So, I just recently uploaded a picture to deviantART. A picture I’ve been working on for three years, and was never fully satisfied with. I don’t think I can fully articulate how much it means to me to finally have it out of my hair and out in public where I don’t have to worry about it anymore!

It started as I said, three years ago, when I was going through a rough time and needed some extra cash. I decided to put out a plea for commissions, just quick $10 sketches and small digital drawings and the like. I don’t think I got any bites, except for one; Mia, aka. Losmios, told me she wanted a commission. But not a piddly little sketch, oh no. She wanted a fully painted digital picture she could make fancy prints of. I didn’t know whether or not I had the time or the energy to pull it off, but I accepted it anyway. How could I refuse?

Anyway, it did turn out to be a little more than I could handle. I was rather intimidated and vowed to do the best work I could do. I had an image in my head of how I wanted it to look, but it just wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. As such, it sat on my hard drive for all this time, during which I would randomly open it up again every few months, put a couple more hours into it, then close it up again. It wasn’t until I started art school and wanted to start fresh that I decided to bite the bit and just set it free.

So I have. But it seems so anti-climactic after so much work that went into it. So I’m going to post a series of WIP images to show you just how many iterations it went through before I finally came up with what I’ve uploaded today.

So yes, Mia gave me a commission to draw a picture of her pegasus persona. I opened up Photoshop and freehand painted, without references, a couple different equine poses, but I settled on the one you see below.

This really shows how sketchy the first pass on the pose was. I used one of Photoshop CS’s default brushes and just went to town. For the wings I used a photo I took of some seagulls as a reference. There’s no way in hell I could do that freehand!

So, after I settled on the pose I switched to the regular hard-edged round brush and started airbrushing, smoothing it out, adding shading, and a few more details. The entire pegasus was painted on one layer, something I had never done before. I had a lot of fun with it. Oh, right, and I decided to do it all in greyscale first, thinking later I could use one of Mia’s own techniques and colourize it. This eventually caused a lot of problems. But anyway, onwards!

Right! Here I added the mane and tail. I did those by painting in a semi-opaque, flat coloured mane shape. I used the smudge tool a bit to tease out some finer strands. After that, I just went in and traced out a bunch of locks from the main shape, adding light and shadow. It was almost like sculpting. At the very end I went in with a small round brush and added a bunch of small, straggly white hairs just to make it seem a little less plastic. You can see some of those in the detail picture I uploaded to DA.

This was my first pass at a background. I envisioned a bunch of mountains poking through a veil-like misty cloud layer, which the sun was just sitting on top of. In my mind it was very pretty and dramatic, but it’s the background I ended up struggling with for three years. Urgh.

I tried many times to paint the clouds in, but I could never get them looking anywhere near to my satisfaction. I went to another friend of mine, Katy Rewston, and she sent me her own little sketchy paint-over to try and show me how I might go about the clouds. I tried her suggestions…

… but yeah, they didn’t really turn out how I liked. (I also added some shading to the pegasus here, trying to make the lighting a smidgen more believable.)

Either way, the picture stayed like this for months. I just couldn’t get the clouds right. On top of that, I knew the mountains were terribly painted. I knew they were simply placeholders just to figure out the look of the background, but I didn’t realize how much of a pain they’d actually be when I tried to paint them properly. Anyway, I took a stab at repainting the mountains.

Well! They certainly looked like the best mountains I had ever painted. But right, they were in the wrong positions. So what do I do? I cut them up and try to fit them in the same places the old mountains were:

Okay, getting closer… but there’s still something off about it. I also added a bit more detail to the mountain in the foreground there.

So I was left with this. And there was something wrong about it. I didn’t have the same dramatic presence to it as the one with the crappy mountains did. I was so frustrated, I went to a digital painting forum for some constructive criticism.

