2009 sketchbook - CLOSED

[dierat]

I really like the last image. Your profile portraits are wonderful. For the tribe of northerners, I was thinking it might help the sense of perspective and the mood if you added a bit of transparent smoke coming up from the fire to obscure some of the characters directly behind the princess. That would isolate her a little more whereas right now her edges are being lost in the figures behind her. Just a thought. Keep up the good work!

[jatherip]

nice work, some photostudies should help you with coloured light keep it up!

[KromNz]

hey Leo!!
You've been improving too man!
Love the cavemen and the guy holding his bird in your latest picture. sweet details!

It might help you to use a bigger brush size in the first stages of your paintings and only use smaller for detailing.

Keep at it !

[ashess]

what-ho? it IS a story ^^ cant wait till the STB!

[Leo Ki]

TASmith - Thank you! I'll take care of those backgrounds.
Brun - You're right, I get carried away, inventing detail as I go until it gets overwhelming. Thanks!
dierat - True, it lacks an atmosphere. Maybe some day I'll get back to this piece. Thank you!
jatherip - Thanks! Indeed colored light is a weakness I have to address.
KromNz - Ah, the thin brush... I still have to understand why I like to paint by slashes and dots. Gracias por pasar por aqui!
ashess - The story was just an aside to training some kind of neoclacissism, but maybe someday I'll write it all?

OK, SSG revival. Posting my share of work. I wished everything looked more finished...







Osara project:





Several interrupted comic projects with a scenario writer:

[ashess]

tish, that's french!
well, at least you 've done something! I like the strong characters in the faces. espec the heroin and the guy in the last pic.
also, you're comming along pretty strong in perspective, I can tell from the nakshatrapsala. you don't use that kind of pose very often, but it looks sweet@!
ye, good new years res with the posting. not sure I can do it. with a job, baby AND study. but I'll try :p

[Wr00m]

Keep up the updates! nice work!

[Zweit]

Good to see you back at it. Sorry for the inactivity lately but I've been spending a lot of time getting my new PC up to snuff, so my art-ing (and posting) has been on the back burner. Partly too it's that you seem to be falling into old habits. You should stick with your pieces longer, at least through the sketch stage once in a while instead of jumping straight into color or the next project. You'll learn more by refining a piece to a semi-finished state than you will by abandoning it, I think. At least, that's what I found worked for me.

I like "cliff" and "demon", by the way. (the third and fourth images)

[Volchiha]

Welcome back Leo!

Good start, the redhead's perspective portrait is a good sketch, but maybe you could use some bigger, harder but more transparent brushes for skintone? It looks a little bit heavy.
I'm not really sure what the dusk thing is exactly, but it looks rather epic. I really like the speckled sky, very impressionistic. Is it night time behind the creature though? The white highlights don't really go together with the orange background.
I love that demon - it looks like a trickster about to give bad advice, and sort of reminds me of a darker, heavier Teodor Kittelsen.

Your cliff is good. There is a big jump in detail and blending compared to the previous work. Really good lighting, and very believable. I especially like the way you blended the colours on the rocks by the stairs. And great use of reflection to give the image depth - definitely one of my favorites!
The portrait of the dark haired lady is an improvement, especially in figure, but again you rely on soft brushes a bit too much. Try experimenting with different pressure, opacity, and shape settings maybe?

That beast head is awesomely detailed! Your normal brushstroke style really goes well with shiny carapce bits.

Your heroine has a lot of depth in that expression - as a sketch, the style works very well. Though things get fuzzy by the nose, and it's lacking some definition. The translation of the character into colour is very successful. With the way the face is, a bit more detail and definition could go a long way, if you want to keep working on it. Did you use reference for the face? It's very realistic.

The last pic where the characters are standing together - the lighting is a bit mismatched, which makes it seem like you drew them separately then pasted them together. The barbarian's face is slightly out of proportion with the rest of his head, but if that was intended for comical effect, then it's a successful expression.

All in all, I agree with Zweit about going back to old habits. It could help to experiment a bit more, but instead of sticking to your own style, try out a whole bunch of different techniques. Imitate traditional media - oil, watercolour, ink, etc. You did it very well in your cliff drawing, where it resembles acrylic or watercolour. You have to pick the right right style for the right mood - and that worked very well.

Don't be afraid to work a bit more on your drawings. Leaving it abandoned won't work to make it seem better to you if you're unsatisfied. I have had so many instances of straight out deleting unfinished work of mine because I ran into a block and didn't want to keep working on them.
Maybe, if you run into a block like that, then post what you have, and improve it as you go along with some help? I'm gonna try do that from now on too =)

[Leo Ki]

ashess - Ah yes, pardon my French, I won't do it again
I'm glad you like the faces, the blend of cartoony expressions and realistic painting is not liked by many, but it's the style I tend to.
You started new studies?

Wr00m - Thanks! I will keep up, and so should you!

Zweit - I hoped you would like the demon, it's more like your universe
You're totally right about my rushing too soon into colors. Those comic sketches are a small sample of a frantic research for the characters and were not really intended to show anybody.

