Life Drawings (pt.1)

so my Uni hosts a free "open studio" life drawing session every weekend at the art school, and I've made it a point to attend every single time for past few weeks.  and as a result my contour line drawing skills have improved A LOT!  all of these are made with a Cretacolor charcoal set in a 18"x24" sketchbook~ working at that size really helps you control your arm and wrist movements!

All of these are 20 min poses:
The proportions were HARD so this is all I could do in 20 minutes. normally my drawings look a little more complete.

This is the first time I've ever drawn a pregnant woman - and I swear, she was positively glowing. So I tried to capture her likeness in the last 10 minutes instead of working on the rest of the figure.

I really liked this guy's dreads, they were fun to draw. :p I worked on this for a few minutes after time was up b/c it wasn't dark enough.

Anyway, it always feels great to make big strides in just a few weeks, so I'll keep attending these sessions. =) Hopefully I'll have some real art to post soon, though...

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

Samurai Champloo fanart

oops, it's been too long once again since my last post... I've got some commission art in the works that I'm not quite ready to show yet, but for now here's a fanart for one of my favorite shows ever:i have a lot of awe for extremely well-animated action sequences, so this show really hit the spot the first time i watched it. then once i got into it, there was the amazing characters, story, music--the whole shebang!  This took a lot longer than usual (usually fanarts are pretty quick for me), but I learned a neat coloring trick while making this, so... things balance out. :)

Character Illustration: mafia wife

trying my hand at a semi-realistic, illustrative style. this is one of my better attempts.
she's an original character for a furturistic mafia story... i drew her first because all the other ones will be a total pain in the butt to draw. -_- (I suck at drawing guns...)
here's a couple of progress pics for this piece:
i like how in the beginning the block-in was so skewed and off balance that I had to rotate the whole canvas... thank god for digital tools like "lasso" & "free transform" to counteract my utter lack of planning =P

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! -_-

A Chinese Love Story: character designs

posting the finished b&w concept designs for the Chinese fairytale project that I've been working on. these two designs are for Niulang (cow herder, the mortal) and Zhinu (weaver girl, goddess from the heavens). they're characters from a very ancient and well-known chinese love story.i really want a top with gold embroidered dragons like the one that ZhiNu has...