Jen's Sketchbook~ LATE SUMMER GRINDIN'

[Sapphirelullaby]

My Tumblr - Just made a new one to put serious artwork on; my last tumblr was full of dumb scribbles and reblogs lmao.

Please view from last page on this page is pretty embarrassing ahaha

EDIT: If the title says "Livestreaming", click here for my channel.

NEW INTRO:

Hello guys; welcome to my sketchbook. I'm a 20 year old student in New York, and currently drawing is only a hobby for me -- I hope that'll change soon enough, though.

After much thinking, I have decided to continue pursing a Graphic Design major; not just completing the major, but doing it well. And after...I think I will pursue a year-long education in the Concept Art field, at none other than Red Engine Studios. Top industry teachers there, with fantastic work, at an affordable price. I really, REALLY want to go there. I hope it's still there 3-4 years from now, haha.

I will spending the next four years honing my skills, not only technically, but expanding my imagination as well. I've always felt like I've been trapped by my limited expertise, only able to draw minimal figure drawing....afraid to break out of that and explore other artistic endeavors, such as sci-fi, mecha design, enviroments, character design. Always felt like I'd limited myself to being only a stylistic illustrator, only able to draw people, and unconvincingly at that. I think that is why I've always felt like such a failure of an artist. Not that I was not capable of more, but that I was afraid to.

But no more. I am so ridiculously pumped, you don't understand. Expect MAJOR improvement from here on out ( I already have a painting about half done!), and a lot of experimentation. I'll still do my stylistic illustration style just for fun, for me, but I want to become an entirely different kind of artist now. I know the business is insanely cutthroat, extremely competitive; and perhaps I may never reach that kind of dream job I aspire to. But I will have my Graphic Design degree to fall back on, and it's not even a poor substitute, I enjoy graphic design. But the major improvement will mean that I can always freelance/do illustrations, and I'll have a bright artistic career ahead of me regardless of what path my life takes.

Attachment 1596054

[Sapphirelullaby]

Decided to finish (well...as finished as it'll get) the face study. I hope it looks better and less awkward now; I enlarged and lowered her eyes (well...the other eye somehow disappeared.) and finished up the hair. I've never done blonde hair before...it was...an experience, haha. I tried really hard to incorporate a lot of color with different hues, so I hope it shows. c: I think its a good start, if I practice a lot, I might get pretty decent at realism. her eye is still pretty sharp and weird looking to me, though..I just can't seem to get it down. I also pretty much painted all the colors without any real color adjustment until the end; I wanted to practice picking out colors by eye and not relaying on overlayers and tons of adjustments.



That's all I did tonight. Hopefully more tomorrow!

[Flanagan]

Damn, you're awesome at portraits. I don't see too much of an anime influence so don't sweat it, just keep drawing from photos and live models. The colors are fantastic too! Man...i feel inferior lol

More over, I can't tell that you're rusty from your art break. It would be great to see some full figures, I bet they're sick! Keep it up, you sure as hell have potential.

[Sapphirelullaby]

@Flanagan: Thanks man, I really appreciate it! And lol, if you take a browse around my DA gallery, you'll see what I mean by anime-centric; these pieces were probably my least stylized. Hopefully I'll be able to render painted fullbodies nicely soon, but I feel I still need to practice skintones and lighting before I give it a go. I tend to get frustrated when my vision can't be rendered properly because of my own shortcomings. But again, thankyou!

More stuff. I dunno if I'm doing any more today (I'm not very productive haha.), so I'll post these up now:



^ Reffed figure drawing, and non-reffed 5 minute eye rendering. I stopped because I got frustrated looking for good stock. Need to find a good website for nude stock, anybody got a good link?



^ what I don't even...playing around with warm and cool hues I guessss

---

so as you guys can see my MORTAL ENEMIES are hands and feet. I am godawful at them, no lie. it's actually kind of ridiculous to compare how I draw regular anatomy and how I draw feet...as if I was drawing them from two different ages, two different sets of experience. If anyone could give me some really good tips, tutorials, book/website recommendations etc etc for hands and feet, that'd be amazing! I'll probably do some studies on them next.

[jNeumann]

Great job with the skintones in your digital work! You also did a good job with the values in the grayscale figure studies. Can't wait to see more.

[Sapphirelullaby]

@jNeumann: Thank you! That was definitely what I was trying for, since I've always had a terrible time choosing the right tones for skins. Practice definitely helps. c:

-------

Alright! So after browsing a lot of sketchbooks, I noticed I was lacking a lot of fundamental training and practicing, such as doing poses, skeletal anatomy etc. So I wanted to give those a try, and hope to do so regularly to get a basic understanding of the human body. Here's stuff compiled from yesterday, done on a very small sketchbook since my regular one is in my dorm (a month before school starts again). Please excuse the poor quality, my scanner is absolutely ancient.

First, 60 sec (I'm such a wimp! I can't do 30 secs properly yet ) posemaniacs warmups. There's 20 one them, and they're god awful. But I shall get better at speed drawing! I'll limit my use of posemaniacs though to just quick warmups...the poses are often really awkward and just plain unappealing.









