Briefs-There's nudity in here!

[bbwolf]

Man. 53 and a lawyer. That info kinda bypassed me until this last post. You sure lay it out in detail here. I am more brief in my ways but thank yew very much for the compliment.

I think it is best to find "commom ground" with ppl if the basics are met. That means give them enough reality in the pictures for them to key into them. You sometimes disgard perspective as well as light. Radiosity and bounce and stuff. One is easy to forget for ppl. Two makes it hard to get and after three important comfort keys are missing, most ppl won´t give a shit. If the tables in the room with the choking war lord are in perspective, it isn´t really that important that his face is off and the hand totally distorted. Get my drift?
Picasso and Dali were both superb craftsmen hence were able to bend the laws as superbly.

Your cards ferinstance:
Just alittle more prespective would help sell the style I think. Y, know you do cool and elaborous things and then this

Like no perspective studies done at all. That throws ppl off the most.
Here it´s not as important but the next big key, the light is evenly neglected.
There´s not much I´ve changed but it´s enough to "key" in to.


Does that help?

[arttorney]

Thanks. I understand you now. The half lights are missing on all those things too, including the warlord. This is what I meant by half assing things. I photocopied the letterhead blank and then drew those chess pieces on the regular copier paper over the course of a couple of mornings before going to work. I had all kinds of lame problems like marker bleeding etc. and I was too lazy to draw properly plotted out cast shadows so I just omitted the cast shadows on the ground and half assed the shadows the things cast onto themselves. I freehanded the ellipses down the sides which is why they look like shit.

I'll just stop beginning things unless I start them meaning to do it right.

To do something in an hour or an hour and a half like in DSG I don't have the time to make studies over and over until I think it's just right. I picked vanishing points way out to the left and right on the warlord but the horizon line they defined didn't pass through the paper. I can see that that is bothering some people. My radioactive trashcan eating Truman got similar criticisms.

The next POW I am doing I am taking several days per page just in the penciling stage. Hopefully there will be an improvement in quality.

[bbwolf]

Whoa - mebbe I should read entire post before posting back.

[JellevdVegt]

hey man, i like your style, it has something not polished and direct or something. but i think you could really use some perspective help. And as someone pointed out earlier, you can tell by the chess pieces you did. so, do some perspective tutorials (check yoitisi's island mentoring thread) also, look at other artists that inspire you, you have to learn from your fellows so you can get better faster and easier.. and be inspired

cya and thanks for the post

[arttorney]

OK. Thanks. This is the top half of page 1 of POW 18.


Edit: before anybody else says anything about the cross on the King, I purposefully tried to make it leaning back because it is supposed to be the operating button for one of those old fashioned Three Stooges seltzer bottles, which in this case was supposed to double as a chess piece that is a King. Those handles didn't stick straight up out of the bottle, but leaned back toward the user, who pulled the handle back towards themselves in order to make seltzer eject out of the front of the nozzle. Obviously, my idea was a failed experiment on very many levels. I would resolve not to draw things that were obsolete before we were born, but I have lots of people who don't even get the everyday stuff. I painted an elaborate photo-realist thundercloud and had a guy refer to it as a "blue sky thing." I am trying not to baffle people, but I do. I'll just stop baffling people about perspective if I can.

The crappy ellipses were because I made half assed sketches posing as finished pieces and I have no good excuse for that.

[arttorney]

This is the bottom half of the last thing I posted. Sorry about cropping and resolution. I am still figuring out some new scanner software.

[arttorney]

I'm finally back. Here is how my POW 18 looks.

[arttorney]

Here is a blind contour of an office fan I just did with the GIMP while waiting for a lame meeting. I need to start with a bigger canvas.

[arttorney]

I hope to get back to serious drawing soon. Perhaps by pulling an all-nighter or two I can get caught up enough on work.

Lately with morning coffee I have been doing tutorials for the Turbo CAD I have installed on my windows machine. It will no doubt eventually prove useful when I have figured out all the bells and whistles.

[michaeljared]

you have kind words, sketch book is looking good, i thought i should let you know i got some new stuff in.

[arttorney]

Thanks. I'll check in when I get a chance. I'm running all over the place dealing with the day job.

