◘♦◘ Art Of Choob ◘♦◘ Fantastic Five

[Choob]

Edit: PAGE 10! Challenge complete! My little challenge to myself was to reach page 10 before my birthday, which is 19th of July, and today's the 17th. (Might have posted after Midnight but totally still counts). And for those of you who weren't here when I started it, it wasn't a case of just a few more posts; I had to do daily and sometimes two daily updates, and hope for some comments to help me along if I wanted to reach it in time. Thanks to everyone who helped.

Sketchy study of one of Dan Milligan's storyboards today. Love his style, and his ability to make everything so dynamic is awesome.



The top one is how I started sketching out the study, bottom is the finished one. I would do it as an animated .gif like I have in the past, but it's not working properly at the moment.

[Chrysley]

Really nice sketch. I'd like to see you push that one further.

[Merē.Jorg]

Great work. The latest image/sketch is great! Fantastic choice of perspective.

[Choob]

Chrysley - Thanks. I might add to it later, but that's what the original looked like so I stopped there.

Merē.Jorg - Thank you.

Aaaaand I'm back. I've had a great week or so off from doing daily updates, in which I had a fun birthday, met up with friends, went places with family, stayed over with other friends, it's been awesome.

Now, I mentioned in the last post that I need a new challenge since I managed the page 10 by birthday one, and I mean to do that. I want to do something other than daily updates though, I want to make my work better with this challenge, and I'd rather post a great piece every two or three days than some average studies every day. I also want to do more finished work in general; I feel like I'm now pretty good at my observation work but that my imagination work is terrible compared to it. As such, I'm going to do an entry for every Daily Sketch Group, to improve my imagination work, and I'm going to try win one of the weekly challenges every month, to improve my finished work. That means a Creature of the Week, Environment, Character, whatever.

I'll still post studies, since that's what I do most of, but I'll save them up for a few days and then post the best ones in one big post. On that subject, I did a study of one of Kevin Chen's life drawing demos yesterday and today, to try get back into the swing of things, and to try out some new brushes and techniques. Progress .gif is included, since I finally got it working again. More coming soon.

[kikindaface]

hey dude, keep up your stuff ! For the last post, i find your kevin chen study lacks of structure, try to really black in the main shapes before adding features ( which are less important than having thefacial planes right !! ) Keep it up !!

[donalfall]

Kicking ass buddy!

[Veshkau]

Great stuff. Always found Kevin Chen's lifedrawing stuff to be crazy useful. I love how he simplifies forms in such a way that it's easy to remember/understand and also looks so good.

[Choob]

Thanks for all the kind comments guys. I'll do proper replies to each when I next post art, this post is just to say that I'm not dead. My internet died a week and a bit ago, and I was away camping before that, so it's been a while since I could post.

I've got some art to post, but right now I'm posting on various sites trying to convince people that I'm no impostor, and that I'm still alive.

[donalfall]

It really is Choob, I promise.

[HarbingerofIllRepute]

Well, well, well... If it isn't CHOOB!
The living legend himself! Wrestle any bears while you were camping, champ? < 3

[Choob]

kikindaface - Thanks man, I'll keep that in mind when doing the next ones.

donalfall - I try.

Veshkau - Thanks. Yeah me too, I have a huge folder of his life drawing demos, they really help with understanding construction and the more difficult forms.

HarbingerofIllRepute - I wrestled so many bears that they stopped attacking me, and I had to go find some locals to fight. Luckily the locals up north are pretty much bears in kilts, even the girls.

I've been trying out the scanner I got for my birthday, need to find a setting which is not to sharpened, and not too blurry. I believe I've posted these before, some are from recent sketchbooks, some from old ones, and chosen mainly to see how the scanner copes with different drawing techniques; technical, doodles, pen.







Moving in to my new flat tomorrow, so I won't have any internet yet again, but I'll be back home on Monday or Tuesday and can post some stuff then. Need to get my ass moving on the weekly challenges, hopefully there's a good one next week. Thanks for all the support guys, means a lot.

[Choob]

Quick start to a matte painting for Illustration Of the Week, theme is "Where Giants Roam". Pretty vague, and personally brought to mind the fog you sometimes get up north of me in Scotland, on the mountains and moors. Going to use this image as a base to start painting on, a technique I haven't tried before, except with quick experiments. This is a screenshot at about 50% final size.



Also did some experiments in Garry's Mod when my internet was down. Can be used for a bunch of different things, but I'm more interested in the animation side of things. Here's a screenshot of me trying out the posing system.



On the flat, it all went well at the weekend, the new flat is awesome, and my flatmates even more so. I've somehow managed to get my closest friends to go into the same uni as me, each one a year apart, and this year we have a private flat to ourselves. Spent most of the first weekend playing N64 and Wii games since we didn't have the internet for xbox, which was awesome. Love my friends.

