Crimson CHOW Challenge #51 - The Bone Weaver

[TrashPanda]

Lookin good guys!

CBinn, really sweet shape design on the ground elements and clean usage of negative shapes in the comp.


Seeing Rottens sketch gave me a reality check to look up my good ol anatomy book and
some Glenn Villpu lessons. Also thanks for the book/idea recommendation !

Respect to Damien for sticking to traditional media, I just tried to use my ballpoint pen
and had another reality check regarding my sketching quality.
 

Lege no worries, I actually tried to work as much as I can,
but all I sketched looked pretty bad so I didnt want to bother you guys with my shitty art.
Im going to post a update later and will finish this piece, no matter how tired
I feel after coming home from my soulless corporate job.

Also cool idea with the little bone man it kinda reminds of a mtg card/character 
who is called "tiny bones". You can maybe try to play a bit more with the placement 
of the claws from the creature in the back. I attached you a small sketch that maybe
explains it better.

[Damien Levs]

TrashPanda - I really hope you get to finish your ideation. Your first sketch looks amazing. You have such clean lines. 

CBinns - I love that you've gone for a more anthropological animal being. I'm looking forward to seeing your finished image. 

Lege1 - Your values are really pushing this piece now. Are you considering putting some magical effects in there? Like your character is using magic? Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

RottenPocket - What can I say really? Your anatomy is solid! This is looking great!

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Ok, a bit of progress. The left hand page is what I used for warm up, looking at reference and messing around with a bit of costume. The right page is me trying a more defined drawing. I'm literally tracing over the last image I shared, using it as a guide. Much like a new layer in photoshop or something. Hoping to get more of it done tomorrow. 

I may ink it, when it's ready, digitally afterall.

[Damien Levs]

A bit more...legs are really difficult! 3 days left. Planning on finishing the line tomorrow, lighting/shading on Saturday and inking on Sunday. 

[Lege1]

TrashPanda: More often than less reality checks are good, but don't let them hinder your progress, or even worse, discourage you from producing anything at all. Try focusing less on comparing yourself to others and perfectionism as a whole, and just do something that you enjoy. Just letting go and blocking out all the little voices in your head will often let you do some of your best work; there are no art police coming for you if you do something not so great, just maybe a few comments of how you can improve from the great group we have in the forum here. 

That is the way, just do as much and the best you can, nobody could ask or expect anything more of you, and anything is better nothing at all. I understand the souless corporate job and hopefully you can find a way to make that situation better in your life; I have definitely worked my fare share of them along with being un-employed for very long periods of time which is just as miserable and often quite terrifyin, so I do understand, and am sure some of the others do too.

Thank you and I'm glad you liked my idea, and no, I had no idea about that MTG character, but I will check it out now to see what you are talking about. YES! Great idea with the claw just a little too in the foreground for me with what you did there, but I love the over all idea. I have posted my final in the finals thread. Thanks for that input, it defintiely helped jazz up the image some in my strong opinion!

Damien Levs: Thank you and I'm very glad you feel that way about my values, I have battled with values for many, many years, and really try to continue pushing their limits to make my images better. I have posted in the finals thread and yes to the magic for sure man!

Also, your piece is coming along great! It could be the wife of my character =) When all else fails with struggling with things like the legs or anything else, either fall back and try to create or find some reference, or do some studies to better understand what it is you are trying to draw. I'm glad to see you have a plan on how you are managing your time in order to bring this to final. Keep up the great work and definitely consider grounding the character with a little background if only just simply applied.

[Damien Levs]

Lege1 - Thanks. There's so much wrong with it, but, i'm having fun and it's been good to try and push something towards what I'd like to do. I'm learning a lot from this. She'd like a date first. Maybe they'd hit it off?

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A little more tonight. My eyes are getting blurry. I'm hoping I can have this looking more neat when I go in with the ink :/

[Lege1]

Damien Levs:  Really great update and looking very good now that you are getting into it more. This is looking awesome man, and I'm glad you are enjoying and learning throughout the process. Will you be analog inking and then coloring the image digitally, or are you considering just scanning the sketch and going all digital? 

Remember that working digitally is very beneficial when it comes to producing commercial work because of its conservation of time and money compared to working analog, hence why most of the commercial industry works digitally. You still have guys like Alex Ross in the comic industry,  and Jesper Ejsing of the fantasy art realm doing their work traditionally, but those are rare cases in the light of the masses who are employed to work commercially. Analog work is always great for having an original tangible product though, like for doing commission work for collectors, murals, etc.

I took a moment to elaborate more on your sketch and evolve it into a pre-finished image; I left off on final rendering and adjusting any edge control. This image was painted out with a simple soft round to establish the values via multiply layer and then worked into more with a low spaced default chalk brush. There is no masking involved with the image here and I have included a screen shot of the layers palette to show some of the layer options I did use. I hope this can help give you some inspiration and new ideas. Keep up the great work man! 