I have made this for the 3CH Random Topic Community Activity "A Shining Skeleton Receives a Knight in a Temple" I guess this makes him a knight templar. Hope quality is up to snuff on this. I did at least put in a bunch of hours. I drew it backwards and flipped it digitally. I am happy the words look kind of normal.

[arttorney]

Watching Grief's sketchbook, and then thinking about collages, I have begun constructing my big template of custom layers to cut sections out of (digitally speaking). This is the first layer I have completed. It is made in the GIMP using 19 pixel brushed aluminum gradient colored brush and just going back and forth making straight lines like a television would.

I am thinking like this could become some really esoteric hatching patterns after I have put together some other gradient-brush combinations in various directions (and perhaps making some in low opacities for overlays).

Think of this as a sort of custom brush for a guy who draws out of it with his eraser tool.

Here is the second layer. Diagonal stuff is harder to pull off accurately.

[arttorney]

I'm currently working on Panels of the Week #20 and daring to try digital again. This is page 1 of three without the actual drawings (for which I've posted roughs in the POW activity). My entry will recount verse 83 of the Song of Roland. The characters will be bugs in keeping with the activity brief. Except for the dividing bars and the text, I am drawing with the eraser tool and layers as I was discussing yesterday.

[Collywobbles]

This is a really ballsy sketchbook. Every post is completely different from the last, it's refreshing.

[arttorney]

Thank you. I feel that experimentation can sometimes yield some cool stuff. Of course the downside is that sometimes it yields stuff that is not so cool.

I hope this little comic I have drawn for Panels of the Week #20 will not hurt too bad. I am still learning my way around the GIMP and I have some weird taste anyway. Apologies in advance.

[arttorney]

Arshes Nei, from the official "Draw people from the what does everybody look like" thread. There is a lot of subtlety in the original that simply wouldn't image. Charcoal is tough to present on the internet.

[arttorney]

Here is a portrait of serhc I made for the Drawing from What Does Everybody Look Like Thread. This is supposed to look like a woodcut.

[arttorney]

Alesoun (She's the woman, not the baby or the angel).
I see you on here chriskot. You're next. I brought my acrylic stuff from Arizona last weekend. It's going to be kind of a fake van Gogh.

[arttorney]

These are some WIPS thumbs for the Team CHOW, specifically for Team Crumpets and PAIN. They are the environments into which the characters will be placed for final presentation.







Here are two of the character thumbs I made for the same activity.

[Pic]

This is a really ballsy sketchbook. Every post is completely different from the last, it's refreshing.

All of arttorneys work I've seen is ballsy!

I really like your stuff, you can tell that your primary aim when creating them is the act of creation itself and that you enjoy it and it shows, and your work ethic towards producing stuff and experimentation really is refreshing and inspirational!

If you didn't have such a large body of work up on here I might be tempted to look at one or two and pass it over, but taken all together they really are something, the whole seems greater then its parts somehow.

I like how you push things so far stylistically, and I think your strongest pieces are the black and white inks with the hatching for shade (Alesoun piece is great!) (or when you've used touches of colour like in the second and third panels of POW 18 ) they really have an etched feel that's quite nice.
It's hard to put a finger on where you need to improve because your inhabited way of working has pushed your style throughout all the areas of your work it seems, so even the mistakes have become inclusive into that style. I'm not so sure perspective -is- the thing you should be pushing as other people say, you tend to work on a flat plain anyway and it think its that flat-plane pattern lineart style that gives alot of your work its charm, adding depth to alot of the images would sure make then technically better, but im not convinced it would make them better art (not to say people shouldn't practise perspective and the like but perhaps your focus in the limited time you have to practise would be best implemented elsewhere)
I think maybe a little anatomy in terms of nailing down facial proportion would go a long way with what you do. Maybe look at some of the work of great line artists like Aubrey Beardsley, I would be interested in your take on someone like that.

I agree with trying to support the community activities by the way, I often wonder why other people don't whilst not doing it myself =P Maybe we can both submit something in the next POW

[arttorney]

About the face and figure I may still have some excuse because I had to drop my life drawing class halfway through due to life pressures, and I never even started portraiture.

