I finished the online digital painting course!!!

 AAAUUUGGHH!!!

I did it! I finally finished "Becoming a Better Artist", an online course that used to be run out of CG Workshops.

It took me a while, but holy cow it was worth it. It was the most informative and challenging art course I've ever done, covering all the technical aspects of composition, colour, lighting and textures (plus a lot of other stuff). The teacher, Rob Chang, is a super awesome dude who continued to give feedback to his students long after the course was over. Thank you so much, Rob.

I do still need to practise some things, but I know what I need to practise and how. I feel like I'm at the threshold again, ready to embark on a new adventure. I pushed aside my other projects to focus on this course, and now that it's done, I can focus my efforts elsewhere.

Anyhoooo, behold my final picture: two awkward monsters on a first date that is going horribly wrong.

More digital texture painting

I spent quite a bit of time practising texture painting. Here are the other two pics I was working on: a husky (for fur practice) and a cliff by the sea (for clouds, rock texture, and ocean).

The cliff was especially challenging. It looked finished to me, and then I came back to it a few weeks later and saw everything that was wrong with it.

At some point you have to call it 'finished' and move on. So, here's the husky (reference on the left) and the cliff by the sea (reference at the top, my work below).

Digital Painting Practice

I've been working on my digital painting techniques. It's amazing how you can read a lot of theory, and understand how everything works, and then not be able to actually apply it. The only way to close this frustrating gap between understanding and applying techniques is to practise, and that is a very slow and arduous process.

But, I'm getting there, and I'm happy with the results. There are two examples below, with the reference picture on the top and my work underneath.

I used Photoshop for the forest as I'm more familiar with that program and building brushes, and I used Clip Studio Paint for the chicken picture. I really like Clip Studio Paint; it has a stabiliser and excellent blending tools.

 

 I did some more fan art! This one is the knight called Perrane in his beast form, from the awesome webcomic The Forgotten Order.

As usual, I am a sucker for shapeshifters.

I did another fan art for the podcast, Hello from the Magic Tavern. Or rather, for one of their spin-off podcasts which is called "Earth Games", where the fantasy characters in a fantasy world play games from Earth.

In one episode, they played the New Yorker Cartoon Caption game. They described each cartoon on the podcast, and joked that "listeners should draw the cartoons and send them in to us" and so I thought I would do that.

But, because I am a smart arse, I thought I'd draw ALL of the cartoons in one picture, and include the fantasy podcast characters.

If this makes no sense, then please just enjoy these pretty colours.

I put down the graphic novel so I could concentrate fully on writing my fantasy novel (I thought I could work on two major projects at the same time, but I just couldn't). I wanted to keep my art going so I did some fan art.

I really enjoy listening to the fantasy comedy podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern, so here is Chunt the shapeshifter, who (for magical reasons) once turned into a seahorse with badger colours.

I listen to a LOT of podcasts and music when I'm doing art!

(I realise now that I did this piece three whole months ago. Oh boy, time flies on lockdown.)

Pencilling the new graphic novel!

I spent last year writing (short stories and a novel) so I've only recently returned to my next graphic novel, "Rumours of Wolves".

Here's the first page: layout sketch on the left, and pencils on the right.



This page was a horror to figure out, as it's an establishing shot and there was so much information I wanted to get in there. I used Maya to lay out the building, horses and people. 3D is more accurate, but my original rough felt more organic. I like to find a balance between "technically correct" and "looks nice", so when I do the inking, I'll freehand it over the 3D lines to get some wibble in there.

For the last graphic novel, I pencilled on paper and then scanned it, did corrections, then inked digitally. This time, I'm drawing it all digitally---all on Photoshop so far, but I want to move to Clip Studio Paint as it has some really nice comics-specific features.

My awesome friend Grace Crowley who does the webcomic Magellan gives me feedback on my pencilled pages, and she suggested adding horse poop on the ground for realism. (Okay, technically she didn't say that the horses had to be in the process of pooping, but I couldn't help myself.)