The Glade 4.0

It always takes a while, but you will definitely get better, faster, etc., just like anything else. I have a few drawings I've literally spent dozens of hours on, but that's including photoshop coloring as well. I do have some pencil sketches that I recall being 10+ hours long. The time really flies though when you feel like you're creating art.

I have to say this second shot looks **** fantastic, man. Seriously that's probably better than anything I ever put down on a real piece of paper. I almost want to suggest NOT fixing what you see wrong right now, and encouraging you to draw a second copy after you've finished. Just tell yourself you're Warhol.

Guess what this is turning into right now -_-

I have been working literally non-stop on this drawing from about 11am to (currently) 5:45pm. I have no idea where the time went. Getting close to being done. I'm speeding myself up a little now that I'm done with the face and his right hand. I can be a little less precise with the fabric and it still looks good. I'm pretty stoked about this one. I'm putting (at least for me) an absurd amount of effort/detail into this. I think it's paying off.

Aside: having a decent set of push sticks and tortillons is massively helpful. There are times when it would be really nice to have to a pointed eraser, too. Something akin to the cartridges those old power erasers that draftsmen used back in the hand-drafting days.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Okay, I think I'm done. I might go back in with lighter pencils and add back some fine texture detail that was lost during blending, but otherwise I think I've made this about as good as my present skill will allow.


Big honking 600dpi version (7.75MB)

The actual paper product isn't actually as gritty as shown. My scanner -- well, probably any scanner -- has issues with graphite because of the reflectivity.

Total drawing time: 12-13 hours. It was totally worth it. The face is still too thin but I don't even care at this point. I'm too busy staring at it and thinking, "holy ****. I actually drew that."

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Nice...I like it.

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Raell Kromwell

I forgot that my mother has a semi-professional digital camera. You can't see as much fine detail, but I think it captures the overall character a bit better than the scanner. I have no idea how to work this damn thing, but I at least managed to get it in focus:

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I haven't had much time to draw since the Summer I session started, but yesterday I just got a 10" x 6.25" drawing tablet from Monoprice. It's actually a re-branded UC-Logic HA60S tablet. At least on paper it ought to soundly beat any of the Wacom Bamboo series tablets, and maybe even reasonably compare to the Intuos 4 line...for $50. I was a little dubious, but Ray Frenden's review finally put me over the top.

The hand-eye disconnect is going to take some time to get used to. It's quite different from drawing on paper. And I'm still fumbling around somewhat aimlessly with all the different brush types in MyPaint (an open source program similar to Paint Tools SAI). I don't really know what I'm doing, heh.

Anyway, all I really had time to do yesterday was just get it set up and draw a very simple sphere shading exercise.



It's tilted because I somehow accidentally rotated my view without noticing it early on.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Okay, slowly but surely I'm getting a little better with this thing and with MyPaint.

This is a WIP still-life of one of our coffee mugs. It's one of these if you want to critique my accuracy. I have done any detailing on the table surface yet, obviously. Or really even shading the table, for that matter.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I've finished the coffee mug piece:



That took way longer than it probably should have, but I'm starting to get over the learning curve with this tablet and software.

Woodgrain is an enormous pain in the ***.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

*sigh*

I tried not to do this. I really tried!

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Thats really very impressive improvement stat - amazing.

Hooray for two of my favorite BG ponies!

As an aside, if you haven't listened to the vinyl scratch tapes, you should. So much... wub... for VS and Octy.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I've starting my first "serious" color painting attempt this weekend.

Reference:


Undersketch + palette:


There's a few things I need to tweak, but I think I'm pretty ready to start the actual painting part. I set up this scene deliberately to have a very well-defined palette. The kids' toys and junk that you can see in the window will be omitted :p

I've switched to GIMP Painter + GIMP Paint Studio for this. It was kind of a PITA to get working on Windows, but I think it will be worth it. Together, they really give Photoshop a run for its money where it comes to digital painting.


I haven't, but I may give it a listen while I paint this evening. I'll try to give my Vinyl art some love this weekend, too.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Blocking in color and, in a few places, starting on rough painting:



My hand hurts quite a bit now :/

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I think I've worked on this about as much as I can stand to for one day.

That bird is going to be the death of me.



Disregard the hastiness of the nest. That's just some temporary sketching for a placeholder. I'm not looking forward to all those damn twigs.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Stathol....

That...is awesome!

Wow....Stathol...you are good !!

Please post more

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Dream as if you'll live forever...
...Live as if you'll die tomorrow

Vivere Senza Rimpianti

Unfortunately I haven't had the time/energy to work on this any since the last update. I've got Summer I finals tomorrow, and then about a week off before Summer II starts. I hope to get something done during the break. I may be taking an art course during Summer II, too. I haven't decided. But if I do, that will certainly buy me some (mandatory) art time.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Actually, I take that back a little. I did make a few changes since that version which I had forgotten about:



Color corrections, woodwork, lamp texturing, and I revised the cage topper and barrel a bit. I need to do some perspective fixing on that window sill

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I uh...finally finished this.



Wat.

Don't judge me.

Ginormous PNG version

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Oh christ

It's well done!

And now, the real reason Stathol decided to dust off his pencils is revealed. For great ponies!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

There is a certain amount of truth to this >_>

Updated version. I had to make one last tweak. I don't know what was going on with the perspective on the head end of the cello case bottom.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

So...MLPDS had a request weekend a couple weeks ago to celebrate 3k subscribers. I couldn't help myself. I had to fill at least a few requests.


On the plus side, it finally forced me to set up a dA account. So if you want to watch me post ponies:

http://ponytron5000.deviantart.com/

As for the requests, I drew:

Vinyl shoving headphones on Octavia
Twilight doing science
Fluttershy as a hippie

I also uploaded a crapton of sketches I did a few weeks prior to that.

I haven't drawn all that much since then. I've got one minor work in progress, and I sketched this yesterday for some goofy reason. (<3 Derpy)

... I have lost control of my life.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I haven't done any art in forever. When in doubt, draw ponies, says I.

I decided to partake in this weeks theme for /r/mlpdrawingschool - "Pets of Ponyville". I drew Applejack and Winona :3


(Click for big DA version & download)

Color is haaaaaarrrrrd! Holy ****, it's hard. I pushed myself into using a near-complementary palette as a challenge to learn how to do color better and to be less conservative about it. Making them integrate took a lot of work, but I think it paid off. At least so far, the consensus seems to be that it fairly well succeeded at that part.

My secondary focus was making better, more visible marks. I took the linear, swooping patter in the grass and tried to carry it into everything else - the clouds, the fence, the shading on Applejack and Winona. I don't know if it worked, but it's at least more interesting than what I usually do.

Compositionally....eh. I'm still not very good at that. Opinions (including my own) have been a mix of "needs work" and "just okay".

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I really like her mane!

/tease

J/K mano, that's fabulous!

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Holy shitsnacks!