Had a little time to kill at work today and I did this little sketch from imagination.  Hope it doesn't show my mood at that time (computer problems, RAID rebuilding).  I had fun playing with the filters.  Just needed to do something fun.

Self Portrait

There is a mirror in front of my computer.  I filled one monitor with red and thought the color on my face was interesting, so I decided to do a little color study of myself.  Maybe I'll use it for my avatar.  You can see I like to work in a dark room.

Jack be Nimble...

This has been on my hard drive for over a year now.  It started out as an art challenge at the place I work -  do something based on the nursery rhyme "Jack be Nimble".  I knew what I wanted to do, but I kept going back and forth about the rabbit.  At one point he was a very large and sinister character, but it didn't fit.  I wanted him to be the turtle's peer, not a villain.  Originally I planned on making it look hyper-real like a 3d render, but my motivation to finish this to that degree after a year's time is gone.  Now I just want to get it out of the way, and move on to some of the images I'm more excited about finishing.  Below is the line art I did.  Hope you enjoy...

Sargent Study

Here's another study I did using Art Rage (really love that program) and Photoshop.  This one turned out to be much more difficult than other master studies I've done.  Sargent makes it look so easy.  His portraits have this naturalness quality that you simply can't achieve unless you really slow down and look very carefully.  Besides the fact that I liked the painting as soon as I saw it, I picked this one because, one - it looked like a simple, fairly monochromatic straight-on portrait, and two - it had a lot of thin areas that I was eager to try and tackle.  Art Rage does the thick, impasto paint pretty well, but the thin areas are hard to mimic.  But boy was I wrong about this being an easy study.

Here is a rather rough progression and a detail.  I started with Art Rage and worked back and forth with Photoshop to get the canvas wash satisfactory.  In hindsight, I should have done the initial sketch and block-in with the darks (stages 1 and 3) more carefully instead of rushing in with the heavy paint thinking I could just fix it all later.  I had to do a lot more correcting of the drawing in the later stages because of that.  Overall this was a humbling experience.  You can see the image I was working from here:  http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2012/01/art-might-online-art-museum.html

And here are some figure drawings from  a week ago.  1 mins, 10mins, and 20 min I think.

LifeDrawings from yesterday + Sketchbook Dump

And here are some life drawings from my sketchbooks - some old, some not so old.  Yes, the first model was nude except for the giraffe hat (complete with spotted pattern). 

sum mo (not Sumo)

In Progress Character Design

I've got a number of personal character concepts in the works right now which I hopefully will be posting soon.  This is one I just recently came back to after putting him aside for a while.  I've noticed that I do better work when I have a chance to take a break from the image for a while (preferably overnight or longer) and then come back to it with fresh eyes.  I don't want to say too much about who he is right now as this is still in the early stages.  You can read his character on the right.  I'm still trying to "dial in" the features until I'm happy with it.