d r a g o n b o n e s    

I’ve done another set of 3 minute portraits. To see who these three are based on, click here for for the reference images.

While we’re on the topic of quick portraits, I have a new project in mind. These 3 minute portraits are great for scratching my ‘don’t want to focus for too long on one thing’ mindset, but not so great for catching true likenesses. With that in mind, I’m thinking that 5 minutes should do the trick. Today it occurred to me that a large collection of such portraits would make for an interesting gallery showing. Perhaps interesting enough to warrant my first public show.

How many would I need to create to warrant a show? Well, I got to thinking that 1 work week’s worth should do the trick.

40 hours / 5 minutes per portraits =480 portraits.

Yeah – that’s a lot of portraits, but you don’t get better without practice so I guess it’s time to practice. A lot.

I’ll post more about that soon.

Every now and again, I find myself with some free time.

No really. It’s rare, but it does happen.

When that happens, I like to offer up the opportunity for folks to pay what they want for commissions.

You did, in fact, read that correctly. Pay what you want. If that’s $1, then it’s $1. If that’s $5,000,000? Well, I’ll try really hard to make the art live up to the commission price.

How It Works

1. Confirm that my Commission status (on the right) is set to OPEN.
2. Confirm that the Pay What You Want option (PWYW) is also set to OPEN. (Please note: if this option is NOT set to open when you request the work, I reserve the right to refund your money. This likely means that time is tight, but not tight enough to close commissions completely.)
3. Use the Donate via Paypal button in the upper right corner of this page to send me your commission fee.
4. Contact me via my contact form. Let me know the following information via the form:
1. What you’re commissioning me to draw. Be as descriptive as possible! The more information you give me, the closer I can come to drawing what’s in your head.
2. How much you sent me for the commission, and what email address you sent it from. This is to help avoid any criss crossing for multiple commissions or commissioners.
5. I will email you to confirm that I have received both the information and the commission money. I will likely have a sketch attached to this email. If I plan on doing more work/revisions, I’ll ask you to confirm that I’m headed in the right direction based on the sketch. If I feel that the sketch is complete, I’ll let you know in this email.
6. I welcome your thoughts/comments/critiques.

Please Note: I reserve the right to do as much or as little as I feel is warranted by your commission fee. If you feel that my work is only worth $1 (or if that’s all you can spare) then you’re not likely to get an illustration that took me 15 hours to complete. I will, however, likely give you more than your money’s worth in general – I do have a reputation to uphold.

As a wrap up to this series on drawing the Basic Human Face (part 1 | part 2) I wanted to add a little nuance to the face we’ve built out.

Creating the Map

Using the center line and matching points on the interior of the ears, I created some angles to show the curvature of the cheeks. You can see how the intersection points create a map of sorts for added details in the following image.

I find that using lines and vertices like this help immensely when drawing likenesses, which I’ll get into in more detail in a later post. Suffice to say that it’s a good habit to get into, and it makes it clear why folks have always told me that ‘artists are good at geometry’. This, for the record, is not always the case – just ask my high school geometry teacher.

Adding the Deets

Here you can see the added details I used the guidelines for. Simple delineation of the cheek bones and smile lines fall easily along the intersection points of my guides.

Protip: While it’s not exactly this simple, a good thing to keep in mind is this: the more detail you add to a face, the older the person looks. This easy trick makes it a simple matter to make a character look old or young – just by adding or removing additional information from our illustrations. Notice how much older this character looks just from the image above?

I also altered the poor guy’s haircut, because the simple ‘dome cut’ from above was making me nuts.

What other details could we add to this face? How would we map them out beforehand to know where to place those features?

In honor of the 4th of July:

Always been a fan of Norse mythology. Thanks to that, I’ve never been a huge fan of Marvel’s version of Thor. I know, I know – just being honest. He’s a god, and he always seemed… awkward in the standard Marvel world. In recent years, I think that they’ve done a much better job of placing him within the world without making things so odd.

At any rate, when the folks over at Xion decided that the May Art Jam would be Thor, I figured it would be a good time to have a go at the ol’ Odinson. I decided to make his costume a bit more traditional – a bit less… tights.

As should be obvious, this needs a lot of work yet – especially in terms of Mjolner. I like the more traditional shape of the hammer, but it needs some knotwork to finish it off. This was really just meant as a quick sketch though, so perhaps another time.