And oh man, did they oblige. They certainly reamed me out for the background, and everything else too, but I learned a lot. They told me about a grid method often used to help with composition, so I stuck that on and went about reordering. After applying their feedback (and making another half-hearted attempt at clouds) I came up with this:

You can barely see the faint gridmarks in there. Anyway, this was a huge help, and I certainly loved the composition much more. But what about those clouds? And wasn’t I supposed to colour this eventually?

Here I started trying to experiment with the colour. The background simply has an orangy-color layer over top of it; the pegasus I actually went in, following the instructions on Mia’s tutorials, and made my first few attempts at colourizing it. And it really didn’t turn out so well.

No, it doesn’t look terrible, but it certainly wasn’t turning out how I wanted it to. The brown on the knees just looked dirty, and whenever I tried to make the socks white I just lost detail. And don’t even get me started on the spots on the wings; I never saved any pictures of my attempts with that, because holy crap, it just looked so bad.

So… it stagnated. I felt I couldn’t deliver a product if I couldn’t even make the subject look like the character it was supposed to be. And on top of that, I just couldn’t get the damn clouds right. It didn’t stop me from opening it up and trying it again and again though, over successive months.

I even experimented with using my own reference pictures for the clouds. Yeah, it looked super cool… but I’m not that great a photomanipulator. I also couldn’t find the type of clouds I wanted for around the mountains… and all sorts of other problems.

Then, using a simpler technique, I came up with this. And it didn’t look so bad! Basically I took the soft-edged round brush and added a bunch of opacity/size pressure settings and scatter effects, then went to town on the clouds. There are two layers here; a black cloud layer, and a white cloud layer underneath the black. The varying opacity in the black clouds made it look like the white showing through were highlights. I liked the effect a lot, but I sat on it for a hell of a long time.

At some point I opened it up and sketched out those misty clouds around the mountains, exactly what you see in the finished picture at the top of this post, but I can’t remember when. Obviously I didn’t think it looked that great at the time, because I closed it and forgot about it. But when I opened the file back up a couple days ago, I suddenly realized, hey; it doesn’t look that bad. Presentable, in fact.

Then I came up with the crazy idea: could I call this finished?

Well, even if I couldn’t or not I decided to anyway. I finally added a small colour overlay layer to give it some character and uploaded it. Now… it’s free.

Can I go now? Hehe!

Well, that’s it. I hope this was interesting for you! I hope you like the picture; I sure do. Hopefully it’ll stop haunting me now.

Oh, yes. School happened. But really, it’s okay! It’s art school! It’s a very good thing! It just means that I’m extra busy nowadays, and I have less time and less drive to actually work on any of my own stuff outside of class. But, it does mean I have some in-school assignments and things I can show off. That’s always nice, huh?

I have already uploaded some of these to my LJ, so I apologize for cross posting for those who read both. Probably not many of you.

Read below the cut to see them. Be warned; there are lots and lots of images under here, some of them Not Safe For Work (NSFW).

Okay! We’ll start with some drawing class drawings. Self-portrait:

Contour-line drawings:

Gesture Drawing:

More contour-line:

A free-form exercise (I drew the tree shape, then this was passed around to about five other artists. This is what was given back to me!):

Negative/positive space drawings:

Contour line using negative space principles:

Right, now onto the ceramics work!

We had to make a coil pot. This is made usually by starting out with a flat base, then rolling out coils made out of clay and wrapping them around the edge and stacking more coils on top of that one. This creates the wall of the pot. Here was my pot after about 20 hour’s work:

When we were done coiling/finishing the pot, we let it harden to a rather stiff leather-hard stage, then took a metal spoon to it and polished it up, what is called “burnishing”. This closes up the pores in the clay and makes it shine. We also carved designs into it at leatherhard stage, if that’s what we wanted to do; I chose a pseudo-mesoamerican pattern. This was mine after about two to three hours of burnishing (the dark marks came from the metal rubbing off the spoon; the clay was rather hard!):

