d r a g o n b o n e s    

Let’s face it – in the world of professional illustration, time = money. It’s true in most professions, but when the work to create your product is work that you can’t delegate, you need as much time to produce as you can get your hands on. Many of us still have to do the rest of our ‘run the engine’ work on our own and that makes the time crunch even worse.

We Need to Work Faster

How do you make yourself more productive in less time? How do you make yourself more efficient? You work on speed. You work on understanding forms and figures and settings so that you can draw them faster.

Possibly the best tool that I’ve ever come across to help with this very thing are the tools made available by the awesome Kim at her website Pixelovely.com. She’s crafted a set of automated web tools for displaying photos of reference images for artists to work from – in a timed fashion.

Did I mention that she offers this to the public for free? (You can, and IMHO should donate to her via Paypal, but she doesn’t require it for the user of her site.)

Currently the tools allow you to use both human figures and a wide range of animals for reference material. Humans can be filtered by both gender and clothed or nude. Animals can be broken down by type (birds, canine, insects, etc). All of the above can be gone through in time increments of  30 seconds, 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or 10 minutes for fast sketching. If you prefer to take your time and focus on quality over quantity? No problem. Kim’s got you covered by allowing you to ‘take a class’ and set the timer to 30 minutes, 1, 2, 3, or 6 hours.

Did I mention that it’s free?

How Photographers Can Help

Kim/Pixelovely really could use your help. She would like to expand the set of tools to include two new options – one for portraits, and one for hands/feet. Any of you who are willing to donate your existing photos (or some portion thereof) should contact her via her contact form and let her know!

She does give credit for every photo with a link to the site of your choice and you would have her (and my!) thanks. So you would receive a little publicity and some gratitude for work you’ve already done. Doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to me, and you would be helping artists everywhere get better at working faster. What a way to support your fellow artists! So if you’re a portrait or hand/foot photographer, please please please drop her a quick email and lend a hand.

I know I will be.

(Thank you!)

I’ve decided to participate in NanoWriMo again this year. It’s been a long time, and it’s probably well overdue. I enjoy writing in general, but I seem to have a bad habit of letting Life get in the way. As many of you who know me personally are aware, I often struggle to just keep up with all the art projects I want to do, and writing is at least one notch down the ladder from illustration, so yeah…

The Idea

I’m bending the rules a bit. The idea with Nano is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month’s time. I’m looking to do the same volume of writing, but in a different format – namely blog posts. I’ll be writing blog posts for Dragonbones.net and scheduling them to go out (at most) once per week. I figured that my poor site has been neglected over the years, and it’s time to fix that. I’m using Nano as the incentive to push through and create the posts that I keep meaning to write, but never get round to. I know that I’ve got plenty to share with folks, and it’s time for me to stop finding excuses not to.

The Format

I’m going to be creating posts for Dragonbones and refining those posts later to develop a book. Each post will center on one topic which I hope to cover in sufficient detail so I will have a strong foundation when I start to build out the book. I’ll eventually take what feedback I get from folks (via comments on this site and others) and rewrite (or flesh out) the posts, compile / edit / etc each of them and voila – the greatest art/illustration book ever written.

Ok, maybe not, but I’d like to think that it will at be well worthwhile.

Each of the posts will hover somewhere in the 500 – 1000 word limit. I think that anything less will feel like I haven’t covered the topic du jour well enough, and anything more will feel like I let myself run on.

I’ll cover things like art exercises, tricks of the trade, marketing for artists, and any other elements I can come up with or folks say that they would like to read.

That’s right – I said that I will take feedback – both on individual topics that I write about and on topics that folks would like to know more about. That’s where you come in.

Your Help

I’d loooove to get your thoughts on things. While I will only be releasing roughly 1 post per week on the site, I’ll be talking about new posts I want to do here and on my blog. I could really use your help via that feedback. Go ahead and let me know what you think – about any element of this project.

Think I’m rambling too much? Let me know.

Think I need a more diverse set of topics? Tell me.

Think I should never again put pen to paper? Well… you can tell me that, but I’m probably not likely to take your advice. If you’ve got some valid critiques though – I promise I’ll consider them. I’ll probably even reply.

Which brings up another point – I’m planning on being as interactive as I can be during this little fiesta. I can’t promise I’ll reply to everyone all the time, but I’ll get as close to that as my time will allow.

Well, it’s time to get started. Thanks for checking this out, and I look forward to your input!

In honor of the 4th of July:

Another in my 3 minute portraits series. This one includes Keira Knightly, Steve Buscemi, and Steven Tyler.

Note to self: in order to keep things more simple, and (for lack of a better term) ‘sketchy’ – stay with a smaller brush when sketching things out. Thicker brushes work fine if you’re just trying to block some forms in, but when the ‘finished’ image is going to remain a sketch, a finer brush (as demonstrated by the Keira image) is a must. Too much gets muddied when using a larger brush and moving fast.

A bunch of very quick sketches of random faces/characters that I did just to get warmed up recently. Done entirely digitally, and spent only a couple minutes on each face. I just wanted to get a feel for each of the characters/creatures and then move on to the next. Also played with lighting in a couple of the characters.