d r a g o n b o n e s    

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.

I’ll be at Dr. Sketchy’s this Saturday for the ‘Tribute to Mad Men’. Let’s see: Dames, Drawing, and Drinking. Ummm… yes please. Anyone else coming out?

Check out more details on the Branch Blog.

synDCon

I will be attending synDCon on the morning of Saturday 4/2/2011 and will be stationed at the NevermetPress table. If you’re in the DC area, come on out and say hello!

This will be the first gaming con I ever attended, and the first of any kind of con that I attended as a ‘vendor’ (sorta), so to any/all of you pros out there – feel free to give me any tips and or tricks that you think would serve me well.

I’ll look forward to seeing you there!

Edited To Add: Super Lame Heroes

Over at his blog, Parka has started a new contest. It’s all about creating heroes with lame (but still supernatural) powers. I love the idea, and I think that I’m going to enter. That’s where you guys, my faithful minions, come in. I have a little bit of time before the contest deadline, so I thought I would pose the question to all of you – what lame (super) power do you folks think would qualify as the funniest? Leave me a note in the comments below. If I select your suggestion and we win, I’ll give you your choice – an original character portrait, or I’ll paypal you $20. (The winners of his contest get a book valued up to $40.)

Open Figure Drawing Studio – Wilmington DE

I have to say that I am beyond thrilled to report that the Delaware Art Museum is having Open Figure Drawing Studio time every 1st and 3rd Monday evenings of each month. Find more information on their website (scroll down – it’s under the ‘drawing and painting’ subsection.

I’ve only been to two sessions, but I’m really looking forward to number 3, and I feel like I can see a marked improvement just since the first session. It’s long past time I got back to the basics. I have a feeling this will greatly improve my work overall.

If you’re in the area, and like to draw figurative work, I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Aviary

So the combination of images above (sorry about the crappy camera phone ‘scans’) was assembled in Aviary in my Chrome browser session. I’m always interested in checking out new technologies – especially when it comes to digital art, and that’s what Aviary provides: free, comprehensive creative tools – all right in your browser. There’s an app for it in the Chrome App Store, and  I have to say that it works pretty well. There’s some bugs to be worked out, and this is clearly a ‘young’ product, but the potential of this thing is amazing.

I use Google Docs pretty much exclusively for my personal document editing, and the idea that there will soon be a creative suite to match it is just awesome! You can bet I’ll be watching this one closely.