Illustrations/Quick Drawings Update

It's summer time for me and soon junior year will come tumbling in at Ringling College! Since I'm away from my modeling programs for the time being, I've been doing a lot of painting on photoshop! This coming semester will be much more drawing heavy than my pervious modeling intensive year. Thus, I am preparing myself by drawing almost daily. I've made about 8 completed illustrations in these last few weeks as well as a lot of smaller tests and just fun concepts to try! It's really nice to have the room to experiment without having a looming deadline over me. It's really therapeutic and I'm enjoying myself a lot. It's nice to get out of the mindset that I need to be the best, or that I need to be in constant competition with everyone else to even be considered for a future job. I'm learning and have learned so much. It's nice to reflect on all of that. 

So, back to drawing! My favorite tutorials are done by Ahmed Aldoori (I frequently go to this video for initial sketching/linework reference Sketching Faces) and I go to Marc Brunet's channel Cube Brush for all of his awesome tutorials and pointers (Marc Brunet's Channel) PLUS on Cubebrush.com's mailing list you get FREE stuff on Mondays! Whether it's 3D modeling reference packs, texturing brushes, you name it! Free! Photoshop is still fresh to me- only been three years of digital painting on my belt but it's been really great. I'm so grateful that I've been sticking with it. 

Lately, I've been doing a lot of portraits. I've been really focused on painting stylized faces. I've also been painting a lot of fanart which I won't post on here. There has been attempts on environment art and compositional studies as well. Those have always been a weakness of mine. I feel like I've slowly been improving which I'm really excited about! Next I will jump back to more realistic figures and more environment art. 

To show some improvement over this last month, here's a side by side comparison; 

Left was done this evening, 7/6/16--------------Right was done 5/22/16

Already I can see some improvement in form and depth in the paintings. I've always been way too sensitive when it came to contrast so I'm happy that I can see some changes there. Although, I really do like the stylistic choices the right has, the left is much more appealing initially because of the contrast.

For some perspective,...this was done July of last year! Yikes.