Introducing Laurie Thomas

Hey everyone, Name's Laurie aka Cetriya. I"m a junior at Ringling school of art as an illustration major, visual development minor. Funny thing is that I'm really interested in making comics and creating work for licensing.

So not so much into editorial or concept art for realistic fantasy/ sci fi games. Since I'm doing the later so much in school, I hope to work on what I'd really love to do. I haven't done a comic in a while and already I'm forgetting about the rules of panel layout.

 The area I mostly want to improve is composition and characters. To be specific, I would like to try new layouts for paneling and composing illustrations. I want to broaden my range for expressing character through poses and gestures.

 Of course there's the things that we all want to work on, anatomy, perspective, lighting.... Anyway, Here's to all of us and our journey!

Another introduction - Sam Hogg

Hi there, my name is Sam Hogg. I'm currently a professional concept artist, working for Jagex on the Transformers IP, though my first love is fantasy art. I work in pretty much any medium going aside from pastels and markers, and enjoy a healthy balance between traditional and digital. My job means I draw for pretty much at least 8 hours a day during the week, and I'm always looking to do more in my spare time. Having burnt myself out doing 2 high profile concept jobs a couple of years ago though, I also appreciate the time to be able to relax and enjoy things like movies and games.

My main reasons for wanting to improve are the constant pressure I feel being in an industry where the young and talented are always on the rise, and seem to be even more multi-talented than ever. So while I think my technical level is now pretty high, I also want to be sure I'm producing the best work I can, and not just getting lazy with what I'm comfortable with.

So, here's my overview of things I'd like to get better at. Currently I'm not sure exactly how I'll be improving these, so I'll probably go back and amend as I go.

ANATOMY:
The problem:  The everlasting study. Can never know enough and work currently isn't working that part of my knowledge hard enough.
   · Do more copies from Michael Hampton's brilliant anatomy book. Try to learn the names of key muscles properly so it sticks in my head better

POSES:
The problem: Default to standing or calm poses. Always from straight on, and never suggest movement.
   · Gestures  -  do a good number of sheets of simple gestures. Work on different types of gesture. Standing, calm, more action based, more with pushed proportions.

EXPRESSIONS:
The problem: Tendancy to always default to a calm or sad expression.
   · Do sheets of both gesture and more in depth expressions
   · Study muscles of the face and how they affect expression.

COMPOSITION:
The problem: Tendancy to think of everything as a flat 2d surface. Over complicate things. Don't use visual rythym enough.
· Work on simple thumbnail sketches - gestures for composition essentially. DO some with line and some with just flat colours
· Break down my existing artworks into simple shapes and values.Try to figure out what the key things that work and don't work are.
· Simplify -  I'm already aware that I have a tendency to over complicate things thinking more = better.
· Camera angles. Look at films, try things other than head on viewpoints.

COLOUR & VALUE:
The problem: A natural inclination towards over saturated colours and not working with enough hue shifts.
· Figure out colour by doing more photo and life studies. Work out how much light affects colour's saturation, hue and value.
· Work with more desaturated palettes.
· Work with limited palettes. Learn the terms for various colour combos.
· Practice using more subtle turns of hue and saturation
· Study master paintings. Artists like Bougereau, Leyendecker and Sargeant.
· Do some concept art studies - looking at how other artists in my field control their colors and value.

LIGHT:
The problem: Not enough knowledge of how more dramatic light works. Defaulting to a more matted light set up with rim lights.
· practice small compositions with more dramatic lighting
· Do photo studies for cast shadows.
· Do a few pages of simple 3d shapes lit in different ways.

Nicole Cadet's foray into art improvements

Hi, I'm Nicole Cadet (sometimes known as nixjim13) and I'm a part-time fantasy artist (the rest of the time I'm a computer programmer). I mostly work in the private commissions arena, doing RPG character portraits, and the occasional book cover, but I love painting fantasy, goddesses, fairies, mermaids, sci-fi, myths and legends, and elves (I got hooked on painting more 'manly' elves, if that is possible, a few years ago as a laugh :) )

Anyway, I'd like to push my skills towards more RPG game card art and cover art, but also take a step back and pull out my watercolours and acrylic paints (as I've mostly been doing digital paintings for the last few years)

My goals are relatively fluid at the moment

• improving narratives/ storytelling through character and composition
• improving my composition skills (in general, might look at Loomis as a starting point)
• trying to get more dynamics into my paintings (dynamic poses, interesting POV)
• improving my values (so they aren't so flat, stuff like chiaroscuro and the likes)
• simplify my colour palettes

Exercises (this is going to sound like a menagerie as I want to push my subject matters)

• participate in sketchfest regularly (to keep the traditional drawing skills fresh & try new things)
• learn to draw horses (so I can go to unicorns and pegasus)
• gryphons
• dragons ... of all kinds, and more than just a head!
• paint a cartoon character in the style of a realistic painter (like the Disney princesses exercises that happened a few years ago)
• sci-fi ships/ concept art / character concepts - like you see in game art concept books
• more character concepts - different types of ethnicities, races, roles etc

Likely I'll be inspired by other people's posts ... I like joining in on the fun :) But Sketchfest tomorrow!

