Msafs' sketchbook

[msafs]

Huge headache today. Started using Quick Poses. Better than Posemaniacs. The two doodles are from imagination... a few of the ones that actually look like people. Not sure what they're doing.
Poses are 90 seconds.

[blogmatix]

Very nice work! When I was your age, I could barely draw stick figures. It is now more than twenty years later and I still can't draw like you. :-)

[msafs]

Thanks, blogmatix! Don't worry – you're getting there!

I haven't had much time to draw lately – two weeks of finals + grading other people's final papers and projects.
Here's a finals week doodle and some figures. I was trying to use a blunter point on the woman. Not sure if it's significantly worse than the others.

[msafs]

A derpy colored pencil teapot from life with some cheapo colored pencils. It looks really terrible larger. I think these were the same pencils with which I drew the flowers on page one, but maybe I'm getting worse. :/
The table reflected should be more green, but I didn't want to overwork it like I did the handle and it gives it more depth this way.
I rather like the shading on the figure.

[msafs]

Found a bunch of irritated bites... I thought they might be from spiders since I saw two scuttling out from under my desk this morning (fortunately of two different species – hope there aren't any eggsacs lying about), but more likely they're flea bites from the cats. Not as cool.
The woman's right hand clearly went through a steak-knife steamroller. Oops.
The spider sketches are pretty slow and my imagined ones look like crap. Might try some spider gestures.

[msafs]

Doodled a spider after doing a bunch of five minute gestures. Just realized that half of the patellas are facing the wrong way.
Also, yesterday I moved for an IT internship. No tablet or traditional paints for the rest of the summer.
I finished my sixth cheap hundred page sketchbook before I left (part of post 22 - post 35). 32.2 hours in it.

[msafs]

Splurged and bought some Prismacolors before I moved. Sixty dollars poorer but sixty dollars happier. I wanted my first drawing with them to be of a throwaway subject in case I screwed up. But damn that is an ugly bird. 3:52 hours.
Plus some meh sort of doodles.
King vulture ref

[Stpete]

Really inspiring stuff! But you need to do more environments

[msafs]

Thanks, Stpete! You're completely right... enviros and the "big picture" have always been weaknesses of mine. Yours are pretty stellar!
I got to 4:48 hours on this one until I realized I should probably be drawing my own photos if I'm going to spend so much time on them (probably would've ended up taking fifteen hours to draw). I couldn't get the brilliant yellow color that the photo has. :/ Although maybe it would come out if I finished the drawing...
And some spiders and a doodle.
Forest 12 photo by Eiande

[msafs]

Two mirror drawings and an enviro fail with Pitt pens (1:40 hrs – it covers a whole page, but shrunken here for ugliness). The black and the other colors just weren't going well together.
I think the leg might be too short, although I'm happy with the shorts.

[msafs]

Some quick Bridgman copies (having a hard time connecting the technical text with the pictures) and some drawings from the mirror. Pretty happy with how the mirror ones turned out, although my feet always look demented. Biker calves... 7,600+ miles since 2007.

[greymatter]

Your color pencil inspired me to try it out for myself... Very nice. Thread bookmarks

[msafs]

Thanks, greymatter! Always glad to be of inspiration.

After work for about an hour a day I've been slowly sketching away at Milla Jovovich... I was trying to get my shading to look nicer (sans tortillion). I read this thread and began to wonder if I was creating a formless piece of fail. Could be a lot better but we're all noobs at the start anyway. It taught me a lot about curvature and form, though.
The face will probably ruin it... should I finish it?

[msafs]

I'm now 20 years old (so I suppose my brain is turning to mush as I type) and my internship has almost come to a close. A bit of advice: if you're wondering how you can get x to work on Windows Server, the canonical answer seems to be "ditch Windows Server and start using Linux." So, here's Windows Server x SSH, Windows Server x XAML Browser Applications (also from Microsoft), and Windows Server x everything else. Also, Benedict Cumberbatch and a huge spider, which can grow to be as large as a dollar bill.

MMA refs

[msafs]

I realized that I hadn't been drawing enough items from life, so I drew a boot and added a teacup to the floor/page so I could elucidate how bad my perspective is. The desk is completely freehand and accordingly terrible (and the teacup is shorter and wider, but after I drew the surrounding box, I didn't feel like fixing it). Somehow the cowboy doodle from June turned out better than my current referenced drawings. Also, a beetle from here.

[maria riaz]

very nice pencil studies, i love how u write ur name in every piece....cheers!!

[msafs]

The first two images are each on two pages and I cut and rearranged them (which explains why the ground doesn't line up at all). The first one is inspired by my roommates – one who wouldn't recycle and one who twice left his underwear on top of the telly remote. Buying bottled water and trashing the bottles has not been scientifically linked to nipple tentacles, but...