After that the pots were thrown into a kiln to bisque; or, get hot enough to harden up a little, but not fully fire. This makes them a little more resilient for the the eventual pit firing. Bone-dry clay is extremely brittle, so we usually bisque before going on with glazing or any other post construction work to minimize the chance of damage. This is what it looked like after bisque-ing:

After that came the fun part! We all traipsed down to the parking lot where there were a couple old, metal oil drums set up. We loaded the pots inside, all stacked one on top of the other, then filled the drums with sawdust. This was set on fire and let to smolder for about twelve hours; the resulting heat and smoke further hardened the pots and also gave them some absolutely amazing smoke textures, which were all different depending on its position in the drum in relation to other pots. Here is my finished pot after the pit firing:

Isn’t it perdy? I can’t wait to take it home!

The next ceramics assignment is a slab project that we haven’t finished yet. The idea was to make a geometric vessel of some sort (though it certainly doesn’t have to be functional). The few restrictions were it had to have 6 sides, an opening that could be closed, and some sort of foot. We constructed these using leather-hard clay slabs, out of which we cut out the shapes of the pieces we need and fit them together to form our vessel. Once formed we used different coloured slips (very watered down clay of different makes, almost like glazes) to add colour and design to our forms. Here was mine with the slip added:

Can’t wait to see what this looks like after it’s bisqued, varnished, then fired. So excited.

Next: Painting class! First up: Self-portrait. Here’s a bunch of successive WIP pictures:

And then the finished product (or close to it, anyway):And let me just get this out of my system now: Painting is hard. Holy crap. This is one of the most frustrating classes I’ve ever had to take, no joke. I think I’m improving, but I still can’t understand how people would work with such and unwilling and unwieldy medium out of choice!

There. Now I can move on.

The next painting was the one I did today in painting class, a total of 4 hour’s work. We had a few restrictions; the subject matter had to be a combination of interior x exterior; that is, something from inside ourselves, with something from the outside world. We were told to go out into the school, find something to paint, and then add a fantastical element to it from our own imagination. We had to limit ourselves to a certain colour scheme (whether it was analagous, complimentary, triads, etc.) and a certain composition (triangular, spiral, L-shaped, cruciform, etc.).

I chose to paint a door in the hallway and added trees and bunnies. I used an analagous-complimentary colour scheme (green/yellow/orange and purple) with an L-shaped composition. Here’s what I came up with:
Considering this is the first time I’ve ever painted in that class without gnashing my teeth and seething in frustration, I think it’s a winner. Bunnies!

Right, so that’s all I have to show for now! I’ll try to keep up with adding more as it develops. I hope you enjoyed this little foray into my schoolwork; I’m certainly having fun doing it. Thanks for looking, and let me know what you think!

Osama drew the first two panels plus the guy in the third, and I did the rest. So much fun.

This was the result of an experiment. The carousel horse on the right was drawn and inked with a brushpen a few weeks ago. I drew the dog back then too, but only just got around to inking it today; with an actual, honest to god bottle of india ink and a paint brush! (Can you tell any difference?)

I’m so excited about it. I’d love to do more with brush-inked lines. The dog was a fun experiment. Obviously I need to practice a bit with it, work on keeping a steady hand.

Here’s a sketch of Donald Duck I drew without reference, also a couple weeks ago. I think I’m getting better!

Watched “The Big Sleep”, which of course had me drawing 1940-style Private Dicks and saucy ladies.

More ladies. Film Noir ladies are hard, for some reason. Anyway, still had fun sketchin’.

That’s it!

Too lazy to scan, so you get a terrible photo until I’m not so lazy. I really need another couple of lamps or something.

Drawn just after that last Shaintar comic. A random bear, a sketch of Polly smoking, and a random cartoony chick who unfortunately doesn’t have a proper face. Poor girl.