Next is pretty random. I was watching my brother play BlazBlue, an anime fighting game, and I started doodling my character Sapphire in random fighting poses:



Next is some Hogarth back anatomy. I have his dynamic figure drawing book..but I find the drawings rather difficult. I think I'll need to work up my way to them, but I did this anyway. Paid more attention to contours than rendering.



And now, some skull and skeletal anatomy practice. Whoops..I forgot to label the parts on the feet...

[Sapphirelullaby]

soo I'm a complete and utter n00b when it comes to environments. Simply put I gotta practice, and what place to start than the weekly environment challenges? c: The challenge is "Harbor the Damned" and this is what I got so far...its pretty damn lame and I have no idea what to do about colors or lighting, and there's no real undead elements yet but...I'm just trying to put the concept and composition down. Any critiques would be greatly appreciated.

[strakosha]

for your environment painting, the only thing that really sticks out to be as weird is the posistion of the dock. It feels like it's being stood upright in front of the viewer. Maybe bring the part of the dock at the bottom up a bit, and have the torches overlap each other a tad more? Sorry i'm not much help there >:

otherwise, i really love your paintings! they're all really lovely, especially the girl with the red eyes o u o

irrelevant, but i love blazblue ahahah, it's really cute

[snatti]

Hi the studies are looking really good as for the enviorment i think it would be easier if you do some thumbnails in black and white, this will allow you only to focus on light and shades, rather then the whole colour sheet and mabye after doing a few thumbs you decide to go with a diffrent ide the your first thought, i always use to start in colour but after being asked to try thumbs in black and white i tryed it and never looked back , i hope this will help

[Trefle]

I think the studies are going well. The anime influences aren't too much actually (....I have more, trust me.)

Good luck on your drawing

[Sapphirelullaby]

@Stratoska - I see what you're saying there, I'll definitely see what I can do about the dock. and thankyou!

@snatti - That is actually a good idea, I dunno why I didn't start with that lmao. I think I will do some thumbs and see if I like a different composition. And thanks!

@Trefle - Thank you! I'm trying not to let it affect me In a lot of my full-color illustrations you can see more an influence, but those are on my DeviantART only. Thankyou!

Ok guys so, I'm just posting a quickie portrait. I want my next update to have a lot of studies and images, and I dunno if I'll be able to do them all tonight or tomorrow, so I'll just post a study I did last night since I'm such an eager beaver. I was playing around with some weird ass colors, and it features my original character. She's blind, which is why the eyes look so whitish.

[Sapphirelullaby]

Alright, time for my daily update. I woke up at 2 pm (..lol.) and it's only about 7 pm, but I figured I'd update now since I'm taking a break. I'll probably draw more later tonight, but if I'd add that to my next update; that's probably how it'll work out so I don't update at like 3 in the morning.

First up, 60 minute posemaniacs. This file is only at 50% the size I worked at...yes, I know, waayy too large. Thus each figure took way too much time, and it became apparent that I was focusing more on anatomy than gesture. I'll try to improve that next time and draw smaller, and much more fluidly, focusing on movement. also..some of the figures are oddly sized and cropped because I was trying to use photoshop and posemaniacs at the same time, on the same computer...it was...hard, lol. My goal is to do 20 poses every day.



Now for some Loomis studies. The last one has an eye/bust from imagination that look..pretty weird haha. They were quick.







Funfact: The size of the images above are life-sized. That's the small notebook size I'm working at 8D

And finally, updated on my enviroment. Changed around the colors and fixed up perspective....still needs a lot of work to go though. Still will keep elements from the first WIP, I just erased them for now in order to concentrate on certain areas. The orange light will make a return for example.

[Sulphur]

Great studies! Keep this up and you'll shock yourself how much you improve

[Sapphirelullaby]

@Sulphur: Thanks man! I hope that's how it goes, haha.

OK GUYS. No new art right now, but I'm posting to let you all know that I'll be livestreaming some portrait studies! All from imagination for now. See my process, ask questions, help me out by critiquing and offering suggestions, or just chat..whatever! All you gotta do is click here for my channel and enjoy. It'll be up in a minute or so.

hope to see you there!

[kiwigarbage]

Cool stuff, I like the way you do eyes

Sometimes the chins don't quite match up with the planes of the face and maybe try to instill more tonal variation in the skin? This is nitpicky though, your stuff is quite lovely!

[Sapphirelullaby]

Thankyou! And I totally get what you mean..I'll try and work on it in the future.
livestream still happeniin'~

[Kalin]

Nice studies! I really like the first 2 colorings especially.

[stcytrrs]

I truly LOVE your style. I cant wait to see more

[Sapphirelullaby]

@Kalin: thankyou!
@stcytrrs: awww thankyouu c: that's really sweet! I will try and update daily, so look out I'll be the annoying presence in the sketchbook forum haha.

