FREE TIME!

With the extra day off I finally made some room to just drop dead and lay around. Well, only in terms of homework at least. Now that I look back 80% of the time I hang out at my friends place I'm always trying to do some form of studying. Last year it was studying Glenn Vilppu's methods for figure drawing. Image below... that's what you call a master.

Vilppu Academy

This definitely helped me out so much last year that I can't stress it enough. In comparison to our schools "Observational" figure drawing, Vilppu's constructive/ imaginary figure drawing helped me out much more. I was also able to attend one of Vilppu's classes during spring break and that was quite eye opening. To see such a proficient artist doing what they do best in person is more inspirational than anything. Now that I feel somewhat comfortable to move forward myself for drawing I am now going to focus on digital painting.

I have nothing against traditional media but I simply have no time for it so photoshop is the way to go! I have no experience whatsoever in painting so its definitely going to be especially tough for the next few months. I mainly do figure painting (mostly portrait as of now) for practice/ study purposes. Sometimes I do comps just to practice on the broad values and silhouettes for environments but I have to admit that I have yet to have taken it much further than that. Something that I do for fun in terms of painting are Mechs and Jets (simply hardsurface stuff). It's just what I want to do so yeah...!

This ones a study of Shoji Kawamori's illustration for Macross. I'd say it was around the time of this painting (early on during summer) that I actually tried to paint digitally (although my tablet broke halfway through the summer and I couldn't move onwards, it was horrible...). Its a fairly quick study as I wanted to try broad strokes and overall value (more like a comp study). Basically what I was doing, and will be doing for the next year, is just to focus on values only. This next image is something I did yesterday because I realized that I have not painted something that I really wanted to paint for months now. Annnnd that would be Mechs!

I've got to say that it's so refreshing to do what you want once in a while. It just feels really enjoyable when you do something that you genuinely like or want to do. This piece is really nothing as I just spat it out remembering that I haven't done one in a while. It technically is still a study piece as I am still trying to figure out values with it. I am focusing more on painting techniques and values right now as feel that I need the basics before I could do anything. For example I did not spend any time designing this guy here. I just did a quick sketch and proceeded to paint over it. Once I am able to grasp digital painting better I'll then actually pay attention to the design (notice how theres pretty much no detail whatsoever apart from the small amount of scratches I added for texture).

Annd that's it for my non-nonsensical post for the day! Enjoy my bad works on my journey to learn how to paint!