Also discovered that the main entrance for 4J Studios, the guys who made Minecraft for the xbox, is directly opposite my bedroom window. We're going to get in touch with them and see if we can visit them and have a look at what it's like to work there, since we're all on courses for the game industry. Could be that we end up getting internships with them at some point, or even working for them at the end of our courses.

[Choob]

Struggling with this matte painting idea, think it's the fog making things difficult. Tempted to just paint over the whole thing, start from pretty much scratch.



You can only really see the changes when switching layers on and off. Here's a .gif of that, so you can see what changed.

[Choob]

Sketched out some ideas for the Industrial Design of the Week, theme is Roadside Billboard.



Finding this much more enjoyable than the IOW, and I recorded myself doing these sketches for once as certain people have requested, but Camtasia dropped the file afterwards for some reason, didn't save it or anything. I'll try fix it asap though, I want to get into the habit of recording most of my work so when I do something good I can share the process with you guys in a better way than a tiny .gif of my layers.

[Choob]

Made the thumbnail slightly clearer, since it's pretty vague and faded. Tentative final, since heading back up to my flat tomorrow, and we still don't have internet.

[Choob]

Chooby's back.



As I've said on other sites, I've not been updating recently because I've been waiting for CA to be back up so I can update everything at the same time. And it's back, so I am too. Firstly, this is the view from my new flat, from my desk I can see out over the river Tay, and I can also see cars, trains, boats and planes going past.



I've been doing an anatomy course for the past couple of weeks now, from CGMW and done by Michael Hampton. Here's some sketches and notes from that.









As well as this, I'm back at Uni, this is my second week back. My modules this year are; Advanced Animation, Professional Project, Computer Arts Practice and Innovation Design and Specialisation. Computer Arts Practice (CAPractice from now on) is a new module which is pretty cool, being taught by a recent graduate who lurks on here like me, and enters EOW sometimes. Basically he's getting us to do actual drawing, and then we'll be put into groups depending on what we want to do after uni, and he will give us mock briefs from clients.

The Professional Project is where we get into groups to do briefs for actual clients from outside the Uni. Clients in the past have included Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., and so on. This year we have briefs from the NHS, Dare to be Digital, Denki, Dynamo Gaming, Havok and more. Might not be the biggest names out there, but they have worked for the bigger names themselves and have valuable links and contacts. Haven't decided which briefs I like yet, and then have to get put into groups and such, but I'll let you know which one I'm working on when I know.

Innovation Development and Specialisation (InDevSpec from now on) is basically we choose a project or brief from the last couple of years and improve it. I chose Life Drawing, quite unusually it seems. My idea is to use this module to really get back into drawing people, from observation and imagination both, and getting sufficiently good that I can enter CHOW and such at a high level, and do entire figure based illustrations. Did a talk for it already, in the second lecture, but it went OK.

And Advanced Animation is animating stuff. We have more choice this time round though, on whether we want to animate in 2D (Flash) or 3D (Maya/3DS Max), and also whether we want to do Narrative (stories, short films) or Game (character running, jumping, finishing moves or whatever) or even VFX (for example like the movie Paul. Animated character into real life footage). So far I'm really enjoying the 3D side of things, here's a screeny of what it looks like to do.



And here's what I did this week; a character charging up a jump. Inspired by games like Prototype, where the powering up things is awesomely over-exaggerated. WIP, should finish it on my day off tomorrow.



And here's a quick Batman Begins painting. Watching a bunch of new films recently now that I'm back at Uni; when other people go to bed or sit on Facebook late at night, I like to consume culture and inspiration by the bucketload. If you have any suggestions for good films or books go ahead.



And I've been doing a bunch of sketching, trying to get back into the near constant drawing I achieved last summer. The anatomy course I mentioned earlier is really helping with my figures I think, even shitty sketches like these have some gesture to them now.







My Fallout 3 character. Culture and inspiration can also be consumed from games I've not played before, and we have an awesome preowned games shop in Dundee now which helps with just such things.



Ideas for future illustrations, working on the Pyro one at the moment but don't have much time with the coursework. Slowly but steadily though.





Most of my sketchbook still looks like this though. Ideas, doodles, to do lists and experimenting; a glorious mess of potential masterpieces.



And lastly, I found this really cool decoration today on the side of one of the old Dundee high school buildings. This is why I need to remember my camera more.



And there you have it, I told you I'd been busy, and there's a bunch of WIP stuff I'm not posting yet either. Oh and also, I made a Tumblr for the InDevSpec module as they required, and did one for myself too. This is mostly going to be stocks and inspiration more than artwork, but it could be useful for you; I only post the best things ever. Click here to go to my Tumblr thing. More to come soon, and less text, more pretty pictures.

