Chris' Book of Doodles and Things

[chriskot]

Happy International Self-Portrait Day 2011!

[chriskot]

Recently I've been doing a lot of quick pen and pencil sketching and a lot of more-ambitious-than-usual digital work which I haven't gotten a chance to refine to a state that I feel comfortable posting yet. I promised a friend that I would update this today though, so here are a couple of things I whipped up in the last couple of months.

[chriskot]

You may have heard of a band called "Walk Off The Earth" that recently became quite popular after a certain video of theirs went viral. They're from my hometown and Joel, the drummer, is a friend of mine from high school. Anyway, a little more than a week ago they called and asked me to design a shirt for them featuring their keyboardist, Mike "Beard Guy" Taylor, and you can now see/buy that from their store HERE! Exciting!


Also, I did a portrait of Marlo yesterday.

[thedestroyer]

Awesome, how you managed to improve your skills!
Those portraits are very, very cool!

Cheers

[chriskot]

Thanks!

Here's some extremely quick still-life drawn in a poorly lit basement.

[Legacy Flame]

Looking great Chriskot! Nice stuff you got going on here.

[chriskot]

Thanks again LF!

[chriskot]

.....

[chriskot]

I've been trying to do at least one page of stream-of-consciousness doodles per day since last August, but recently it has gone down to more like two per week. Here are a few of the ones that I've done since 2012 started. Lots of goofy faces, silly experiments, extremely sloppy anatomy, and monsters.

[chriskot]

Drew another ugly creature today. Happy with the near side, but I need to fix that far leg.

[Vritra]

Wow, four stars, really? Here's a fiver from me, you deserve at least that.

Your digital painting carries a softness that is incredibly pleasing to my eyes. Especially the self-portrait, wow. Incredible, incredible understanding of tone, beautiful rendering of form, and most importantly, a brilliant feel for the surface of the medium. Even the digitals have a tactile quality to them.

Nothing but praise from my end, keep updating this sketchbook.

[merl1n]

Yeah, as Vritra said, you have great digital work here. I would only suggest to use more color variety and to use it wisely. E.g. the selfportrait could be much more colorful. Human skin tends to reflect surrounding colors and I bet that the blue shirt you are were wearing had much bigger influence than you showed us.

Anyway keep it up

[chriskot]

Vritra: Your vote pushed me over the top! I'm honestly a little stunned that I have a 5-star rank already. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was getting all excited about hitting 4 stars. Thank you so much!

merl1n:Thanks a bunch for the helpful critique! I definitely agree about the colour thing and that's something I've been trying to improve recently. As far as my self-portrait above goes, my shirt in the reference photo was actually much closer to black, but I changed it for the portrait and I guess I wasn't thinking enough about how that would affect the rest of the image. Good catch.


Worked a bit more on the ugly thing today.

[Vritra]

I didn't push you over the top, mate. You pretty much did that yourself. With your works, the votes were going to come anyway, either from me or someone else. So don't think too much about it, just keep doing your thing.

[chriskot]

Fluffy clouds.

[chriskot]

I'm going to be participating in COW #253 (subject is "Living Interplanetary Vessel"). Here's what I have so far:

[Saurabhinator]

pretty cool sb here! love it!

[chriskot]

Thanks Saurabhinator!

I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't get this C.O.W. in for the final vote. The piece was technically done in time to be submitted, but a typo led me to believe that it wasn't due until 24 hours after the actual deadline (which was last night). Oh well. Here's the finished piece:

[Velocity Kendall]

wow cool!
a Chuy-Hirtsi warp animal?

[JakehC]

a good practice to do in your sketchbook is to draw everything inside of a box. this will help you focus on composition and context. good work. love to see where you take this!

[chriskot]

Velocity Kendall: Thanks! I had to look up that reference. I've been meaning to read some of Iain M. Banks' stuff, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I outlined my idea behind the creature in this post HERE.

Aryeh: Thanks for the tip! I do put a few compositions in boxes in my sketches but it really is something I should be doing more of.


Here are a couple more fluffy clouds and some quick robot/mech thumbs.

[Ricardo Robles]

The Chow Living Vessel looks amazing, it´s a shame you didn´t get it to the poll. Cool work overall!

[chriskot]

Thanks Ricardo!


Been messing around in Sculptris again recently.

[Patonki]

Ahh man the top-right clouds on post #345 look fucking delicious!
Keep it up.

[inverse catheter]

awesome dude. loving the little bot sketches

[FightingSeraph]

Nice to see you try your luck at robot thumbnails, and the latest pixel piece is great as always. As for pixel art programs, I think you ought to check out Ultimate Paint, xPaint (For Mac), and Paint.NET when you get the chance. Did I mention that your color selections are also nice?

[chriskot]

Patonki: Thanks man! I also really like those particular clouds, but they felt a little too heavily inspired by Sam Nielson's clouds in this image, which is why I drifted a bit further from that style for the others.

inverse catheter: Thank you!

FightingSeraph: Thanks for the suggestions. I don't really have any plans to do more pixel art in the near future, but I will definitely check those programs out if/when the need arises.

[chriskot]

DSG 1651: Vehicle/Enviro • OUT AT THE AIR-CUSHION-HOVER BATTLE TANK TEST

[kevin_]

wow great improvement! also think you work is very interesting!

[FROZ3N]

post 357.
nice