In Flight Sketching

I see a lot of sketchers doing the old ‘seat backs and sleeping passenger’ sketch after a long flight. Somehow I’ve never done one of those. I did have a few jpgs of Nerdrum paintings on the iPad – so I did a little in-flight study.

Syn Studio – Fingerpainting Double Pose

Was out tonight at Syn Studio. Anthony had set up a two-model long pose, so I thought, hey, you can’t pass up a double pose. We had a pretty good turn out. It seems like the life drawing sells out every time. Jeevan was there doing some really great charcoal drawing. A few good oil painters. Good group overall.

I’m a little under the weather from a long flight, so I just brought the iPad and chilled out for the 4 hour pose. Finger painting in ProCreate is very relaxing. You just gradually build up shapes. Stacking up layers and dropping them back. If you take your time, it’s possible to get a painterly finish. If you like a smoother painting – don’t judge the software from these. I’m just doing the things I like to do -  you can be very smooth and rendered with ProCreate if you choose to go that route. I like the ink brushes – they almost look like a palette knife painting.

Progress steps, and some details.

Baladi Nadya

Thanks to my friend Chantal, we were invited last night to Tango Libre to see a Soirée de Danse Orientale by Baladi Nadya (et ses élèves). They gave us a great seat right up front so I could sketch the action.

This swirl of silk happened in an flash. Far to fast to draw. But the image stuck in visual memory long enough. Sometimes it’s like that.  You can use that instant impression and bring in details from other poses or combine more than one person. There were six of them spinning and flaring silk cloths. You can wait for the poses to come around again – most types of motion are rhythmic – dance especially.

Drawing dancers is always a pleasure. Sometimes your pen gets in time with the music. Often I’ll start a figure with a gesture, and wait for something exciting to happen. Changing the sketch as needed. It’s not unusual to draw a person with five or six arms. Just choose the best ones to finish in the ink drawing.

I was drawing in pencil, and inking over with dip nibs. I have a few more to try out sometime. There are calligraphy tips that give you double or quintuple lines. Looking forward to seeing what I can do with those.

If you’re interested in a lot of chatting with moi :)

Anthony at Syn Studios has just posted a podcast we did a while back.  Just a big chit-chat about books, comics and a fair bit of video game industry and concept art talk in there. I’m hoping to get out to do some more drawing at Syn this year – perhaps we’re working on a class? Who knows! More on that later :)

Personal Work

Here’s a few things I’ve been working on in “recent” spare moments. I was interested in calming down some of the brushwork I’ve been doing on the ipad. (Tho these are CS5). Keeping the sense of the brush strokes from finger painting – but trying to rein it in towards a more refined illustration. These were a lot of fun. Now someone just needs to write the books they can cover. ~m

Concept Art. Org Interview

I was recently interviewed on Concept Art.org as part of the ramp up to the CAO,org workshop in London (May 31-June3) where I’ll be demoing/lecturing about game design. I thought I’d post (some) of the interview up here. The info might be entertaining for someone.

Interview by Daniel Rizea and Jason Manley for ConceptArt.Org:

Some brush experimenting

When they added larger image sizes to the iPad app ProCreate – it kind of messed with all my brushes. I like to be able to make large sweeping marks that cover a decent amount of page. I had to go back and re-tweak some settings to get brushes big enough for the new retina sizes images. So – here’s some test noodling. As always, I’m trying to get the kind of randomization that makes it interesting working in the no-pressure-finger-painting iPad environment.