A bit of a sketch page filled with little mice sketches, since a good friend of mine asked me for some. Unfortunately mice are terribly hard for me to draw (they don’t have boooones! Or… don’t look like they have bones…), so these aren’t all that nice. Still… mice. Oh, and some ladies too.

A close-up of the woman in the last page. I liked her a lot. Sometimes I have to remind myself that, yes, I can draw semi-human looking things. I still have to practice noses, though.

Aaaand some puppy sketches. There were done without any references (can’t you tell?), and are for that project I’m working on to do a series of dog/cat breeds on postcards with watercolour. That corgi is actually the next card and is all transferred and inked; I just have to finish painting it. Man, I need to start practising canines again… And cats. Yuck. My problem with cats is the same as with mice; they’re like bags of jelly or something, and for some reason that’s really hard for me to draw!

A quick sketch of a girl I saw… somewhere. Didn’t end up looking anything like her, but I liked the sketch.

Just a very small and silly little self-portrait.

And last but not least for now, some fanart of T.O.E. and Rice Boy from the comic Rice Boy. It’s such an absolutely excellent comic, one that I own in real life now thanks to my awesome sweetie. You won’t regret reading it, it’s one of the best webcomics I’ve read yet, and in such an interesting, original world…

Right, now some sketches for my illustrations for the Open Game Table project:

And:

These are illustrations for a couple articles in the up-coming book. I’m currently in the middle of inking them. The OGT is a really neat project, I’m glad I’ve had the chance to be a part of it; I just hope I can get these done on time, yargh!

Anyway, yes, that’s it for now. I haven’t really been drawing much, despite my best efforts; things have been rather hectic. As always, I hope to do some more drawing soon; we’ll see what happens. Thanks for reading!

EDIT: Oh gosh, I forgot to post this one!

Drawn at the local burger place (Moderne Burger; mmm) on their oh-so-handy blank white paper place mats. Suggested by Dennis, who has all the best suggestions. He also suggested a whole series of sketches of strange people with appropriate dog breeds as noses, which, who knows, may become a reality on future visits? Hehehe.

I love the weird stuff the most.

I’d like to say thanks to the awesome Teresa of Lost In Wonder for the wonderful advice she gave me on DA. Of course this is just a small practice painting, but I am new at this, and her advice really helped me decide what my next step was going to be. Please give her blog a visit, she’s insanely talented, and I absolutely adore her paintings. You won’t regret it!

For sale, if anyone’s interested! Originally offering for $5, but feel free to make an offer if you’d rather pay less. It’s 6″x4″, postcard sized, has a postcard address/stamp layout on the back. Front is pretty much just as you see here, except without the website watermark.

Keep reading to hear me ramble about the process and what I learned. =)

Differences from the previous WIP are: I deepened the shadows a teensy bit with a purple hue, though over top of the yellow and the previous shading it got to look a little muddy. I think it still added a bit more life to it than leaving it the way it was, so it was a positive change. Then there are the obvious additions of the background and shadow.

I actually really like the blue background, but I think I need to learn again how to stretch my paper. I had a lot of warping occur along the sides, which prompted me to do a lot of lifting excess water with paper towel to struggle to keep it even. I think it turned out pretty well considering the warping problem, more even than I expected! Yet it still has enough uneveness to keep the background interesting, and has that watercolour look about it, which I like a lot.

Once I had finished the painting I struggled with coming up with ideas for how to finish it to tie it together. I finally decided on adding the “Pomeranian” label/title on there, which might fit with the rest of the breeds if I decide to make it a series. I dunno… I think next time I’ll have to come up with a more interesting font, and spend more time on it.

Anyway, on a whole I am satisfied with it, and I had a lot of fun! I can’t wait to start my next one… but what breed should I do? Any suggestions?

I actually defied my law of procrastination and sat down and started one on Tuesday. Here’s how far I got:

Now I’m looking for suggestions/critiques/advice/what-have-you. I know very little about watercolours, really only the very basics of how to use them, and I still have a long way to go.