Maria Arnt Introduction

Hey, I'm a friend of Angela's and I've worked with her before (she was actually my instructor for a one-on-one multimedia class). I'm looking to improve my art so I can feel comfortable finishing my thesis for my MFA.

I think my main area of focus is going to be non-figural, although I'll probably do some figure work too. If you look at my dA gallery http://mariaarnt.deviantart.com/gallery/ it's almost exclusively figures. I get a little lost when I try to create settings, and it shows.

For right now I'm just going to try other people's challenges, but if I come up with something, I'll be sure to post it here!

The QR's Ambitious Art Advancement Adventure

Hulloo! I’m Christine (Cris) Griffin—damn you, Family Guy, I was here first—and I’ve been a freelance artist for far longer than I care to admit. You may have seen me floating around the internet under the handle 'Quickreaver.' I haven’t made the progress I crave, for a couple of reasons: ambition (or lack thereof) and motivation/direction. I’m hoping to remedy this, starting NOW.

To date, I’ve been mostly doing digital book covers and private portrait commissions. They’re not exactly filling my creative niche anymore, though financially they’re lovely! What I really want to start doing is my own original properties in the form of full-length genre novels and graphic novels. Right now, I’m kinda fixated on the fandom circling around the TV show Supernatural, so I will likely use it as a point of inspiration for these studies until I reach a certain saturation level. ;) So I apologize in advance for the probable preponderance of All Things Winchester in these exercises. I figure it’s not a bad way to utilize fanart for fun and growth, and will certainly keep me inspired while I try to wrangle my shortcomings into submission. I’ll likely mention my literary exploits too, but to a lesser degree.

My formal training is in traditional painting, but my desire is to become a stronger draftsman, mark-maker and cartoonist. I want to better my grasp of anatomy and perspective, as well as pictorial narrative…quite the opposite of what I did all those years in art school. I’m pretty much starting from scratch, so bear with me!

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of The Paper Wings Podcast, hosted by the smart, funny and talented team of Chris Oatley and Lora Innes. I highly recommend them and their podcast, regardless of where you are in your artistic development.

So, now it begins! My list of potential explorations (borrowing from Angela):

Anatomy:
-gesture drawing, action and different POVs
-proportions and body types
-egads, hands and feet!

Composition:
-multi-fig scenes
-varying POV
-SETTING
-visual flow (laying out a page)


Character Design:
-exploring personal style
-mark-making and drawing/cartooning
-visual short-handing and consistancy
-expressions

So if any of you animation students have advice, lay it on me! I don’t intend to explore animation, per se, but storyboarding is on my list of jobs to look at in the future…

Wish me luck, babies!

Angela's Art Wish List

My name is Angela Sasser and I consider myself to be a fantasy artist.  My favorite topics are myths, fairy tales, gods, goddesses, elves, rogues, and warriors, among other things.  My ultimate career goal is to end up as an illustrator for card art, rpg books, and book covers.  I would love to get involved in doing character and concept art for video games as well!

I am a traditionally trained painter with a classical education a la 'paint your feelings on canvas', but that path never suited me.  Too in love with Elves!♥  I'm currently trying to expand beyond my watercolor and ink roots into digital painting and it's been a tough road for me. I would ultimately like to be able to create digital paintings that replicate the energy of my traditional paintings.

Here are the list of the things I wish to improve on with a few of the areas I'm hoping to challenge myself with.  I still need to think of some specific exercises to do with some of these.  I'll be adding more as I think of them and will keep this list here for my own benefit.

Anatomy:
Draw 100 Hands and Feet
Draw 100 Torsos
Draw 100 Mancrotches
Various Expressions
Various Ethnicities

Composition:
Group of people
Action scene
Book cover

Concept Art:
Storyboarding - Favorite Scene from a Book

Character Design:
Fashion templates
100 Faces
Orthographic Sheets

Environments:
Narrative locales from a favorite book

Color Theory:
Limited palette
Accent color

Coty: My challenge list

Hi there! I am Constanza Ehrenhaus, known online also as Faerywitch. I recently posted in my blog that I was challenging myself to grow as an artist and posted a list of things to study and paint. Angela here saw that list and kindly invited me to join her community blog (yay!)
I have already been asked if it is OK to repeat the exercises in this list, and my answer is "Please do! I would love to see your journey too!" So let me share with you my list:

Palettes:
Monochrome

Limited
(Circe)
Complementary
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
Split complementary
Analogous
Multicolor
Warm
Cold

Why? Because I feel that my coloring could use improving!

Composition:
Pyramidal
Spiral
Big group of people
Architecture
one point perspective
two points perspective

Why? Because my compositions are quite the same, and it's boring.


I decided to keep my submission for the Enchanted Visions Project: Circe, very muted and limited. I chose an earthy palette because I wanted to keep an “ancient” look, and I used a roman inspired frame. Also, I wanted to practice fur, which didn’t come out as good as I wanted, but it is a good first attempt
It was challenging, I hated it for most of the process but towards the end it started to come together. I do like the final look, with the frame in place and the wrinkled texture.

 Feel free to critique this piece!  :)