Illustration Friday: MAGNIFY

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Original scan, click to enlarge

I didnt want to do anything that involved a magnifying glass, so I was trying to think of other things that could be magnified. I wa thinking about doing a Cyriak style infinte zoom aimation of something, but I wanted to do a more detailed painting than you can have in an animation. So I did something rather obvious and hardly related to the word at all, an appaling abuse of Illustrtaion Friday to exploit it into just drawin some tough bastard punching another tough bastard's head off.

As it is, I have numerous anatomical issues with this character, the tonal range is a little bit shallow (not enough darker tones worked into the shadows) and the face is a mish-mash (but then again, he is a boxer so maybe I could pretend that's characterisation and not just shoddy painting).

I promise to try harder in the future ;)

More Painting practice

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This was a speedy painting that I did yesterday from a picture from Suicide Girls.

This Week's Life Drawings

Didnt get as mych done this week as I have in previous weeks. That is because I have a finite (and soon to decrease) amount of time to work before I have to go to my job, and I have been doing more painting and more gesture drawings (as you saw in the previous Uber-scan). It's still fun to get stuck into a longer observational drawing.

Poses/Gesture Drawings Uber-Scan

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My favourite part of the week, uploading a massive compilation of the gesture drawings I have done before work . As ever, these simple gesture drawings are from photo ref from the newspapers, Suicide Girls and bits and bobs around the net. As a means of expanding my general drawing vocabularly and making my sketch book a more diverse place to visit, I intned to start loitering in public places doing some surreptitious sketches of people in cafes/pubs etc

HAIRBOT pt2

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The second part of the HairBot illo I did as a quick study for how to paint hair. The result - I need to look at greter detail in my life studies at the way hair lies on heads, and the way that it clumps together into sections. At the moment, the hair looks very synthetic like a wig, the smooth /flat way that it hangs down. I need to try and builf more shape into the hair, by studying real hair.

When I realised how little visual vocabulary I had to describe hair I stopped working, but I was quite pleased with the custom brush I was using to paint the hair and the subtle highlighting I had achieved.

More studies to follow....! ;)

NOTHING TO FEAR available via Amazon NOW!

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Available now from Amazon.com!

Tell your friends! ;)

HAIR BOT pt1

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A WIP for a practice painting hair, of all things for a robot to have (!) I have been reading a lot about paiting hair, and I wanted to try and do some studies. For this, I doodled a quick 'blank' bust, that I slowly and inexorably doodled into a robot. I quickly rendered it today and am gonna spend a coupla hours tomorrow trying to give it a bit of a barnet. Will post the finished study asap.

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This is a pen doodle that I painted in photoshop. I doodled the whole pose, but when I painted it I focused on the area I cropped.

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Once again, another group of longer studies, maybe 20-30 minutes on each one. I have very loose criteria for selecting which poses I'll spend a longer length of time on than others. Usually they're an unusual pose or the lighting on a particular body part makes for a particularly sculptural form. This is one of the advantages of Suicide Girls' photosets-- unlike other fashion/glamour magazines/websites, the models on SG are decidedly alternative and so there is very little by way of airbrushing going on. A lot of the girls are shown warts, lumps n bumps n all.

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Slightly longer studies, each drawing taking maybe 20-30mins.