Skuntch needs some love

So I'll do my best.

I had the opportunity to go to a 'Comic Camp' in October and study under Svetlana Chmakova. There were two other groups studying uner Paul Pope and Craig Thompson as well.

To say the least, it was a life changing experience.

So ever since I've been sketching up a storm and working on confident line. ( And comic submissions)
Other wise, I'm still Freelancing like mad.
So here's a sampling:

Hope all is well with you guys!
~Angi

July 2010 Life Drawing part 1

Here is a sampling of life drawing from earlier this month. These are 3 - 10 min drawings except for the first which was a couple of hours. Conte crayon on newsprint. I kinda butchered the top one when I started drawing over it with white Conte. I should have left well enough alone. Ah well...:)

More to come later this month...

Ship poster - old concept

Another non-figure study. I did this quite awhile ago, a concept poster for a small television production company wanting to pitch a Discovery-style series. I personally don't like Prismacolor as a serious medium, and I think this was the only thing I ever did using colored pencils. The irony is it was such a good show concept, another company 'borrowed' the whole thing. The research was fun. This was also before the digital age had matured, so I'm toying with taking it into Painter and giving it more punch, especially the water.

Figure Update

This looks like a figure work blog lately! Lots of nice stuff all around though.

Here are a few of my recent digital figure works.  I feel as if i'm getting better about making conscious pallete decisions and enhancing what I see rather than just being 100% representative.  I still think i've got a lot of work to do on my edges, and I really need to focus on tightening things only where they need to be tightened.

Gotta Have a Hook Challenge

Hi all, ol' Duder's got a lot of irons in the fire. Recently I've been participating in an open art challenge put on by WotC art director Jon Schindehette on his blog Art Order. It's been a lot of hard work and a lot of fun. Here is the assignment brief:

Description

Setting - A cavern

Characters - A Male Dwarf Fighter and a Hook Horror

Scene - The dwarf has just delivered a mighty smack to the hook horror and knocked it backward through a stalagmite and/or stalactite.

Details: The dwarf is wearing heavy scale mail armor. Wielding a warhammer and a heavy shield.

These are the thumbnails I started with: I chose number 3 as it felt the most dynamic and engaging to me: 

Here is the B/W drawing and value study that will serve as the foundation to the final painting:

 Next will be the final color phase coming up in the next couple of weeks.

 

Life Drawing - Gesture Drawing

Who would've thought the Maryland/DC area had quite a thriving art community? I suppose it makes sense when one thinks about it for a minute. I'd never given much thought to Maryland until the weird idea of moving here reared it's head my way. Anyway, that said I'm making it a point to go to life drawing every week these days. Not only is it refreshing, it's *vital* if one is going to continue progressing to the next level. Montgomery College in Rockville has a great community of artists and models that meet on the weekends to do Short and Long pose drawing/painting sessions. I'm sticking to Gesture drawing right now to loosen up. I look forward to becoming more involved in the coming months. Here are some highlights from June 2010. These are all roughly 5-15 min Gesture drawings. Sorry about the poor image quality. I have no lighting rig or image stabilization available to me in the foreseeable future.

Lunchtime sketches

Hey all. Here a few from the past year. Most are before I started concentrating on stronger musculature and a bolder variation of line, but since they're only practice here they are. All are 1-2 hour sessions, with the exception of the fifth, which was a 3-minute quickie.

Concept Crash

A concept piece I did using ArtRage3 based on a rough sketch. Scout cruiser brought down on some distant planet, with a faint nod to Peter Elson's work.

I took it further than I should, but fortunately ArtRage is horrible at blending, so it provides a natural stopping point. Not happy about the background, but first time in ArtRage, so there was a bit of a learning curve as to what it can do well. Now that I have Painter, I may revisit it at some future point. Anyway, comments are always appreciated. Cheers!

Lunchtime at Disney

Here at Disney we have long pose and short pose classes over a two hour lunch, so I spend those days drawing at eat lunch at my desk later. We used to have 5 classes a week, the other three being sculpting, costume and another uninstructed life. I miss the costume - we'd have a theme and soundtrack to go with the session.

I felt it's about time I start contributing to the 'skuntchings', so here's my first offer. There's about a dozen things I could tweak, but hey, that's the 'never-satisfied-artist' gene talking.

Moby Dick pt1

I'm going to attempt a WIP series on my blog that will hopefully keep me motivated to see it through to completion. I've been reading Moby Dick recently which has inspired about a 1000 different illustration ideas so I'm going to try a couple of them. My goal will be to post stages of progress which may last months given my schedule:) Starting here are some very rough thumbnails of scenes in my head while reading along. The tail fluke idea comes from the part of the book when they've gotten surrounded by a huge pod of sperm whales in the south Asiatic Sea. A ring of whales has surrounded mothers and calves who swim just below their tiny boat regarding them with (slightly curious) indifference. The visual effect in my mind is a slithering mass of (what must seem like to the whalers) eyes, flukes, and teeth just below the surface.

I also have the ubiquitous White Whale jumping out of the tumultuous sea with Ahab's boat in the foreground which is always fun. As you can see I've thrown in some steep high waves to create a sense of even more peril. The other one I really like is a top down view again of Ahab's boat cutting across MD as his pectoral fin is cutting through the water towards Ahabs boat. Seeing this one through I think will be a challenge and could be a strong yet subtle piece. We'll see:)

My immediate goals are to do some very strong refined drawings using models and props with anything I can make, beg, borrow, or steal. Stay tuned...

Sunday Life Drawing May 2, 2010

Maria Garcia. Learned a lot on this one. I'm not at all happy with my proportions or edge quality however I did come away with some insight on how to approach next time around. There's a few nice things happening on her head. I hope I get the chance to draw her again as I definitely only caught a glimmer of her essence this time around.

More old cartoony stuff... Part 3

Here's a few more for good measure. The little boy drawing was done by Rafael Colonzo. I swiped it and threw it in for scale. Again all from around the same time frame of 2007-ish.

Beach adventure layout...


Snabbit Factory...


Some sort of pickup item. I forget what it was now...

More old cartoony stuff... Part 2

Here comes some more from around the same time period around 2007-2008. A few environments plus a chibi-ish character. This could've been a really cool game but alas it wasn't in the cards. Such is the fate of many a game project the public rarely sees.

More old cartoony stuff... Part 1

Rummaging around I unearthed some unpublished stuff from years ago for various project pitches. These were all fun and very challenging. Some of them have that Golden Books feel which I never even realized until my AD at the time pointed it out. Amazing what our minds will pull from when asked to step out of our creative comfort zones. Anyway I'll post some more soon. Hope you enjoy my little strolls down memory lane until I can show new stuff:)

Sunday Life Drawing April 18th

Here's the result of a whole lot of measuring and remeasuring and then more measuring. I used the corners of the room as perspective guides which was quite useful for keeping my proportions in check and perspective true. I'll worry about making these pretty later. For now I'm interested in accuracy.

18x24 Newsprint and vine charcoal.

a doodle that sprouted into a painting, i eventually want to get a fair amount of detail in there and do a larger format print with it (its currently about 8k pixels wide)