Another one I'm quite happy with...maybe I'm actually making progress? *grin*

It's Stump

Recommend looking at it full size.

Night City

Quite pleased with how this one turned out.

Time: approx. 90 mins

Yosemite

Just a quick sketch, haven't really felt the creature urge to paint for a while, but today I wanted to do something, so I re-created a photo I found on google images. (This means I didn't paint over the photo, I just used it as a reference)

Yorkshire Moor

I got the idea for this one going to bed last night, and I worked on it off and on all day today..well, ok, when my school wasn't freaking out about the guy killing himself next door with poison gas (ah, another day in Japan!)

Anyway, I really like how the lava turned out, but I'm less happy with the city. *sigh* I feel like I've learned how to get to a certain point, but I don't know what to do after that to make it good...so I feel like I'm one step up from a 5 year old with crayons, but hey, I guess I've fought for that step ;>

Lava Lake City

Complete with flying saucers ;)

I find large buildings in the background really hard to make 3D looking...practice practice practice!

Warfields of Mars

Shadowmoor Swamp

(source idea was one of the new Shadowmoor MtG swamp lands, although I didn't even try to copy it directly.)

Haven't done much in color/on the computer in the last week, so I figured I'd try doing something today.

Blasted Field

So in a fit of productivity today, I sketched out 22 thumbnails in pencil. Even more impressive, I scanned in 18 of them! Well, ok, it was only 5 pages, with multiples on each page, but still.

Rather than subject you to that many links, here's the root page, and you can look at them if you want to.

Pencil Quick Sketches

I did a couple of paintings/sketches in Shanghai, but was prevented from posting them by the Great Firewall of China. Today I'm doing a *bunch* (like 14 so far) of pencil sketches, but I hate scanning, so I doubt you'll ever see them ;)

Pencil is so easy to play with compared to digital. I don't know why, but it's a lot easier to get good results, at least for me. Nothing like a 6B ;)

Anyway, here are links some of the recent stuff:

Witnessing Doom Playing around with paper textures to achieve a more dynamic look.

Lightning Storm More papers.

Pine Forest Quite happy with this one :)

The Wall Not as happy with this one, playing with textures and perspective.

Birch Tree An attempt to capture the same sort of energy I'm getting in pencil on the computer.

If you made it through all of them, thank you very much :)

Didn't like the depth on the first forest picture, so I did a different one. Still trying to get the hang of Painter. Right now I'm using it and PS almost in tandem. Things like clouds and fog I can get down in PS easier, and PS seems much better for global color changing...but the watercolors and chalk brushes in Painter are da bomb ;)

Forest Stream

Having a ton of fun figuring out Corel Painter X :)

City Streets

It's been almost 2 weeks since I've posted a picture. Here's something quick I did this morning, mostly in Corel Painter X, with a bit of work in Photoshop.

It needs more depth.

I have to laugh though, I have been downloading old rpgs from the early 80s, and this would have fit right in for the art of those books at the time. Clearly the industry has come a long way ;)

Forest Walk

Man, I really do have problems rendering out lighting. It's easy to manipulate shadows if they already exist, but creating them whole-cloth is a pain in the ass.

Desert City

I wanted to practice on my brush strokes, and to try and illustrate something without drawing every itsy-bitsy little detail. I settled upon an MTG Land by John Avon to basically copy as painting practice. Quite happy with how it turned out :)

Avon Fields

Nothing creepier than an abandoned amusement park.

The Dragon's Graveyard

Valley of Pillars

Loosely based on an MTG land card. Mostly just screwing around and playing with lighting effects. I'm not really good at drawing/painting light, my pictures tend to wind up pretty flat....so practice it is!

Can't decide if I like this one or not...

Swampland

Trying to not get trapped into just doing landscapes, because I really need to practice figures as well. I played around this evening with these two robots - this is really just a concept piece, I was trying to get their forms to "read" well, 'cause that's the part that frustrates and scares me. Detail is (relatively) easy, but making a humanoid look right I find quite difficult.

I kinda "cheated" a bit on these, I rendered out two guys in Poser and then used them for initial blocking of shape, but then I warped, cut and painted on top to create something quite different from the original.

Robot Studies