Brief update

Alright, haven't done much art at all recently but I'm making this post in an effort to guilt trip myself to do some. Luckily for me several glitches in Skyrim have given me ideas for some comics, so we'll see how those work out. Got some sketches going already, it's just a matter of scanning them and doing some work on them...

Almost there

It's the home stretch now. Mostly it's just the background, and maybe a few small things here and there. Should finish it tonight or tomorrow.

Progress2

I was going to post this last night, but I ended up falling asleep.

Forgot to resize the link watermark but whatever. The gold doesn't look so flat anymore, but I need to go over the chains and add a couple links at the back of the neck and have it actually attach to the pendant. And do the gem in the pendant. After that it's just details and a background and I'm done :D

And I finally got my third pyro milestone in TF2, so I'll be much less tempted to play that instead of doing art >3

Progress!

Dragon's mostly done, now it's just the jewelry. The shiny, gold jewelry... and the shiny gemstones.

I'm going to redo the spine sheaths again, since I still don't like their shading. Same with the gold pendant. And of course the gems. Plus fixing details like the nostril and eyelids and such. The main thing left, though, is the chain. I tried multiple times to get it with rectangular links and it just wasn't working, so next up are round links that overlap. What's there is 5 seconds to get an idea about it, and it looks better. Whether it will still look good after I put time into it remains to be seen, however.

Quick update

Figured I might as well post what I managed to get done since my earlier post, since I won't be working on it any more tonight and I don't know what, if anything, I'll get done on it tomorrow or the next few days.

It's coming along nicely, even if I keep wandering onto the internet every 10-20 minutes >_>;;

Not sure if I'm looking forward to or dreading the shiny jewelry.

Yay tutorial vids.

I'm so bad at actually finishing anything... Started working on yet another piece =_=;;;

Earlier I ended up watching several tutorials on ctrl+Paint and wanted to try out some of what I learned on a new piece. So far so good, and without a crazy number of layers or an embarrassing amount of time spent! Of course I have work the next three days, so I don't know if/when I'll finish this. It never fails that I'm most motivated to do art just before I won't have the time or energy left to work on anything XP

But I definitely recommend checking that site out. Lots of helpful pointers and info there. And did you know Photoshop has a transform selection tool?! How was today the first I've heard of such a thing? I can not wait until I get a chance to use it 8D;;

Now leaving the pony tangent..

So, yeah. I haven't posted anything recently because I ended up drawing pony fanart due to Equestria Daily's artist training grounds. That and I needed a break from what I was doing, things came up at work, and some laziness tossed in for good measure.

But some good things did come out of it in that I've gotten a better hang of my tablet and can work faster now... when I don't get distracted -_-;;

Anyway, I'm still not ready to go back to what I've posted previously, so I'm completely redoing a previous WIP. I posted it on my DA account (though I did a fair bit more work on it after that post), but I just didn't like how things were turning out.

This is what I have now:

Foliage beast WIP-2: Success!

A-ha! After a few days of trial, error, hunting, and shrubbery, I finally managed to find part of a tutorial that actually helped with making leaves.

So here's the latest WIP sporting revamped foliage:

Still not quite done with the leaves, but I think it's a definite improvement over what I had.

Hopefully now I'll stop dreaming of leaves and partially waking up thinking how to do them >_>;;

Foliage beast WIP-1

Just got an Intuos4 yesterday and went with one of the previous sketches to use as practice. I definitely feel more loose and relaxed now that I don't have a cramped work area, and can work at a faster pace. It hasn't helped me with my shrubbery, though >.>

And I do know I need to up the contrast in a number of spots. When I was working on it it looked fine, but now I can definitely see how flat it is.

Er...

Well, things didn't turn out quite how I had planned, but I finally have sketches to post albeit a couple weeks later than intended.

Nothing too exciting here -- just some crappy random doodles.

More work doodles, but this time not quite so crappy. I may even fix these up and make proper drawings out of 'em.

 
I don't normally sketch or doodle in pen, but I had left my pencil at home so it was either use a pen or be bored for 20 minutes. I chose the former as I had also left my MP3 player at home >_>;;

But I'm starting to like the permanence of it. It sucks to screw up or change my mind about something, but because of that I need to think harder about just where to put lines. The only bad thing is that my last Micron is running low on ink so I'm going to have to do a pen run sooner rather than later now.

Side note to self: buy a dang notepad with plain paper in it!

A Start?

This may or may not end up being a simple impulse to make a sketch blog. I rather doubt many would/will bother to read it because frankly, I'm not that good. I'm not an up and coming artist, I don't have mad skillz or the charisma to draw people in -- I'm just an amateur artist still deciding whether art should be a hobby or something more.

But! I still want to get better, and hence the blog. I have the nasty habit of procrastination and getting distracted by a small thing known as the internet. I just can't seem to shake either of them, but this is where this blog comes in. I figure that maybe, just maybe, if I have a place to post crappy sketches, practice drawings, and WIPs then I might be more inclined to focus on art instead of browsing the internet aimlessly.

Only time will tell if this will work, but here's to hoping.

Cheers!
- Zephire