Ok guys. Not terribly much done today, but I have a goodie! The first is the product of my livestream last night, and took a total of about three and a half hours. I saved and sped up the process video, more out of curiosity to see how I work anyway haha. Unfortunately, I stopped recording by accident after I had done the sketch so I couldn't include that in the final video like I wanted. I'm aware it's pretty fast--hopefully, if I do another I'll divide it into two parts in order to slow it down. also..sorry for the weird gap inbetween songs, and the annoying instances with the curso simple stops; that's me talking to those that showed up to the livestream. (I also find it hilarious that the thumbnail is a closeup of her boobies)...





Second is a speedpaint of the protagonist from V from Vendetta. I saw a piece of V fananart somewhere in the critique forum, and it inspired me to give it a go. I kept it very simple, but I like it.

[blue skies]

Wow. You're already quite good- I can picture you ending up quite amazing.
So you're studying graphic design right now? What school are you in? I'm actually minoring in Concept Art for Games.. so I really should get on that. I can never seem to keep this thing updated.. maybe I'll have to make some New Year's resolutions for the first time.

Keep it up!

[Sapphirelullaby]

@BlueSkies - Thanks! And yep, Graphic Design. I'm currently attending the New York Institute of Technology, but I'll probably transfer next year if I get a good financial aid package elsewhere. Where do you go? I would love to minor in Concept Art...I need to find a school that does that. How is that working out for you? And yeah...one of my biggest problems is keeping my artistic commitments haha..so I'ma try really hard to keep this book updated. You should too (: If the progress I've seen in the sketchbooks here is anything to go by, I say keeping up with one helps a lot.

[blue skies]

Yeah, some of the sketchbooks around here are amazing, huh?

I go to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Awesome school, a bit spendy, but they gave me lots of monies. I can't really give you any insight on the concept art program yet, since I'm really only just starting it.. But in general.. this place kicks ass, so if you're looking for schools, definitely check it out.

Alright.. I'm going to try so, so hard to keep this thing updated. Wish me luck!

[Sapphirelullaby]

@blue skies: goodluck!

ok so I realized I need to go back and change all my img tags into attachments and basically reformat the way I talk about them, since I hope this sketchbook stays up for a while and I don't want the older pics to turn into red xs for stupid reasons :U sooo.

First pic: Loomis hand studies...ohgod why am I SO BAD AT HANDS? this alone took me enough effort to get bored and stop x_x

second pic: hopefully my next full out painting. I want to go all out on this, so any critiques/overpaints/redlines/etc etc are greatly appreciated! she will have clothes in the end...promise. right now this me working out general composition, working out anatomy and the basic lighting. no shadows/values or fleshed out objects yet.

[Sapphirelullaby]

Hi guys! I woke up around 2 pm today (it's 8:30 atm) and I was browsing Conceptart a lot, so I haven't done much today.

1) Posemaniacs again. 60 seconds. I might just stop posting these until I have a bunch...

2) I saw a bunch of people on conceptart start painting screencaps and photographs from movies and videogames, and I decided to give it a try. This was an exercise in not only drawing by eye, but also picking colors manually with only observational help. I didn't expect much, especially since I deliberately decided I would only work for this for 2 hours, but I'm actually pretty happy with how it came out! It took a lot of will not to fuss over the colors to make it look better haha, but I wanted to post only the version without an color adjustment whatsoever. So this is the original painting, at 100% size since it was a speed paint. Obviously it is Captain Jack Sparrow (I hope I achieved some sort of likeness?), using this reference screencap.

[Sapphirelullaby]

Oh yeah! And I'm considering re-doing this old speedpaint (which apparantly took me an hour and a half..whaatt), because I kind of liked the original concept:



If I do, what would you like to see changed, thrown in there, worked on etc? The piece is almost exactly a year old (Jan 2 2010), so it'd be kind of cool to see how I'd tackle the same idea/character now that I have some improvement under my belt.

aahh so many projects/ideas @__@ I still have that enviroment, the new painting, studies, this speedpaint....I hope I'm not trying to tackle too much at once...either way I'm having fun

[Sapphirelullaby]

I don't think I'll have any art done tonight, so I'm going to just post this WIP from last night. critiques/suggestions/redlines/overpaints etc etc welcomed/encouraged.

[Sapphirelullaby]

Since I want to have something to post (I've been horrible with my sleep schedule -- woke up at 4 pm today, I need to change that tonight) since I haven't done much. here's a WIP I started about two weeks ago just before I started to do studies and try to get away from my style, so it's kind of animeish...I dunno if I should finish it or not. but it's a fanart of one of my fav characters, Yuri Lowell from Tales of Vesperia, so I'm torn >: plus I already did the lineart. Though I don't really work with lineart anymore....ahh...

[Sapphirelullaby]

1) wiiippp getting there...

2) super quick speedpaint...didn't think anything would come out of it but I did. I actually had barely any sketch (had just a couple of lines) and focused on color/mood. this was actually a glorified doodle as I inspired by some good music.

[My57]

Proportion needs to be watched in some places but otherwise you're doing pretty well! I like your use of colour, very nice. Pretty good style as well - Hope to see more! Just keep doing practices and such.

[chuck18mp]

That last piece is dope! The lightning gives it all its life and makes it a vibrant work.

Keep it up with the studies, they're very important and you seem to be good at it