brush tests

 Royal Guardians, wip illustration

got a new computer and finally installed the newest versions of Photoshop/Painter, so i'm playing around with brushes like always (cross-posted from my art tumblr)

... hope everyone's been having a great 2011 so far! :)

Landscapes

wahhh, so many months without an update... is this really my first post of 2009?! crazy. @_@ anyway, here are some environments... i like drawing mountains/trees and organic things cuz it's so easy to just make it up as you go along :p

 this one's an oldie, the first landscape i posted here... i fixed up the drawing & deepened the colors, now it looks way better. always nice to revisit old pieces :)

a speedpaint you may remember from a few months ago, finally decided to finish it!

and these next two pieces are WIPs that I'm working on right now:
that's all for now, more to come later~

Warmups + Character Design

So I've been taking quite a few commissions lately, just for single character concepts/illustrations. I should probably figure out a price table for this soon so I can start doing it on a larger scale...

Anyway, here's the piece that I'm working on right now. The initial sketch phase went super smoothly, and I like how it looks overall, but now the details are gonna be a HUGE pain to finish.  I really want to finish it tonight though~

edit: here's the finished version, totally forgot about posting it lol

also, here are a few 15 minute doodles that I do to warm-up before I start drawing.  I got the idea from going to regular figure drawing sessions at my Uni - they really help me get into the "fast sketch" mindset! :D
heh, I just needed to draw something to get me into that "fantasy swordfighting" mindset :D

Emperor concept sketches

here's some tonal concept sketches, once again for the chinese fairytale project. i'm trying to plan out my pieces more (and just do more studies in general) to improve my composition and tones.it's IS helping a little, so far... i just need to remind myself of that constantly so i can keep plodding on and not get discouraged!

this blog needs some color

okay, so i just realized that my last few posts have no color in them... D: AHHHH what a travesty! in fact, this bothers me so much that i'm going to post some color doodles/WIPs right now to remedy this grievous error. (nothing against b&w studies, it's just that i've been doing them so much lately and I LOVE color too much to have a monochromatic blog!)

this is for the "chinese fairytale project," it's the goddess with a white dragon swirling around her. i think i made the pose a little TOO sexy.


i really suck at cityscapes. but there's no way around it, i just have to practice... i'm trying to work out all the basic shapes/composition in this picture right now.

i really love painting mountains! gonna add a figure, and a bunch of architecture to this

man, it's gonna suck to finish all these pieces, doing all the detailing is always so hard for me... i love the initial "spark" of inspiration that makes me attack a blank canvas with so much confidence, but it always tapers off once I have to start adding detail! -_-

more sketches

got some more art to post, 'cause I really wanna fill up this blog! here's a quick fanart I made when i was taking a break from original art:

my friend jeremy recommended "Kung Fu Panda" as one of those super-cool movies that one needs to check out...  i haven't had a chance to go see it yet unfortunately, but i did watch every clip i could find of it and it looks AMAZING!! very authentic scenery, and the character expressions/designs are top notch!

and there's also this kinda sad excuse for concept art:it's an wip for my adaptation of a famous Chinese fairytale, but I accidentally lost a ton of progress on it (stupid laptop ran out of batteries). it's just as well since it looks like crap anyway... composition/scale is totally off. I wanted the dragons to look HUGE, but the composition just doesn't work for that purpose.  oh well, I'll start anew and see if i can do better~