Thanks, maria riaz! I've been putting my cA name on most of the images so that people might be able to find my sketchbook if they download them in an unlabeled fashion (if anyone wants to save my pictures – never know). I always hate not being able to locate the source of an artwork.

[msafs]

First day with a tablet in three months… I realized how bad my sense of color is. It seems like a regression from my earlier digital color drawings. Starting back at square one, I guess…
And more doodles…
I have no idea how I chose pink for the sand.
Horseshoe crab ref

[msafs]

A lamp and my keyring from observation... No straightedges were used because I'm too lazy for rulers because drawing straight lines freehand is a useful skill to acquire. I probably should've left the black lines off of the inner key edges. The gradient on the lamp looks weird because it's a mixture of warm and cool grays.
I actually have more keys – they're just not visible from this viewpoint.

[msafs]

Too old for the Teen Challenge and still not good enough.
Now I know why I love graphite's grayscale so much. Getting the saturation on the bin correct was pretty tricky and the folds were nearly impossible. I used the 63px default pack PS brush.
Also, I got into my university's honors college, so now I can register early enough to take art classes before I have to graduate.
Ref from Tumblr... I forgot the shoelaces and the curb...

[msafs]

I realized that I'm terrible with perspective and the photostudy sketches I was doing were really flat looking and formless, so I took a bunch of white things out of the bathroom and put them in a pile and it seemed fine until I outlined the shadows after all of the objects were sketched in and the deodorant isn't on the same plane and the smudge-less shading that I tried looks really nooby for some reason that I can't pin down and now my eyelid won't stop twitching. </too much tea>

But I constructed everything staring with prisms and cylinders and the ellipses are sort of decent, if I may say so...
Not sure if it's worth finishing.
tldr:

[msafs]

I originally intended to draw the garlic in graphite, but when I sat down in front of it, it seemed like a shame not to try it in color. It's lit from the right by an incandescent lamp and from the left by the sky from a window. The purple part ended up a bit flat.
Also, beetle...

[smael]

hiiii man, if i can to give you a council, now, you should to make imagination drawing much.
sorry for the errors^^

[msafs]

Good advice, smael. I've got so many things to learn before I can make a proper imagination piece (lighting/color and perspective are at the forefront), but I've been trying to apply anatomy in some doodles. I haven't quite gotten the hang of folds yet.

The first one was drawn on the back of someone's resume (with permission to doodle on it). I left it at her house, so hopefully she doesn't hand it to a recruiter or leave it for her landlady to discover...
The second was sort of inspired by the angularity and hair in this Jon Foster painting, which is part of a current exhibit at the Allentown Art Museum – At the Edge of the Fantastic. If you're anywhere in or near Pennsylvania, Estados Unidos, I'd recommend going to see it, especially for Donato Giancola's The Hobbit: Expulsion, which is unbelievable in person. Of course, all of the artwork is amazing. I spent about ten hours there on various weekends.

[msafs]

The first one on the left is outside of the cone of vision. :/ The right one is a blocky abstraction of a detergent bottle with contrived vanishing points.
I can't imagine how people sketch industrial designs freehand...

[msafs]

I've stopped using the tortillion in my mirror drawings – two years ago I was just using it as an excuse not to follow the form with lines. The attempted crosshatching in the middle of the arm made it look awkwardly translucent, and I'm not sure the curvature is quite right. Time to do more.

[msafs]

I put my nine year old scanner on a chair so I could use the table for drawing and the AC adapter broke (scanner would still be working if it could turn on). This is why we can't have nice things. :/
Here's something I scanned before it broke... I think the folds turned out nicely. It's interesting how the folds from the pinch at the shoulder meet the folds from the pinch at the armpit.

[msafs]

I stopped to take a picture of this because it wasn't a completely green landscape. I'm still not sure what to do with forests/extremely leafy vistas. Used the default round brush for the sky and clouds and the 150px rectangular "watercolor" brush for everything else.

[Psychobuddy]

Great work, the way you render drapery is awesome. I'm liking these digi pieces, keep them up, you're already pretty great at pencil rendering, the digital side shouldn't be too far behind.

[msafs]

...I haven't updated in half a year. My past semester really sucked, mostly in terms of how group projects were going. I still haven't really gotten over the stress from that, but I'm going to start updating my sketchbook again. Pictures will be in a roughly worst-to-best order until I finish the backlog, just to cheat on the illusion of progress a bit. Edit: pictures will be posted in absolutely no discernible order, just for lulz.

Great work, the way you render drapery is awesome. I'm liking these digi pieces, keep them up, you're already pretty great at pencil rendering, the digital side shouldn't be too far behind.

Thanks, Psychobuddy! I should get back to digital. I've been working on fundamentals in graphite, but that's been limiting me color-wise.

Here are some random bits of meh from the past six months (although I could do with more simplified fold drawings). The new attachment manager is quite nice, although the inline part can get messy looking.