What I’d like some advice on if you’ve got any:

Shadows: Should I add another layer of shadows, possibly in a purple colour? What areas do you think would benefit the most from this? How stingy/generous should I be with this to really make it pop?

Background: Simple gradient, simple shadow on the ground, something more elaborate…? What colours do you think would work well in a background? Should it fill up the whole rest of the paper, or form a smaller rectangle/oval around the subject? Should it have hard edges or fade into the white of the paper? I’m pretty stumped here, actually!

Pom detail: Is there enough detail on the pom? Too much? Should I attempt to do more, and if so, what would you suggest? It’s kind of hard to see from the crappy photo I provide, but I did try to lift some of that yellow off the edges of the fur and in certain places to make it seem lighter. I also went in once with a darker orange colour and added some little swipes with that; blah blah.

Right. So, basically, I suck at colouring things. I have very little practice, and a lot of the time my coloured pictures turn out looking very preschool-ish. Since colour in watercolour paintings is so important, I thought I’d ask for advice; and any technical advice/critique you have to give for now, and for the next one would be so welcome!

Thank you in advance for any help you’re able to give; and if not, I hope you like the look of this (poorly drawn) pom. =) My internet was down when I started drawing it so I couldn’t look up refernces; I hope it’s recognizable. If not, I’ll do better on the next one!

Anyone interested in purchasing this for $5 when it’s done, or others in a series like this?

I’m not sure if I ever really explained who Creature is on this journal… so let me do that really quick.

Creature is a weird canine-ish animal thing that I drew a lot when I was a kid, mostly in highschool. Actually, he first started out as more of a demon-ish thing, as is evident in the first few pictures I drew of him. I hadn’t ever really had anything that I drew more than once, not even a character, but for some reason he stuck in my mind, and I ended up drawing him all the time.

I still don’t know what he is, really. I’m terrified people think of him as one of those many numerous canine-ish “fursonas” out there, or even worse, a sparkle dog. But he’s not me, nor is he an extension of who I am; he’s separate, and I just like drawing him. He doesn’t have a set personality, or any kind of a story or background. He’s just there.

Anyway, I hadn’t drawn him for ages, so I sat down tonight, opened up Photoshop, and sketched him out and coloured him in about an hour and a half. I’m trying to get used to doing these quick Photoshop drawings, and I really do think I’m getting better. I just have to work on my shading and colouring, and definitely my backgrounds as well…

Right, enough rambling. Hope you like the picture. =)

EDIT: Here’s another animated .gif layer run through. I let it linger a little on the sketch layer, since I find that the most interesting part. =) Click on the picture below to see it animate for you.

Polly the clone, working on an information console. Hacking is what she does best. =)

A page showing some sketches of d7’s character, Mercy Junius. And a small sketch of Polly too. =)

Tali’Zorah nar Rayyah (damn, forgot the “h” in the picture) from Mass Effect. I’m currently addicted to that game. Drawn using references from Creative Uncut (specifically this one). I haven’t done a detailed ink picture in ages, so this was tonnes of fun to do.

I hadn’t drawn a dragon in a while. I love dragons. I also love muscles. Some day I’ll learn how to draw both properly. Inked with a brush pen.

Was going to be a picture of a Brinchie character from our Shaintar game, ended up turning into a referenceless body study. I really need to do more figure drawing, oi.

A page of Bambi deer (drawn from references on the official model sheets, with the bottom one being from my own head so-to-speak) and a southern belle. We were watching “Little Women” on Christmas, and the dresses were itching at me to be drawn.

And Dennis suggested “A person lying in snow” as a drawing prompt, and it turned into this. I’m planning on playing around with it in Photoshop to see what I can make of it. Rushed and crappy inking job ftw!

Right, that’s all I’ve got so far. Hope you all had a lovely holiday, and I wish you all the best for the coming New Year! Thanks for reading. =)