Super Haitus Over!

I realize that my blog has gone unattended for more than a month. :/

This is largely due to a class trip to Amsterdam, a lack of good drawings to upload and my dissatisfaction with my artwork in general. I've been in quite a large rut lately (artistically), and this has discouraged me from producing worthwhile drawings or even feeling like writing on the blog. Luckily Amsterdam cheered me up and now I have a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with some friends to look forward to - which means that digital works of that nature will probably become commonplace on this blog.

Today I'm gonna start with my new character for the Forgotten Realms campaign we are starting tomorrow: Feki Quartzbeard.

He's a Dwarven cleric! A classic class-race combo. This portrait and the following image are some of my first solo exploits in Photoshop, so I'm fairly proud of them. Getting to grips with colour and light (issues that are not too important to our particular discipline of figure drawing) is exciting and challenging. :)

And that's it for now I'm afraid. :P I am working a lot more digitally lately, and soon I will be putting together my portfolio, so things should heat up then. In the meantime, I'll be working my way through the last few weeks of TDA.

Cheers!

Pencil Croquis Sketches

I have this habit of forgetting to update for quite a while, but when I do there is so much to post!

Hence my second update of the day, this time some of my preferred croquis sketches from last month. These were done with a soft-ish pencil. I've had to run them all through photoshop, since they are too soft on the scanner. Sadly that means some of them are rather dark and the lovely cream of the paper is now just a grey. Still; drawings!

I think it's important to mention that these are very short drawings: between 30 seconds and 2 minutes usually. The longest pose here is five minutes. Enjoy!

Golden Oldies

The last week has been extremely busy for me, needless to say I am sorry for the lack of updates. :P I have plans to photo all of my long studies this weekend with a fellow classmate - so those are on their way. In the meantime I thought I'd upload a few of my really old images in a kind of retrospective from the beginning of TDA.

This was one of the first drawings I remember doing at TDA. It has nothing to do with classical figure drawing, but it's fun to look back at. Note that I couldn't even draw a full, standing figure at this point. Those were the days.

This is the earliest surviving croquis I have from TDA. It's from the end of my first week there. I think we can agree I've come a ways since then.

A seemingly complex object like the foot becomes charmingly simple once you know enough about the bones. This is an old short study I did way back when. After this, I could draw feet.

This is the first long study I ever did at TDA. It's 45 minutes of OUTLINE. Once again, incredible to look back and see how far I've come in the 9 or so months since.

And last but not least, a small colour character drawing I did while I was training with Glen Vilppu. Unlike the earlier drawings, this is more just for fun. :)

I'll be uploading some croquis drawings over the next few days. Mads Peter had us working with pastel for the whole week, so I have some unique studies to show you.

Until next time. :)

Pastel Croquis Sketches

These are some short sketches using pastel that I made at the beginning of the semester. Soft black pastel and cheap paper were involved. ;)

Also included is this little snippet of a morning we spent framing the model and drawing her with abstract shapes, so we could better understand composition and form. As you can see, in these sketches I had problems framing the model correctly the first time, but I still find the drawings charmingly abstract.

Until next time! :)

And that's all for today.

Seeing as I have a huge backlog of work to upload, I think I will stagger the releases a little so I don't overload the front page with new work! Tomorrow I will add some more, and hopefully by the end of the weekend I will  have started uploading long studies. Until then, enjoy!

Pen Sketches And Glenn Vilppu Drawings

While the model is supposed to be the primary focus during our bi-weekly croquis sessions, after a while one also finds that you are stuck in a room full of interesting people who are sitting very still and staring intently in one direction. Ultimately this leads to a lot of portraits and small sketches of the other artists as they go about their business. I have a few portraits I did in pen last week:

Last semester at TDA we had the honour of studying under Glenn Vilppu for a brief period - who is a famous figure artist amongst our circles. I had the chance of experimenting with many media and I still consider many of the drawings I did under his tutelage to be my best. 

Some of my favourite croquis drawing to this day.

Coffee is an excellent tool for drawing. As an art school, there
are cold mugs of it everywhere, and all one needs is a brush!

Although the anatomy is questionable on this image, I am quite
fond of the mixed media.

Glenn was very fond of bringing forms down to their absolute
basics. Strangely enough, these really work.

Yes! There is still more!

Cheers!

Charcoal Croquis Drawings

Finally, I have some stuff ready to put up. :) 

These are some of my favourite charcoal croquis drawings from the second semester of TDA (I have none surviving from the first, as even when fixed they tend to leave a lot of residue on my other drawings). Enjoy!

I tried organizing them all fancy on the page (composition is a key part of our training here), but it's an absolute nightmare trying to move images around on what is basically a word document, so instead you get a long, single feed.

I really love the dynamism here. 

More to come later today!

Høgni Pub Sketches

These are my sketches from the Høgni Pub poster that made the cut. Lasse and I did quite a few more characters but in the end not all of them were needed.