Team Donatello

Here is a personal piece that I worked on during a couple weeks that I took off work. I wanted to stay sharp, and also I wanted to play with my new copy of Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro! Below is the finished piece and some work-in-progress stages.

Final. Light and dark tones added. The dark tones I added by painting different shades at full opacity. After doing so I realized that, even though this is something I'm doing for fun, I would have preferred to use just black on a semi-transparent layer. That's exactly what I did for the highlights (not using black, though... naturally) and I enjoyed that much more than hand-picking several different shades.

WIP #4. Base. I put down a base coat for all of the colours that I would work with. I put all of the base colours on one layer; since this was a personal project I didn't want to have to navigate through several different layers. Not if I didn't have to. The paint splotch however was its own layer. I used one of the pre-made brush designs as a starting point, but scaling it up this far made it extremely blurry, so I painted over most of it and just had fun designing an energetic splat!

WIP #3. Line Weight. After putting down all of the clean up lines, I went through and added more weight to some carefully selected areas.

WIP #2. Clean-up. After I was happy with the semi-rough I proceeded to create a clean version on a new layer. Looks like I jumped ahead and began adding some heavier lines before remembering to save a new version.

WIP #1. Semi Rough. After scanning the rough draft from my sketchbook I did a lot of plussing and re-constructing on a new layer inside Sketchbook.

Rough Draft. After a couple pages of brainstorming, this idea appealed to me with its energy and simplicity of design.

Ink And Watercolour Tones

Experimenting at home with my Pentel brush pen and a water brush, adding dimension to some sketches that I did while riding in transit.

~Chris

Transit Gestures

Having fun applying some wisdom gained from attending the Gesture Drawing Workshop with Louis Gonzales. What a great time that was, and what a blast this page was to draw!

~Chris

When Boredom Is Fruitful

Posing Exercise #1

I wanted to practice conveying weight in this pose because I hate seeing poses that lack any sense of gravity and balance and I want to make damn sure that they aren't creeping into my work. This is the Sergio character from Strut Your Reel, I just made some small adjustments somewhere along the way but all copyrights to their respective owners.

I hadn't touched this character in some time but a friend of mine was asking me some questions about the rig which forced me to open it up and poke around. I think I'm going to animate something with this character because I remember really enjoying the rig in the past. But that's going to have to come at another time as I have some other, more pressing fish to fry at the present moment. I have some action analysis notes to post, as well as the current Work In Progress that the aforementioned action analysis has spawned. Not to mention the ongoing search for work. Hoo-ray.

~Chris