Volchiha - Wow, Thanks for such a detailed crit!
I have experimented many brush settings of OpenCanvas but I guess I'm still at a loss for fast painting. I'm considering switching to ArtRage (version 3 is awesome) to make more natural blending. Anyway, if you've seen my illos at the bottom of page 2 it's one of the kinds of finished style I want to reach.
I don't know either what the dusk painting is, it was kind of automatic painting I don't know if I will continue it.
The heroine face was from imagination, although after a ton of trials and misses, too bad the story probably won't be written. It was an attempt at co-developing a universe from scratch with the writer. Maybe the work will resume later.


I've never posted my studies and trainings, just concept thingies, so here are some anatomy studies from imagination from this week:




And this is a something going somewhere:




And this is a weird thing which I'll talk more about later. It's related to the Osara project. I post it only for the concept, not for the technique, as it is my usual mess of scribble:

[ashess]

oh, dont mind a bit of french dont speak it to well, but I can read most of it. I see story! good. and nice drawings. the big lady in the las is a bit wonky; I'd just leave the arms out. and fix the angle of the boobs and you're good

[wendeefisher]

I really like your style of art its very creative and I like the colors that you use. Kepp up the good work!

[wilkerson]

Alright, you're getting better with figures. Still, your technique for painting hair is not working. Throw out that medium sized brush, use a rake and a very fine brush. Hair is usually a mass with a few loose strands when at rest.

[Ricardo Robles]

Bonjour Leo I missed some works here I´m seeing advance here, overall.The pics on post#58 are very cool!
I see you have a good sense of the anatomy, the composition and feeling of the last pics is cool and refreshing. Try to find a way to complete the illustrations without have to render it all,(it gets boring for you I guess) so i think you´re doing it. I´ll say you the same they said to me: keep leaving out the lines, step by step, and concentrate in color mass. This blue girl in the center of the last 3 pics would be an example.
It´s a pity the story don´t continues, so you can do another!

[Leo Ki]

ashess - Oh, I was just making fun of the phrase "pardon my French" which funnily assumes all Froggies are rude brats.
Yes, there's a story coming up this way It's a major revamping of the universe of Keis the mapmaker, there's a glimpse of it below and more to come as soon as I have time.
Yep, the ghost lady and pretty much all the rest is wonky, it was a hasty rough which I'm very ashamed of now

wendeefisher - Thank you, and welcome on CA! Will you make a sketchbook?

wilkerson - My problem is that OpenCanvas doesn't have brushes with dynamic orientation, so my custom brushes are really just for texturing, not for structuring.
But the real problem is that I'm very lazy at drawing hair, and it will get worse in my new comic project where everybody is in a gravity-less world and their hair floats all around

Ricardo - Sometimes I work in masses and it feels better. Sometimes I add the lines afterwards. But most of the time I make a dirty mix of lines and masses
But I'm going to try to find a direct painting style for the comic. The former story doesn't really disappear, it will get transported into a crazier place of Osara and mutated to accomodate the many changes in the environment.

uraion - I see you're selling Aion gold. Good luck in your spamming attempts!


Character design for the Dayglo Pterodactyls Challenge (see Aaron's sketchbook for the details):




The story of Keis the mapmaker will take place in a different part of Osara:




A prehistory WIP:

[ashess]

not all the French are rude? please dont rock my world now!
ah, what am I saying, I'm from Amsterdam; rude-city! we call it speaking our view by the way. just so you know.
I love the character sketches. they are very diverse and have a lot of.. well, character :p
as for the wips, well they're rough as always but good. I do feel though that you've got enough material by now to just put the storyboards in order, add some texts and you should be almost done

[Ricardo Robles]

cool work, the last rendering is becoming more blocked, but still using too much lines in mi opinion, anyways is a way between much others
I find your worlds natural and refreshing..I´d like to see more Seamonster´s hunters variations, they´re interesting and i see you´re coming out of stereotypes, wich is good.

[shambok]

I really like the clean and fresh feel you achieve with your colours! cant wait to see some more of your work! ... have you posted any finished work anywhere els on on CA? I love to see some finished work as well

[Leo Ki]

ashess - Hehe, is it something like "zijn dunk spreken" in Dutch?
I'd love to start storyboarding but I've made so many changes to the environment that it affects all of society, techniques, and everyday life. It's now set in a part of Osara where the branches are so thin that there's no gravity, people litterally swim in the air. I thought it would be funnier, but maybe I'll revert to the previous setting, because it's a headache to manage actually.

Ricardo - I've made some extensive trials on ArtRage to see if I can paint differently. The airbrush works well, so I can paint in the length of a volume, instead of blending by dragging the colors in streaks as I use to do. The oil is interesting too but it drags the color only after a while, which is a totally different method than what I'm used to. Well, I'll keep trying other techniques.

shambok - Thanks for visiting here! I have only very few finished works and I can't show them now unfortunately. But I'm preparing some finished comic pages at least, which I hope will not take too long.


EDIT Feb 15: I'm closing this sketchbook. Will open a new one later. See you.


First step of the fisherman from last week, didn't work enough to produce more sketches:




More environment research for Osara:




And this one done on ArtRage, overwhelmed by all the brushes available: