The usual collection of images from my sketchbook this week, anatomy and facial studies, this week I have also been studying more dynamic poses than the usual glamour photography that I usually work from. Very interesting and usueful to see what the figure looks like when muscles are clenched and the model is exerting physical effort (as in the Stone Nudes studies).
Over on the ConceptArt.org forums there is a thread which has had quite a lot of attention: NIBRU! The perosn who started the thread has a character called Nibru that he asks his friends to draw their own interpretation of. He posted a sketch and a few details of the character on the forum, and asked if anyone would be interested in doing a quick doodle of the character for him.
The response was incredible....
Instead of being met by howls of derision by the ConceptArt community over someone asking for 'free' work, everyone responded positively and posted their own versions of this character. Some were simply doodles, some were more elaborately finished paintings, some were accurate to the character description, some were humourous interpreations. Amongst the people posting their work in this thread were some of the premier concept artists working around the world, students, hobbyists, and even some people who had heard of the thread from Facebook and other places and just wanted to have a turn.
My usual weekly update. This week I have been drawing a lot of faces from the newspapers, trying to work on achieving a likeness. Again, this exercise is underataken with my upcoming comic project in mind, where I will need to maintain consistent distinct likenesses of several different characters across multiple pages.
And as well as the ususal figure studies from Suicide Girls and vasrious other sites on the internet, I have also started to work my way through 'Creative Illustration' by Andrew Loomis. This is a very interesting book that has laready started to effect the way that I approach compostion and design in my artwork, as I beleive is evidencedc in my IF entry this week 'Flying', which I have included my sketchbook work for in this post.
Pencils from photo ref, painted up without ref. I was just doing some sketching from Suicide Girls, and really got into this pose. I decided to splash some colour onto it in potatoshop and got carried away again. I wwas working on multiple layers so did a quick GIF as a sort of steps animation.
This week's entry is an animation, please watch it on the embedded Youtube player below. ;)
...and here's some supplemental material, the images that I used to create the animation.
Click to enlarge
This week for Illustration Friday I took my inspiration from the 1971 Robert Wise movie The Andromeda Strain, based on the novel by Michael Crichton. It's the ultimate movie about Germs, the story concerns a super virus that hitches a ride from outer space to the Earth when it becomes lodged in a satellite that then crashes. A team of world class scientists try to analyse and contain the virus in a state of the art laboratory, but the super virus - code named The Andromeda Strain - defies modern science.
This animation is of when the Andromeda virus reproduces out of control and overwhelms the computer monitoring it, resulting in the computer crashing and displaying ther code '601' to indicate it can't process the deluge of information that it's being fed by the alien virus.
I didnt refer to the original film for refernce when I designed the visual displays, equipment or the lab, but I worked from memory trying to give it the same features but with a darker feel.
Not a huge dump this week. My new shifts leave me with an hour less every morning to work in, and my lunchtimes are occupied with immensely difficult/boring/necessary task of thumbaniling my next comic, so I havent got a great deal to post this week. With any luck I shall soon adapt to my new shift rotation, and will be able to pick up the pace a little in the mornings so I can get through more studies everyday.
Along with the usual poses and figure drawing, I have also included a painted sketch I did last night of myself wearing rubber gloves and breathing through a harmonica. This is something I do from time to time to let off steam. Sorrel and I were both sketching last night when this activity came up in coversation, we both quickly sketched it out as we were speaking. I painted mine and blogged it. I'm surprosed Sorrel can remember this at all- she usually represses the memory of things like this.
