Skulls and Anatomy

I haven't painted much lately so I decided to sit down and paint a couple of funky skulls from life. I will be starting to work on a personal illustration piece soon and I want it to be all done in oil. So I had to pick up the slack and do some practice, even though painting from life is a completely different process than painting an illustration, I still find that doing life studies to be very helpful. Probably will see a bunch more studies in the coming weeks. Also here are some anatomy studies that I have done recently for the anatomy thread I have going on The Illustration Board. Right now I am the only one posting, feel free and participate its always more fun when others do. These studies were traced over from old master drawings out of the Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters.

Remetee

So I have been doing pencil illustrations for the clothing brand Remetee. They make designer clothing, mainly shirts which have a lot of grit to them. This has been a lot of fun for me because I get to draw cool looking skulls. But besides just drawing cool skulls and what not, something that this job has helped me improve upon has been my design skills. There are a lot of ornamental design shapes within the shirts, which is something I normally don't draw or think about. So what I am hoping is that when I go to create a fantasy painting now I will have a better design sense and create more interesting looking armor, props, weapons, etc., but also create a more interesting flow to my compositions. Here are some of their shirts which have my skulls on them, unfortunately I am not allowed to post the actual drawings.

New Figure Drawings

Figure drawings from this last semester. Range from an hour and a half to six hours. The 2nd one down is from a photo from an unknown source.

Influence Map

Here is my influence map. I definitely could have used a bunch more squares, couldnt fit everyone on that I wanted to.

Two New WoW Cards

Here are 2 illustrations I did awhile back for Blizzard on the WoW TCG Icecrown expansion that released today. If you buy the box set and send Blizzard the box code you can get a foil version of the Death Knight that I did. Pretty cool huh.

Portrait Painting

Haven't painted a portrait from life in a few months. Had some help from the lovely Meadow Gist. Check out her work at http://meadowpaint.com/

More Anatomy

I have been doing anatomy studies for some time now. I used to just copy diagrams from Goldfinger, but I found that that only gets you so far, at least for me. Doing diagram studies can be boring and not the most exciting thing. What I have been doing lately have been taking master paintings like Frazetta and Phil Hale and using tracing paper and tracing out the anatomy over their drawings. Now what this does is make me think more about how anatomy works and how they designed it. Also on top of that it makes it more like a puzzle, instead of just mindlessly copying a diagram, I have to figure out where the pieces fit. I have also been using the Figure Drawing Design and Invention book by Michael Hampton. The book goes over more structural aspects of the body with more simplified anatomy. The leg studies I did today I used that book and the Eliot Goldfinger book for added anatomy.

Links:
Goldfinger
Hampton

Anatomy Studies

I started a weekly anatomy study thread on the illustration board for people to participate in, http://www.theillustrationboard.com/index.php?/topic/286-the-weekly-anatomy-learning-thread/. Here are the studies that I have done so far.

Lazy Zoo Day

Some sketches sketches from some sleepy animals at the zoo. There was a monkey inspecting his feces, but he didn't sit still long enough to get a good drawing.