[Damien Levs]

Lege1 - Wow thanks, man! That actually gives me hope. To be honest I was just going to go with pencils and ink. All traditional. 

I'm really into David Finch at the moment. His pencils are king. I watch his streams while I'm drawing. 

I do mess around on digital sometimes, but I only have a Galaxy tablet with the sketchbook app. My computer died a while ago and I can't afford a new one. I really do miss my Intuos and Corel Painter.

I did take a photograph and try a sketch over in digital.

[Lege1]

Lege1 - Wow thanks, man! That actually gives me hope. To be honest I was just going to go with pencils and ink. All traditional. 

I'm really into David Finch at the moment. His pencils are king. I watch his streams while I'm drawing. 

I do mess around on digital sometimes, but I only have a Galaxy tablet with the sketchbook app. My computer died a while ago and I can't afford a new one. I really do miss my Intuos and Corel Painter.

I did take a photograph and try a sketch over in digital.

Damien Levs: You're welcome and hope is great! You must take the route you feel best for you. David is great, I love watching his stuff, especially on dynamic figure drawing and perspective; his pencils are indeed king. I highly recommend the digital route for more speedy and commercial work; traditional is great if you have the supplies, minimal supplies as you mentioned with the graphite and ink, and time, although some artists can work very time efficiently working traditionally.

Where do you live? I'm curious to know because I have an old desktop tower I'm currently getting rid of. It's an old Dell E520 from years back like the early 2000's, 4gb ram, and a smaller hard drive. I have an extra hard wired keyboard and mouse I can throw in as well, along with a usb wifi catcher so you can have wireless wifi. Just let me know and I can ship that out to you via you pay the shipping cost which I'd have to go to the post office and figure out. If your interested it's all you.

You can get cheap wacom tablets on ebay, to be most budget friendly I would highly recommend the wacom Intous 3 ptz-630 model 6x8" is ideal, all you need is tablet and pen. Extra pen nibs can be purchased for the low at the wacom site and you should be able to download the old driver from there as well for the tablet; you would just need to get an old monitor or tv to use as a monitor and the tablet. Just let me know if you're interested as I literally was just ready to bring the old desktop tower to Best Buy to discard of it, and I can work with you on the rest of the information.

Krita is a good and free painting software a well:
https://krita.org/en/

The new sketch looks cool but what you had cooking up on paper definitely is a lot better in my strong opinion, but you must go with what you feel is best and however you can bring the piece to final by deadline.

[Damien Levs]

Lege1 -  Wow. That's amazing. I'm in the UK, so i'm not sure it would be worth sending depending on where you are in the world. My hardrives and RAM are healthy. So they could work. I have an Intuos 4 Medium from way back when, I just can't use it because my comp is dead. The motherboard took some damp damage from where I stored it when we were moving house. I used to use Corel Painter 12. I love the ink oens on there for drawing. 

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A bit more work on the piece here. Just outlining in copic pen. I think i'm about ready to go in with the brush ink pen. Then i'm going to try and push some lighter shades/values with copic grey markers. I may do a "test" in digital first. 

[Damien Levs]

[Lege1]

Damien Levs: No problem and I'm not sure if it would be worth the send or not. I looked up some general info on shipping from Atlanta GA where I reside over to the U.K. and the info I got was between $100-$300; I wouldn't know exactly unless I box it and take it to the post office which I'm down to do. That is great you have hard drives and tablet already. Yes, Corel Painter is a great program, I had the IX version and loved it. Yes, I recall a lot of great ink brushes on there and I know I liked doing abstract creature shapes and thumbnails with the Sumi Ink brush.

Your piece is coming along really nicely and I really like the comic book style block shading you are doing! Very cool mark making and shape organizing! I see you have some halftones in there as well. In inking you really have the opportunity to sign your work with style via the halftone look etc. The brush pens really do come in handy. That's a great idea to render the piece out with gray copic markers. Yes experiement and explore man, what you have going is looking really good.

[TrashPanda]

I agree Lege all this over thinking can for sure stop the progress in art.
It was in fact one of the main reasons why I quitted through the years.
Im glad you liked the small idea with the comp change for your piece!

Damien you are getting there! With the inked sketch theres more structure going on.
I recently got back into inking too and Im currently studying Sergio Toppis work.
https://www.sessions.edu/notes-on-design...gio-toppi/
He has some neat ideas about how to display creative loose edges and overall texture.

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out a scene in 3d for the character.
I first liked the idea about having old big bones benath a swamp but I couldnt convey the
scale in my 2d sketch.
Thats why I switched plans and created this creature design instead
I tried to have floaty clothing so the smoke out the kettle gets distributed better in the air.
Im gonna try to paint it out and see if it works if not I will go for a inked finish to meet
the deadline.

