Spaaace!

Previously - My thesis work has kept me pretty busy for these past four months. So much so that I've neglected all other studies excluding it. It's taken me roughly a year to finish, due to work getting in the way. With a total length of 65 pages, it's now awaiting review. I hope to have it out of the way by the summer of this year.

This pic was drawn (or micromanaged into life..) with vectors. As previously advertised, it was made with Inkscape. I primarily used the straight-and-bezier-line-tool  (or whatever it's actually called) to draw a lot of the shapes, occasionally cheating by making shapes out of various fonts. A lot of gradients went into this one. I'm worrying that I'm overdoing it with them however, as I'm not too good with subtlety. I used two filters - one on the main ship body and one on the lights attached to it. Filters drastically slow down any operations within Inkscape, so I use them sparingly. The starry background was made in Photoshop, as adding noise is apparently a raster technique. It took me roughly four to six hours to finish. Much of this time was spent fiddling with filters, gradients and such, rather than creating shapes.

Sketch-Stretch 2

An Illustrated Guide to Life

I'd have hoped to have posted this yesterday on May 1st, but I wasn't able to reach the necessary art files. Long story short - It's been a busy time in my life. Rather than explaining the stuff that's been keeping me busy, I'd rather try showing it instead. It is my intention to draw five subjects over five weeks, but let's see how that goes. I tried out the open-source vector illustrator Inkscape during the weekend. What a positive surprise! I was expecting an uphill battle but it was a rather smooth ride instead. I've tried my hand at Adobe Illustrator by way of drawing logos and GUI elements, so I wasn't a complete stranger to the purpose of Inkscape. Perhaps I can post some of the output here once this sketch-stretch is over.

Sketch-Stretch 1

Pulling a fast one

Haven't continued along the angelic-drawing-route at all. Instead, I've updated my profile picture. I'm also going to shamelessly distract everyone with a few cute animal doodles. You should be able to identify a rabbit, a seal, a dog and a cat. I really need to start drawing bigger pictures. I had to enlarge this picture by 20% to make it at least a little bit more readable. I tend to start with really small drawing sizes, like 100 - 200px, when I could easily draw larger pictures and just adjust my brush size accordingly. I guess I subconsciously dislike the notion of having to scroll around the drawing, but that's just an issue I can simply tackle with the all-powerful zoom tool. The animals are drawn to over-emphasize their supposed cuteness, as my more realistic trials would probably yield something horrific as opposed to aww-inspiring ...

Animals 2

Multifaceted

Last post I mentioned something about wanting to draw more faces, so I did! On four different days, I drew a face. What was quite surprising was the progression of time taken on each picture. The first one took about three hours to make, with the rest of the pictures steadily taking less and less time to make. The fourth and final face took  roughly half an hour to finish! The first face is actually fully colored (a fact which I blame the unseemly amount of time taken to finish the damn thing on), but I decided on greyscaling it so that it doesn't pop out. For each picture I drew a quick sketch of the face first, then filled in the blanks, so to speak. Structurally I placed the shape or outline of the face, the facial features and the hair on different layers. Drawing each face was surprisingly enjoyable. As a bonus, I threw in a work-in-progress (well, sort of...) of the next scribble I want to work on.

Faces 3

WIP 1

To Infinity, and Beyond!

Here's a piece I began three or four weeks ago. I've worked on it for a total of three or four days, coming to a total of 6-8 hours worth of artistic effort. It's a reminder for me of why I started doing all this drawing in the first place: to be able to draw awesome mechs and other nifty mechanical contraptions! It's supposed to be a Szlamandra Tactical Armored Gear, from the boardgame Infinity. I've never played the game itself, but I happened to browse through the miniature catalog at one time and the Slamandra TAGs were among the coolest things in there. As for the drawing effort itself, I think I concentrated more on the shadows this time around, as opposed to any fine details.

Mech 1

Interlude

Games and work have been actively and very persuasively keeping me from my artistic efforts.The problem is, that getting better at this sort of thing would require much more... How should I put this... Cannon fodder? I think it's a bit like learning math (for some people, like me for example), that one just has to keep crunching numbers together rather than searching for an quicker way out. I'm clearly not doing this. I tried portraying some basic emotions this time around. Nothing fancy, just line-art with some shadows. I want to do more faces! I should start working on clothes as well.

Emotions 1

Heavy Metal

Here's another piece I started about a week ago and never bothered to finish it in time. It took some 4 to 6 hours to finish, with quite a bit of that time going into fiddling about with the line-art and coloring. I need to optimize those tasks somehow. Paint-bucketing uncolored areas wasn't such a hot idea after all, since it roughens the fill area edges rather crudely. One idea would be to quickly duplicate the line-art layer (or a portion of it), bucket it as normal, then merge it back onto the original line-art layer (or another duplicate) thus preserving the nice, gradual stepping that the lines often have. Anyway, this piece is a fictional WW2-era tank I wanted to try drawing. I drew it completely by hand, not using any line- or shape tools in it.

Vehicles 1