Bruce Brenneise's Sketchbook (illustrations, concepts galore!)

[Bruce Brenneise]

Hey all,

After a bit of lurking about, I finally decided to wade into the morass and start posting some WIPs. Expect sketches, concepts, and half-finished illustrations for the most part. Currently I'm doing all of this in my spare time (of which I have a decent amount) when I'm not teaching ESL (my day job). I've got a bit of volunteer (no pay) work with a small indie game company doing illustrations for their story/blog/news posts. I'm also always looking for tutorials and tips, in addition to grinding basic studies, in order to push my art further. So without further ado, here's some art:










Hopefully this worked out correctly. Also feel free to visit my portfolio:
bbrenneise.wix.com/works

Cheers!

[Azsha]

Hi Bruce Brenneise, Welcome to Conceptart. org!
Nice works, especially Tanaloresm!
My advice is you should focus on anatomy in order to strengthen your understanding of depth and weight. Here is one digital paint tutorials http://ctrlpaint.com/.
Cheers!

[Bruce Brenneise]

Thanks, Nika. I have been getting into ctrlpaint, lately, as well as working through Loomis, Hogarth, Vanderpoel, etc, books to work on fundamentals. Anatomy is certainly an area I need to improve on.

I've got a few other pieces to add, where the human (or skeletal) figure is a bit more central.

[Bruce Brenneise]

Tonight I'm uploading a WIP concept for an illustration I'm planning that involves a dryad in the desert. First I'm starting with a fairly basic face, then will develop it from there to (hopefully) create a more interesting/unique character. I should have some more concepts regarding the environment, clothing, accessories, etc, after I get the 'look' I want.

[Amphsix]

Hey there! good work so far, love your scenes a lot, they really have a story to tell!
But there's also one point of critisism I can give for your scenes. You seem to have detail all over the place, giving equally as much attention to the point of focus as the elements surrounding it. To put more depth in your work and give more emphasis to the focus, try not to overly detail the parts that's don't matter (as much). You already seem to be going in the right direction in the last two images of your first post. In the collapsing city you put slightly less detail in the buildings surrounding the one with the fire, really drawing the eye to that center of attention.

Nice work and subbed... curious to see your progress!

[Bruce Brenneise]

Danka well (the only Dutch word I know!), Amphsix. You make a good point, and this is something that I've been working on over the past year. I find, and maybe you can contradict this if you disagree, that the masters do have a lot of detail in their art, but we don't feel like it's overly detailed because (a) they're capable of confident, exact, amazing detail in their area of focus, and (b) because they have such clear understanding/observation of their subject, even hinting or suggesting at detail really looks quite detailed without overwhelming the area of focus. It's such a subtle thing, sometimes, that can be quite a struggle to achieve.

Anyway, thanks for the crit! This is something I need constant reminding about, otherwise I'm all too apt to just luxuriate in unwarranted details. :-)

Also, since I don't like to post without putting up some art, here's an illustration I did a few months back. As with the majority of these, it was commissioned, unpaid work for Phoenix Online Studios, so if you're intrigued by the stories implied by these illustrations, do go check out the Four Winds Blog at their website!

[Bruce Brenneise]

A quick update on that dryad/female close-up study WIP. Currently working on softening and blending a bit, since the original sketch was done with the palette knife in Painter (i.e. blocky). I'm a little worried that I've placed the eyes too far apart (it does give a slightly alien appearance, though, which might not be completely inappropriate for a dryad/humanoid creature). Thoughts? If I want to pull them in a bit, in a symmetrical way, what would be the easiest method?

[Amphsix]

I see what you mean and maybe I put it slightly wrong. There's nothing wrong with detail per say, and like you said, the great masters often put detail everywhere, they just knew how to use subtly to still keep the focus the centre of attention. Don't get me wrong, you are certainly going in the right direction, and you're about a hundred times better at drawing scenes than I am at the moment (though I am working on it!). Maybe I am not the best to give advice when it comes to centre of focus.

As for the dryad picture. I am still learning how to draw human faces properly myself, but I'll give you what I notice from an "outsider's" perspective.
The narrowness of the eyes together with a lack of very distinct upper eye lids makes her look a bit Asiatic, I wonder if this was intended? If so, she might be lacking the distinctive "epicanthic folds" in the corners of the eyes. The eyes could be -slightly- closer together, but since there is quite a lot of natural variation in this, this could be quite possible.
If you're using photoshop for this, use the lasso tool to select one eye, then tap the arrow keys to move it in a new position. Count your taps, each is a single pixel, then do the same number for the other eye. Then fill in the white gaps that appear. Might seem like a silly precise thing to do, but it worked for me more than once.

[Bruce Brenneise]

Yeah, do I appreciate the crit! I'm quite far from those 'masters' I mentioned, but I just want to take the right approach: always improving control over detail (when to enhance, when to suppress) as well as contrast, lost/found lines, etc. that will improve the eye flow and focus relationships within the picture.

The Asian look wasn't something I was consciously going for initially, but maybe unconsciously (my wife is Chinese) that was where I ended up with my first sketch. When that 'look' started to develop, I liked it, so I went with it and did a little bit to emphasize it. This isn't quite the conscious decision-making process that I'm usually trying to develop, but I've been trying to be relax a bit and be a little 'looser' with this particular project, since it's a project I've set for myself. In terms of conscious decisions, though, I'm thinking about this desert dryad and trying to imagine what desert she might be living in. It could be western China/central Asia, in which I would need to modify this for more of a mixed Turkic/Chinese/Mongolian look. Perhaps I should just go ahead and make a few more versions (Saharan, Namibian, Mojave, etc) to represent a few other major deserts and see which version I like best. I'm also thinking about desert plants I can incorporate into her appearance, skin texture, and clothing/covering.

I hadn't really thought about counting the taps of arrow keys with Photoshop. I was thinking about playing around with puppet warp (I think that's what it's called), but when I play around with that tool, it always seems really tough to control, much less achieve a symmetrical change with. I also have wondered if there were a way to make two selections then change them symmetrically, but haven't figured out/seen an elegant solution yet.

[Bruce Brenneise]

Busy weekend (plus really nice weather enticing me out doors!), so I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. In any case, this is where I'm at with the dryad concept. Modified features a bit to try for less of an 'East Asian' look. It's easy to let things get too 'precious', though, and not be quite as daring as possible. I've also started playing with painting bark textures and thorns onto her skin. As a desert dryad, she would have some of these adaptive features of desert plants. I might need to look at more reference for bark, though, and do something a bit less generic with that. As always, thoughts and crits are welcome!