Art Blocks for Ghana LA Event

In a couple of weeks I'll be heading to Los Angeles for the preview fundraiser event for Art Blocks for Ghana. It happens March 12th and should be a beautiful and fun show. Try to make it if you can!

Saturday Painting

Did a bit of painting at the life session this morning, then came home and tried to apply some of that lesson into a kitty messing around with a robber for my little brother's b-day. The older he gets the older I feel. ;_;

5x5

wood panel and acrylics

25 min Zbrush Head

Just a bit of exercise this evening. The video is in real time, so it's pretty boring. Sculpting from a sphere I used clay tubes, rake, h-polish, and falloff sharp mainly. You can see how awkward I am with manipulating objects using scale and move. I need to get more comfortable with those.

This year's sketchbook is now on sale!

Rawr! Tres is my third sketchbook. It's 243 pages of sketches drawn during 2010.

Please check it out on Lulu.com

Also, I will be at table L-09 at the Emerald City Comicon selling copies of Rawr! Tres as well as the few remaining copies of last years Rawr! Dos.Come by and I'll draw you some kind of critter!

Productive weekend!

I did my first round of life painting ever. It's time to learn about color and stop faking it. 

These were done in acrylics. When I'm comfortable enough I hope to move into other mediums, probably watercolor, but I keep hearing that oils are the business. I'm so scared of oil paint though...

Also, I finished my first sketchbook of the year today. That means 200 pages since November 22nd. I really hope to keep up this kind of pace and not burn out. Not long ago at all I'd have been lucky to complete half a sketchbook in a year.

I'm bent on getting better at what little it seems I do know, and begin practicing on everything I don't know or have backed away from. Anyway, I've been pretty fired up lately and feeling super crazy.

The little creatures to the left of the last page were fun to design today.

The large one is the female. The little male is part of a group of females. He cares for a nest of undeveloped pups, feeding them, moistening them, monitoring their temperature, etc. The pups look like mustached salamanders. The females have large fatty tail-like back sides which secrete a nutritious "dew". The male feeds off this dew and also feeds the pups with it. He gathers the dew with a brush pallet, a set of bristles protruding from the lips.  Females have a more robust brush pallet which they use to browse a mix of foliage and small animals from rocky surfaces. The back of the male is underdeveloped compared to the females, but the bristles are able to fold up and down, this is a visual signal and also aids in dispersing scent.

Buy Matt Barrett's Book!

If you like machines, or creature designs, or dinosaurs, or architecture, or landscapes, or anything interesting at all, then you NEED this sketchbook.Throwing the word genius out there might do Matt justice.

I copied this off his blog.

"The new book is done! I've placed my order and it's now in Lulu's hands, but I think I got this fired off earlier than last year so I'm confident I'll have my stock in time for Emerald City Comic Con. At the show, I'll be in the lobe of Artist's Alley immediately to the left as you enter the door (I'll have the actual table number ready on Monday) Go see the sales page now, though, right here if you don't want my germs on it."


Also check out his blog! http://mattpostsarthere.blogspot.com/

dragon and some female head sketches

I've been flipping through a lot of Adam Hughes, Mucha, and Chris Sanders artwork trying to learn how to draw cute girls recently. In these cases what I like is the elegance of the design. Clear, effective, and what I consider deceptively simple. 

I still have a real hang up about directly copying images by other artists, even for educational purposes. I feel odd duplicating existing ideas directly. Even though it could help me grow, I feel hesitation there, because a repeated idea doesn't inherently seem like growth. It's not just a repeated idea though, it's vocabulary. The more visual words you know the better you can express with your tools. Imagine refusing to read existing words because they've been created already. It seems a little similar to me, if extreme.

I am trying to learn not to isolate my internal vocabulary from new ideas.