#170

#169

finally finding time to climb back aboard the Dungeons & Drawings horse. yee haw! this one is fun to draw. I had to resort to a bit of quick 3d to get the sword in his left hand looking right but i'm pretty fond of everything else, dont thing the shapes are too boring etc.

#167

some rough / cleaned up animation I worked on this weekend. I modelled and animated the pretty basic 3d in the background, too. probably gonna move the dude in the bottom left or the face on the ramp, feels like it's a bit of a weird composition at the moment. still a few things to tweak but i'm happy with the bulk of it.

 sorry about the huge gifs.

#165

trying to loooooooooooooooosen up. last three omnipathy issues I didn't really care about character design that much (except for maybe the one with the aliens) so I actually want these guys to be good. main goal of issue #4 is to fucking RELAX though. everything i draw is laboured over and doctored and fiddled with (especially if I use a computer). secondary goal is just to use a computer as little as possible. I was at the Birmingham MCM expo this weekend and I saw a lot of awesome things people can do without being a wuss and burying themselves in photoshop.

DONT WORRY THOUGH the  covers will still be big pretty digital paintings paintings. people seem to like them and I do too.

#162

i like the head shapes on these guys

#158

Today I was reminded that I haven't posted anything here in a while so I figured I'd go ahead and put up some stuff I've wanted to for a while.

I've been going to a free life drawing session on Brick Lane on and off for the past couple of months with my friend Ben. It's super informal, very cramped (it takes place inside this hipster cafe) with no tutorial, just the cold hard problem of sitting in front of a naked person and trying to draw them. The atmosphere is nice, though, and they serve some nice cakes and play fun music. These drawings are roughly chronological, I talk about what I think of people's bodies in there so I guess if the thought of that is unpleasant then don't read the text.

 On the right is a quick warmup drawing of Ben before the session starts. On the left are some doodles of a friend's D&D character. There was a girl that we drew this session but my drawings of her are so bad I don't want to post them.

I've seen this guy twice now. He had a look to him that made me think he was a model (like, the photographic kind). He's kind of fun to draw, he's skinny but when he tenses up you can see he has a lot of definition on his torso.

This is another guy. His body was less modelly and he wore glasses which I guess was sort of funny. I was talking to someone and apparently he just does the same 3 poses over and over, which I noticed the next time I saw him. He didn't have a lot of expression in his face, which is something I like with a model.

I got told by a lecturer at uni that crosshatching was an illegitimate form of shading. I can sort of see why someone would think that but it was still a stupid thing to say.

first guy again. These were the only okay drawings I did this session, mostly because I like the way the chair and the hands look.

These are from last night. We usually go on tuesdays but broke our pattern and went on the alternate saturday session. Our adventurousness paid off and we drew a new model. I really enjoyed drawing her - one of my big problems is that I'm too up-tight in how I draw and she had a really relaxed, curvy figure which was conducive to me loosening up with the pencil a bit.

Plus I just need to draw more women in general, I've never ever been good at it. The above drawings were all really quick, like 2 mins or less. They're lazy but I like them because they capture the approximate feel of how she was standing.

There's a thing that happens with fleshy thighs where if the leg presses against something it sort of spreads out really broad - she had that with a couple of poses, the thigh would just take up like a third of the image.



these were the last two I did and I'm pretty happy with them. The pose is captured ok (the hand on the right was a bit rushed) but I got her expression down which is always the best.

anyway, I'll be doing more so I'll either charge up a bunch like this or post them bit by bit.

#154

spent today drawing robots

#153

so I did hourlies this year. they are terrible but it was fun to do shitty short autobio again, it was just like being at uni. i actually like all the different ways i drew my face here. PART 2 COMING SOON

#145

sketch of Lash from Advance Wars. my brother had a copy of this at home which I borrowed for the train back to London. I don't wanna sound all JonTron but it's literally my favourite fucking game ever... the mechanics are crisp as heck, the character design is exactly what I like. There's a couple of things I like about this drawing but I want to push it further for the final thing.

#132

link

#128

I can't really say I have a consistent method for making comics yet but here are some pages showing a sort of process. Right now I'm laying out text first (trying to do this as early as possible so it doesn't end up looking tacked-on), then I rough out all the art in B&W linework before blocking out colours and lastly adding details and adjustment layers.

In addition to this I did two drafts of the text in a word document beforehand, pretty much wrote it once and then rewrote it with quite a different story and tone. I've never done this before, but with the first story was floating around in my head for ages and it felt like it was trying to talk about too many unrelated things at once, so I wasn't really happy with it. When I wrote it down I still wasn't happy with it, but the process of writing it down (aided by a helpful lightbulb moment I had when I went out on an impromptu walk) sort of dislodged all the elements in my brain and I knew exactly what I wanted to change, so I just spent a few more days and rewrote it entirely. I have a hard time with character design so I end up spreading it uncomfortably across the whole thing (with OMNIPATHY #2 I finished designing the lead character as I was drawing it).

I think the process of colouring and detailing is laborious and a lot of my favourite artists favour something that looks more rough and ready, a bit more immediate. With OMNIPATHY #4 I'm gonna try something like that.

#120

#119

dungeons and drawings stuff

#117

doodling for my next biggish project. trying to draw girls not looking retarded, mostly succeeding. really need to get some good reference for suits of armour, though. quite happy with the colour comp panels.

#116

Dungeons & Drawings has a slight makeover today! I've recently started posting there again as a regular contributor so I fixed up some of the text and redid the logo. Really weird that we started that blog over two years ago now. I feel like I've improved a bit since then but I spaz about so much stylistically that I probably haven't focused on any one specific element of my art enough to improve it.

Although, that said, my first D&D illustrations - the Roc, Rast and Necronaut - are all actually lined manually with the bezier curve tool (not even in illustrator - I would actually manually draw the outline of each line) because I'm  a huge control freak and didn't trust myself to line things well drawing them by hand. I think I'm much better at that now. Plus the digital painterly style I've tried to use in today's illustration was completely alien to me a year or so ago so I feel good about that. I don't really know what I'm doing artistically overall but I do feel like I'm stumbling in a beneficial direction.

#114

#112

orc gods woooo

too busy right now but I'll fix it.

#49

sketch of a work in progress. sorry for the lack of posts! I worked for two weeks at cartoon network on a pilot and shameful as it is to admit, it was probably the hardest I've ever worked in my life. I was a little tired afterwards. Back to schedule.

#30

Haha! you thought you would get actual art out of me. this is some preliminary stage of what I eventually imagine this weekend's Dungeons & Drawings entry might be (I'm in the priviledged position of being the able to do the new year one on sunday). I'm sure it will look ok in the end.