As I've mentioned before in this blog painting well defined muscles is kind of time consuming for me and this figure is a perfect example of that. I spent so much time trying to get the muscles right that I neglected the color until the end of my time limit so the color is much weaker than most of my other figures.

A bit of fan art of Supergirl done mostly to experiment with a different way of painting. I was done in about an hour and there are some anatomical issues but I do like how some of the colors turned out so it was an hour well spent.

 While I'm not happy with the face or the hair I think that the rest of the figure is pretty successful. The colors look good and they match the lighting of the photo that I used as reference.

 Kind of went for a Mass Effect & Battlestar Galactica feeling with this sketch. I imagined this character as a fighter pilot who had a kind of Starbuck kind of attitude. I do have an issue with the mouth that I drew here, I think that when I drew this I wasn't really sure what her expression should be so it came out a little wonky.

A female Abe Sapien done because a friend was talking about dressing up as Abe for Halloween or Comicon so I started wondering what a female Abe would look like. Came out pretty good for something that I did while watching TV.

 With another ten minutes I could have really gotten this figure looking really good, but right now it just looks okay. The anatomy is good, the color needs some adjustment but was getting there sadly I reached my time limit before I was able to do any of that.

Another landscape study looking at clouds. I spent an hour on this one and it looks pretty good for such a quick painting. The ground looks a bit too green and needs to be a bit more yellow.

Not thrilled with how the colors turned out in this figure. She's essentially the same color all over which is not how human bodies work, certain areas are darker or redder or some other variation. Leaving aside the color This came out all right.

 I wanted to come up with a cyber punk character and her antagonist so I came up with these two people I never came up with names for either of them but I think that I will eventually. She's a smuggler who I picture having a similar personality as the Flash in the Justice League cartoon, a happy-go-lucky goofball who is actually really smart and good at there job (The Flash was a forensic scientist for anyone who didn't know). Her adversary is just a generic law man at this point but I want to give him a little more life at some point.

Another picture of her from the back and showing off her cybernetic arm which I like better as an obviously artificial limb rather than the life like one I first drew her with. On the side there some logo designs I was doing for my sister.

So after the chaos of the holidays I'm back to my regular schedule and that includes posting here every day. This figure here seems a little thin and while the model was thin I think I pushed it a little to far. Some of the colors are a little off but overall not bad. 

A set of color studies done from from the movie Tangled. Trying to learn more about how color and composition work together.

So I did this meme because a friend of mine pestered me to and I'm glad I did. The last year has been a good one for my art. Doing this has shown me that all the work that I've put into my art this year has paid off and it encourages me to keep pursuing my goal to become a professional artist and if in the next year I improve as much as I have this year I think that I'll get there.

 I really like the way I got the light in this figure, it looks like the sunlight was hitting the figure. I don't have much else to say about this picture.

 I do a lot of fantasy and superhero stuff so I tried to do a more sci-fi kind of sketch. The character is a woman who has been surgically modified to interact with her ship by using her movements. On the side is a picture of her piloting the ship, I tried to go with something unusual and thought that it would be interesting. I pictured her piloting the ship as a cross between the Minority Report computer and ballet, with different poses being different commands. On the bottom I a picture of her ship.

And now back to fantasy stuff. I was hanging out in a bar with my sister and just decided to do some drawing because she was distracted by the football game. Not really happy with the perspective but I had had a couple of drinks and I'm a lightweight so I'm amazed it looks this good at all.

Not happy with the color or the anatomy in this figure. The color is kind of flat and boring and the anatomy is  a bit oddly proportioned in some areas. It's obvious that the coffee hadn't kicked in when I did this one. 

I don't draw or paint a lot of cars because I've never been a car person but it's probably something that I'll have to do when I start working as an Illustrator so I've decided to get some practice now. This took an hour to do and I'm pretty pleased with it. While it is a bit rough I have the major details in there and all the highlights look correct.

 There are some issues here but most of them come from the fact that I only spend half an hour on the final pose. Something about the way that the color came out in this one really puts me off, I can't quite put my finger on it but it just feels a bit off.

The main figure here is Rapunzel from the movie Tangled I just decided to make her a bit more bad ass and give her the sword and the frying pan. I also have some skull studies and other little studies on the side.

 I was working with a friend on a project and had to come up with some Art Nouveau style designs that induced a bird. The figure started off as just a hair study but I kept adding to it until it became a whole figure.

I've been watching the British sit-com Black Books and decided to draw the main cast. I did this on the bus so I didn't have any reference so there faces don't exactly match up to the real cast but still pretty close. 

 This model was very pale and the photographer was using a very cool light and that made her even more pale looking. Needless to say this figure was a bit tricky as far as color went, normally when I paint skin for a Caucasian person I start with a pinkish orange but here that wasn't going to work so I went with a pale purple and that seemed to work out pretty good.

A woman from India from a photo in National Geographic. I would have liked to gotten to more of the details in her clothes but the face was a priority and my time was limited. This took about two hours and I'm happy with the face. Another hour or two and the hands and clothes could have been finished.

Since I've started working a regular job now I'm going to alternate paintings with sketches because now that I have a commute I'll be sketching a lot more.