[Lege1]

Trash Panda: Yes, I'm a big believer in just trying to constantly work on foundational concepts of image making while just letting go to stay productive and do best. It's basically the idea of trying to learn the academic rules so well that you can successfully break them to some extent and actually enjoy the process of image making. It's so sad to see so many visual creatives quit or go on long hiatuses because the overall process and over thinking stresses them out, and yes, thank you again for the comp idea with the creatures front right foot forward, I def decided to go with it.

Sergio Toppi is great, and that is awesome you are studying his work, you will def get some great ideas and possibly learn some cool techniques and composition from his work; I should start looking at his work more myself. What you have going right now is really cool and I love the creature that has been added into the illustration. Definitely looking forward to see how you conclude this indeed.

RottenPocket: I just saw your final in the finals thread and WOW! Looks absolutely awesome! Really great work there and regardless with what you noted in your bottom caption there, it came out really amazing! You continue to be a big inspiration to want to get back to working traditionally, it's just so hard after working digitally for so long; I feel lazy and spoiled in that respect. Great work!

[RottenPocket]

RottenPocket: My first initial reaction to your sketch was being super impressed with the concept alone, and the anatomy and what appears to be either really good traditional drawing on paper, or well done super imposed digital sketch work on paper texture. I really love the over all costume design of your character especially with how you treated the head of the character, the shoulder armor, and the mid-chest jewelry and adornments. Your cleaned up coloring and gray tone flats really have this piece looking fantastic without any shading which is going to make for a very powerful finished image when you do further rendering. I feel this is an important aspect for us all to take note that if the image can look this good at this stage it will only look that much more amazing once the value, and color are added.

Do you add your gray flats in straight away, or proceed directly into doing color flats, duplicating the layer, and then desaturating the original while keeping the duplicate layer as some form of transparent color layer to overlay your base colors over your grayscale work once value entry is complete? I'm just curious as this is something that I have been experimenting with myself and it seems to work rather well. Either way, great work, and sorry about the deadline extension; by the look of your meme you didn't seem to be to happy about it, as my educated guess was that you were probably putting the pedal to the metal to meet the deadline which I understand can be disappointing. Majority seem to have been behind this round so that is what made me pull the trigger in adding the extra weeks time for everyone to sort their druthers and hopefully bring their images to completion.

It is all Digital, using a textured adjustment layer and pencil brushes, I'm getting a good workflow in keeping my sketches looking like sketches. I have tried vectorizing linework but there's not enough life in it for me, and I like leaving evidence of the construction. Being all digital it allows me to manipulate elements more at earlier stages rather than the extensive time and work involved scanning in a finishing sketch then flipping it to see everything wrong with it. 


Some minor references to animal skeletons used, and ignoring their actual sizes. I do feel like I preferred the costume in an earlier stage of the sketch - with fuller shoulder armor and a cape rather than the finished costume. More time and planning next time and I would be able to compare versions instead of steamroll it like I did.

The tones usually go next, and they double as masking for areas, although this time I just applied tone to one layer. Sometimes if you block in general tones of elements, it makes it easier to start to develop the forms without getting muddy. This wasn't the best example, but that's my thinking behind it.

Once there's a good base of tones, I wash in colour, usually a solid base colour than soft brush accent colours. Cooler desaturated shadows, warmer highlights etc. It's a little bit of a cheap and nasty method, but it's kind of offset when there's a big enough sketch foundation. As opposed to people who start with a minimal base, then work predominantly on overpainting.

I had a massive couple of weeks, I though you brought forward the date i.e. made it earlier - which goes to show I would have missed the deadline and had no idea what planet I was on haha - ignore me.

I'm getting big Demon dog energy from ghostbusters on your creature design. Not exact in looks, but can picture it as a big animatronic.





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I would say I have an okay approximation of anatomy. I observe it fairly well, execute it somewhat convincingly and consult references if I'm stuck, but I know there's room for improvement. I'll still take your flattery. I can recommend Patrick Jones and Sarah Simblet as two anatomy perspectives I tend to fall back on. Honestly you just have to keep creating. Learn from your previous works. No one gets good overnight.

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@ Damien I use a Galaxy tab for this one all the way through. ClipStudio has a plan for android devices which if you can spare I think it's like $9USD/month for tablet, is really convenient. 

I also have a large wacom intous 4 sitting in storage. I tried selling it but I feel like it's very Apple-iPad-centric in my town's design circles... Plus I refuse to just give things away without knowing someone's going to actually use it. It's up for grabs. 

I can recommend NUC computers are pretty damn good. I bought a Beast Canyon and customized it for less than $2500AUD. It's been sooo much better than my $4k+ custom/franken-tower. 



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I hope everyone makes the submissions!