[Choob]

I'm one of Sickbrush's "Fantastic Five"; a few lucky artists that he's going to be mentoring for the next few months. Our first assignment, given out on Friday night, was to do 30 digital portrait sketches, 3 of each race and each gender, of which there are 5 races. So first page is three asian males and three asian females, second page is 3 black males and three black females, and so on. Just finished my pages today, have so much work to do with Uni as well at the moment.











Also, these are at half-size, we were told to use a 1080p size canvas. Here are a couple of them at full size. Spent way too long on these, didn't realise I was so slow, but began to speed up on the last couple of pages.



Other assignment is to do an environment study using only the selection tools (lasso, marqee, etc) and the gradient tool, but I'm not finished that one yet. More to come soon, busy busy busy.

[ARRGH!]

You keep pushing yourself like this and your gonna get real good real fast. Thanks

[Choob]

ARRGH! - Thanks man, that's the plan.

Here's the environment study we had to do, using only lasso and gradient tool. We could have used the usual marquee selection tools too but I forgot about them. So hard to do this, but I felt it helped with understanding the edges on things, where to have soft vs hard edges.



And here's a link to the crits we had from Sickbrush.



My crits are at about 28 minutes and again at about 1 hour 40 minutes, but I'd advise watching the whole thing, he gives some good advice throughout the video. And we also have the next assignment! Due in for Friday, we need to do 5 still life sketches, and then one painted study. As long as the objects aren't too big or small, or too simple, like a box or something, then we have pretty much free reign. Has to be from life though, no photos, and the emphasis is on good construction and such; Cris'll be doing a perspective demo next week, and we want to try get some of that in these pieces too.

Pitch went well, best thing about it was some of the other people in the group were really inspiringly good. There are first and second years who have such full sketchbooks already, and full of good stuff too which is even better. Also saw a guy using what I guess you'd call a tablet PC, albeit an old one. Called a Toshiba M400 I think, little thing, but he swivelled round the screen from a laptop looking thing, and turned it into this awesome portable graphics tablet for Photoshop and such. Touch screen and everything, I'm investigating prices and such now. That's all for now, I'll start the still life assignment tomorrow, expect an update soon.

[Lightship69]

HI matey

I was thinking mate that with that view out the window I am surprised you get any work done at all!!

The mist cairn picture is seriously good dont paint over it just leave it alone for a couple of weeks and then come back to it with fresh eyes it will help with the creative juice mate.

all the best and thanks for posting

[Choob]

Lightship69 - Thanks man, yeah the view is awesome. Seeing the Tay means I can tell what the weather's going to be like for the day too, by how the water's behaving.

This was the assignment for Friday's Fantastic Five class; some still life sketches.



At 50% actual size. Did a rough sketch in grey and then went over it in black, but left the rough in this time as per Sickbrush's request. Haven't been given the assignment for Tuesday yet, so I'll have some time to work on Uni stuff more this weekend. As far as the crit went, it was good, my main problems were forgetting some vital construction guidelines, and having ellipsis trouble, but the tutorial Cris did cleared them up. More to come soon, probably Uni stuff first as I say, need to get a bunch done.

[Choob]

Here's some stuff from the past week, been a busy little bee. First, did these for my animation course, experimenting with expressions on the new rig I'm using, seeing what I can make it do.



Then Sickbrush gave us our assignment for Friday on Thursday, which basically meant having to work all the way through to about 3am, and then getting up early on Friday to finish it off, assignment was to paint these two knives from photos he gave us.



I missed the crit because I was travelling, and Cris hasn't put up the recording yet so we'll see what he thought of my work. It was a bit of a struggle, but also good to see just how much I can get done if I really push myself.

I also went and saw some Da Vinci sketches in person this week, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time. Any of you who are friends with me on Facebook will have seen my gushing review of the exhibition, and I think the main thing is I compared it to being a pianist and being able to sit next to Mozart by the piano while he played. You can learn so much by looking at someone's sketches, and in person you can see where the hand moved across the page, where he corrected and changed things, and basically get a glimpse into his thought process, which as he was a genius, was truly inspiring. For more info on the exhibition click here.

[Choob]

For the next Fantastic Five assignment, had to do a sketch and a painting, turns out my face is so much more fun to paint than to draw. Sketch is at about 50% size, painting closer to 75%.





Also, did this quickly for Kekai's new painting.

[Choob]

Sketch for a friend on another site who's struggling with drawing on tablets, explaining how I sketch on multiple layers, getting better each time. This is at 50ish%, the .gif is smaller, but she has the full size .psd to play around with (and schlick to). That said, I tend to sketch at 50%, and then only zoom in at final painting for details. Also, it's her as a sexy viking babe, because vikings are awesome.

