Daily Animal Sketch – Bears and Wolves in Motion

Quick gesture sketches from the last few months. Polar bears, grizzly bears, and wolves.

 

Speedpaint 28 - Thanksgiving Charly

Another Christmas present. This one's for Charly's owner. :D

Photoshop CS3, about 1 hour 10 minutes.

Charly the Shih Tzu was also the subject of my very first speed painting attempt earlier in the year.

Speedpaint 27 - Thanksgiving Tiki

This is a painting of my parent's cat, Tiki. Like the last picture I posted, this is also going to be a Christmas gift. I got caught up in the details and ended up spending about two and half hours on it (I broke my own speedpaint rule of "Work at 50% and never zoom in", so it's super detailed even at 200% zoom).

In case any one is wondering, I should clarify that these paintings are done primarily for practice. I haven't lost my mind or given up comics or completely overhauled my art style or anything like that. Just trying to challenge myself and pick up some new techniques to use in the future on actual work.

For the past couple months, I've been focusing very intensely on a new graphic novel pitch. I've put a great deal of work into it so far: research, detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis, in-depth character descriptions and histories, mountains of sketches, and character designs. Thing is, that's all behind-the-scenes stuff that I can't share. I have one more chapter to go on the synopsis, and the ending has been set since almost the beginning, so it's just a matter of fleshing out the final part. Then I can move onto scripting and storyboarding the first chapter. This new story is something I've been thinking of since last year, so it's really exciting to see it all coming together. I should have a lot more to show in the upcoming months. :)

Speedpaint 24 - Tiger

For this speedpaint, I tried a different approach. As always, I work from back to front, blocking in the background before moving onto the figure. The difference is that this time, I started with the lightest colors and built up to the darkest shades (sort of like using watercolors), whereas in previous pieces, I started with my darkest colors first, and worked up to my lightest colors. As a result, the finished piece has a slightly more pastel color palette.

Photoshop CS3, 45 minutes.

Speedpaint 23 - Komodo Dragon

Finding a method for quickly painting reptilian scales proved difficult, so this is yesterday and today's speed paint. I did the background and basic body structure on the Komodo dragon yesterday, and then some retouching and scale texture today. I believe in total it took about an hour and a half. I'm not quite satisfied with the results, but that's not the point of these exercises. It's to expose myself to new challenges.

I think I'm in a rut with the greens and browns. I'll try to work some different colors into the next one.

From the Sketchbook - studies of polar bears and beetles

The polar bear studies are based upon photos I took at the New York Central Park zoo, with the exception of Knut, the famous polar bear from Germany -- too irresistibly cute not to draw. :)



The beetle studies were done for one of the Domo manga chapters in which Domo catches himself a kabuto mushi, aka a Rhinoceros beetle. They're popular in Japan and sometimes used in fighting tournaments. Before I could "toonify" the beetle's design, I made sure to do a number of drawings of the actual insect so that I better understood what I was drawing.



The final design ended up being just a tad different than the sketches here. See if you can tell the difference when the book comes out!