A rare male figure for me. I think that in the near future I'll just do a bunch of male figures because this one seemed to give me more trouble than it should have. It's not that its a bad painting just really unfinished because I don't draw as many men as I do women so men require more time for me to do.

An alligator or a crocodile I can never remember the difference. This was a quick two hour painting and my goal was to get the texture of his skin across and to get the eye looking just right. I think that it was mostly a success. the skin looks dry and bumpy and the eye looks bright and shiny; it even has a subtle glow to give it a more eerie feeling.

This figure feels a little rushed to me. The colors aren't as accurate as they could be and the blending in most of the figure needs some work, but other than that I like where this was heading and no one part of the figure is more done than the others. Not great but not bad ether.

In the original photo the woman was wearing some sort of mesh top that would have taken forever to do even if I had half assed it so I decided to just make it a sheer black top. I think that It came out pretty good other wise. Not bad for a two hour painting.

 So in the original photo the model had some really crazy hair it was like three different hair styles so I decided to skip that and just paint her bald and I think it kind of works. The pose is simple but I think that the figure looks pretty good.

Another painting of clouds from my landscape book. Another two hours well spent I think.

 This woman's very pale skin gave me a bit of trouble but I think that this figure came out good regardless. Her upper leg, torso and upper arm are the most finished parts of the figure, the rest got a bit neglected but I still think that it looks pretty good.

A two hour portrait of a girl from Afghanistan. I didn't quite get to the hands or the books but the face and arms look pretty good. I need to put more effort into working on the whole painting rather than on just sections to avoid the unevenness that I have here. Other than that slight issue I think that this is a good portrait with a good likeness to the original.

Not really happy with this one, the colors aren't very good and some of the anatomy isn't very strong. Still figuring out how to use color and doing some experimenting with different techniques and this time it didn't work.

A hawk of some kind, I don't remember what kind of hawk it is. I think that this guy came out pretty good. I think that the feathers look particularly good. He took about two hours to finish.

 Still working on my speed while working with color so my figures aren't coming out as finished as I would like. That being said I like how this figure came out for the most part. Some parts like the the abs and the hands need some more work but I think that the rest of the figure is not bad.

Another pin up painting done from a book of pin ups. This took two hours to do and over all I think that for a short study it came out very nice. Her skin and face came out particularly good and I would have liked to have gotten more done on her hands and her clothes but I am trying limit the amount of time I spend on these studies.

 I like the way the abs came out in this figure. The light gave her skin a cool color that I thought looked neat so I wanted to copy it. I think that I was successful in copying the tone even though I wasn't able to finish the face or shoulders.

A two hour painting from a photo, I'm still having trouble working with color but I think that I'm getting better I liked the way the ocean came out in this picture even though its a quick painting.

 Okay this second attempt went much better than my first. The colors are much less muddy this time and the anatomy is better defined. I didn't get to the face because working with color is still kind of tough for me, but overall I like this figure.

A portrait done from a photo I found in a book of National Geographic photos. This photo was taken in Timbuktu. This took two hours to do.

 I have struggled with color for a long time so I've decided to just bite the bullet and start doing everything in color. This is my first attempt to paint a figure in color in a half-hour and I don't really like it. The colors are muddy and nothing is very well defined, the figure has no real life to it, and just ugh. As this is my first attempt to do something like this I wasn't expecting a whole lot and I have gotten better since I painted this (I have a weeks worth of these done ahead of time). As the old saying goes "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".

It's some sort of lizard thing. I'm not quite sure what it is but I liked his scales an he reminded me of of the Ouroboros symbol; it's an ancient symbol that depicts a serpent eating its own tail, the meaning of the symbol changes depending on the culture but most of the time it has to do with a cycle of some kind. This painting took me about two hours and it was a struggle the whole time, I'm not used to drawing animals so this was outside of my comfort zone by a fair margin.

 I like the pose here, it's a very dynamic kind of pose. The drawing itself is pretty rough because I had some trouble getting the pose to look just right and that took up most of my time.

This is a two hour painting done from a book of pin up photography that I have. I've been doing mostly hour long studies for the last couple of months so now I'm trying to do some longer studies. I decided to paint some pin ups to practice poses and skin tone; those are two things that really elude me when I try to draw without a model.

 This figure came out much rougher than usual. It's not entirely bad but there are a lot f things that I would have liked to spend a little more time on, the arms and the face in particular.

I've needed to improve on my landscape painting skill for a while so I decided to just paint a few landscapes. This came from a book I have that's just photos of landscapes; this was in the first part of the book which focused on clouds. I really like the way that the clouds turned out here, some parts don't look as fluffy or soft as I would have liked but the color of the clouds is pretty good. This took two hours.

 While there are some parts of this figure that are unfinished I think that overall this is a good figure. I would have liked to have finished the arms and the face but I ran out of time.

A couple of quick perspective sketches. The second one was done at home on my art desk so it's much cleaner and more finished.

 I'm not sure where this character came from. She some kind of fantasy character and an archer but I don't remember any thing else about her.

Okay I've cleaned out a lot of the old stuff and tomorrow I'll be back to posting paintings.