[Choob]

Next assignment for the fantastic five is a 2 week character design. Here's the first thing Cris asked for, a moodboard with references, ideas, inspiration and doodles. This is at 50% size, because Cris was very careful in saying he really doesn't care what size it is, he's getting the glorious full sized one. Here's the brief for my character, an awesome shape-shifting druid type guy, with deer horns and the ability to have bear claws, gorilla arms, that kind of thing. Mi is the location, a planet similar to Earth, and this is written as if from a traveller from Earth's diary;

"Oh, Mavis... He is a savage spirit, very close to nature. Sometimes you see him talking to deer, other times you see him ripping off trees or throwing huge boulders at his enemy with his strong arms. His morphing ability is unnerving but so beautiful in it's way... He sometimes grows the arms of a bear or a rhino, even the jaws of a crocodile. His normal stance is scary in it's own way or rather impressive and it feels as though he is one with Mi and Mi is one with him. Whenever we travelled in scorched plains and desolated lands, it felt as if his power grew weaker and his heart was heavy with sadness, but every time we were in the deep forest, I saw his eyes glow with joy. He keeps his deer horns almost every time and wears them as proud as the earth itself. In my mind, he is nature itself and I respect both him and the path he walks. He used to say, "Come traveller, I have one more thing to teach you." So many years later, he still says that to me...and there are still things he teaches me...

[Choob]

Sure is quiet at CA now. I miss all you guys, and update this sketchbook in the hopes that one day you'll come back to the site and I'll go, "Look, see how good I've become!"

Busy busy busy. Group pitch to the client went OK, but we've strayed off the brief in a couple of vital places, so back to the drawing board at tomorrow's meeting. Met up with my group for the illustration brief, very nice people and we all have the same kind of ideas for the project. Here's a moodboard for that, the book is Heart of Darkness, so slaves, the Congo river, all that kind of thing:



Getting on with the character design for Cris too, albeit slowly and painfully. This week we have to do about 4 character sketches with variation on costume and such, and then a second page for variants of acessories, so the character's helmet, weapons, necklace, whatever's important to that character. Mine has no weapons or major acessories, so my second page is all about him with gorilla arms, or bear claws; the shapeshifitng variants. Here's a screenie of the first messy pass at character sketches. Really struggling, but looking forward to designing the helmet and doing the shapeshifting sketches. More soon, have so much to do.

[Choob]

Progress on Mavis. Apparently Cris meant the horns to be part of his head, not a helmet, and he also pointed out some other things I could try, so this will look so much better by the Friday stream.

[Choob]

Update on Mavis, this was done for Friday, I just haven't had much time for posting things over the weekend. Have a lot of work to get scanned and put up, and more needing finished, so updates should be pretty regular over these next few weeks. Also, really feel I levelled up this weekend, you should see what on by Tuesday's stream.



Also pretty tempted to post music with my art, each piece has a particular album or soundtrack I did it too, or a song that I liked particularly at that time. A lot of the time I wake up with a song playing in my head which is pretty nice, today it was this one by Journey. Them drums.

[Choob]

We're speeding up since the character assignment is taking so long, doing colour stuff and final for Friday, then onto the next thing. This was the piece I felt like I'd levelled up on, mainly on the sketches more than the rendering. Especially when compared to the first Mavis sketches, it looks a lot better.

[Choob]

Almost there... almost... there......



My apologies for being off the map for the past couple of weeks everyone, I've had some personal problems to deal with which I just couldn't get done at the same time as all my Uni work, personal work, and work for Cris. My thinking was that it'd be better to take a break for a week or so and get it all sorted and then get back into full-time art, instead of it constantly looming over me and making me stressed. All sorted now hopefully, so I can get back to work at last.

I have a few updates incoming; I have a new touch screen tablet/laptop which is really cool and will hopefully lead to me being able to do digital work anywhere, and I have a whole bunch of work to do on it, mainly Cris' work, which this week and next is environments, and also my final character, and then a whole bunch of work to get done for my illustration and game design group projects, and then a whole bunch of 3D animation to get done too. So busy busy busy, but I'm going to get it all done as soon as I can, so I could have Christmas free and then some relax time for personal work before going back to Uni.

Also, I'm very much looking forward to looking back (sounds strange but bear with me) on how much I've improved this past year; I'm going to be doing a big image of all of my 2012 posts at the end of the month, and also looking back on my goals which I've achieved or will achieve soon. And on that topic, I'm also thinking about what I want to achieve in 2013, and I'm planning on posting these goals as a deathlist on here and on the Crimson Daggers forums, to make it more official than this year's more personal challenges.

-------------------------------------------

TL;DR - I'm back and ready to roll with my huge art-needing-done pile, I have some promising new ways to work which will lead to more and better things and more frequent updates, and I'm planning big things for next year, as well as a big post to round up this year. There's great things on the way, thanks everyone who's given me their support to get me this far.