I am supposed to have learned perspective and lighting in Drawing I though. Why I have been focusing on that linework lately is only partly because my brother's stuff fills my house to the point that oils are impossible. In part it is because all that hatching forces me to see the values. I have picked lighting as my first area to focus on in studies. Each new direction of hatching is another level of the shadow. I am forced to remember, or relearn, that there is a gradation of shadow as the clothing fold rolls around.

Aubrey Beardsley has those rockin' Victorian sensibilities that I have been getting into, but he has these major areas of solid black that I rarely put into the drawing. If I wanted to bullshit somebody, I might say those big black areas flatten the drawing. If I wish to be truthful I might admit that I can't seem to get a uniform coat of solid black even with several coats of ink. When I image it I always see brush marks that I then would have to hide by jacking up the contrast. I just need to get more patient in that area.

When I go outside the lines I forget the different parts of the shadow again. Look at that stupid garden bench that I markered and then worked in digital. Because I was in a hurry I slapped some shadow on there in digital but I omitted the cast shadow made by the bench. I am supposed to know better than that. Very embarrasing. Building up with ink gives me plenty of time to look around the picture and remember such things. All the time I spend penciling values before hand should give me time to plot out perspective beforehand. That will probably prevent the impression that I am half-assing the backgrounds (which was the critique center consensus about the Alesoun drawing).

In oils, I simply get too wild and exuberant to do purely representational work. At my closest to representational, there are still mounded blobs of paint all over turning the painting into a relief map. It's not natural looking that way. I'll do my abstract work in oils (plus bolts).

[arttorney]

Trying a new direction in POW. I know lighting, figures and perspective are straight out the window on this one. I'm going to try to do a proper job on the IDW mechanical man.

[arttorney]

I "drew" an origami crane using the three dimensional drawing tool in Open Office followed by Kolourpaint. Then I messed around with some filters in the GIMP.






Some of these things have potential, I think. That emboss thing would make a rad orc halberd if I tied it onto a stick.

[donalfall]

Nice poetry in the POW. Those shapes are interesting. And some of those "draw what everybody looks like" pieces are great - you should go back to a few reference pics with the charcoal like you did on the Arshes Nei pic, only do them big. Really, really big. Loosen it out. You need a bit of looseness here and there.

You've been doing a sterling job in keeping POW subscribed to. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but I think it's potentially the best activity on CA, and I feel a right arse for not helping out. Keep up the good work my friend.

[alesoun]

I didn't know Gimp could do that! But, hey; a chain would work better than a stick!

[arttorney]

Thanks, folks. I have been thinking of doing a POW in charcoal but I always get so frustrated at how poorly the gradations of tone get scanned. I just need to pick 5 distinct values or less and stick to them. It's hard because charcoal can be so smooth and fluid in the transitions. It's easy to get lost in the love of that.

The topmost crane has no GIMP. It is just built of pyramids from the Open Office drawing tool that have linen bitmap surfaces. I drew the black lines and trimmed edges with Kolourpaint (though the GIMP would be more efficient at that anyway).

I have been looking at the Open Office drawing tool because I have decided that it is the open equivalent of Sketchup. This took me about two minutes.

[arttorney]

This was supposed to be about lighting and perspective. I'll come to looseness in due course.

[arttorney]

starting on the mechanical man Industrial Design of the week.

let's see if I can upload a windows metafile. I never heard of them, but they are the only kind of file I can export from Open Office drawing tool back to TurboCad. No. Invalid file.. As it turns out, the damn thing only saves whatever 3d shape I was sticking into the drawing but not the rest of the drawing. Whatever. I think I can only go downstream from the proprietary TurboCad. Anyway, here's a version after a bit of cleanup in the GIMP:

[arttorney]

Some more work on my mechanical man.

some updates. As always, I'm learning a lot.

[arttorney]

This is a WIP for the Cyberspace Environment of the Week.


The first step was to convert that metallic looking origami crane drawing into several image pipes (.gih files) of various colors and orientations and do a little painting with them. If any GIMP enthusiasts want to know more details about how to do this just ask. The next step is standard painting with the paintbrush plus shift key followed by painting junctures with a couple of the GIH files that came with my GIMP 2.2. The green junctures don't show up on these WIPS, only the orange. See below for the green.