A break

Been some time since I posted a random drawing. -_- I've been busy with studying and some house-guests. Also, my internet connection has turned bad like some fruit. :/ I'll be back on track soon.

On a different topic, my friend Rashi C. has made a tutorial for digital painting in Photoshop on her blog. ^_^ She's pretty good and definitely knows more than me about this stuff. Have fun and don't forget to thank her if you find it helpful. :P

Fail and learn

The reason I started Headshots Week is because some of my friends thought my shading style was boring. :| I like the old-school 2D shading with only a few tones and I usually use shadow work just like that. For example:

 

This is typical to the shading style I use. I could have worked harder on his hair, I guess. Anyway, so when my friends said I need to try my hand at soft shading, I started coloring headshots for practice and I was able to come up with some good results:

 

 

I tried varying the amount of soft shading I used with the extent of cell-shading. So in every picture here, we have two elements - one is the soft indiscernible shading done with a powdery sort of dry brush set at low opacity and the other is a smoother, defined ink that contours the shapes.

If you look closely at the purple drawing, you'll see that i used more definition and more softness. I don't like the result. 

In the green one, I used very little of both and I liked how it turned out but I wasn't sure I could use it often. For example, if I colour a comic with this method, there will be scenarios where the drawing needs more definition and this light look won't do. 

In the blue drawing, I used high softness and low definition. It kinda worked and I think it works best when working in dark tones. 

In the orange drawing, I used high definition and less softness. I think I like it because it makes the subject very clearly outlined but also manages to make it closer to reality (less cell-shaded, i guess).

But then these are my opinions. Maybe if my friends looked at it, they'd argue a different way. In any case, I got carried away with all the soft shading and I thought 'Hey, I should try to make a painting taking a photograph as reference and see how close I can get to it.' So I found this picture on the internet.

 
The reasons I chose this picture were : ONE, the limited color palette; TWO, the high contrast which makes her look almost plastic; THREE, some challenging parts like the sleeves and the hair.

Maybe I should have chosen an even less complex picture. Maybe something like this would have been better for a first attempt:

Maybe next time. :) Anyway, what I'm going to say is, I failed quite terribly. But once again I learned a lot. For one, I know I don't do enough paint-work. My deviantart account hardly has any drawings, mainly because I don't have paintings to post and I think its a waste to put sketches there (unless they're like WOW). Secondly, with this exercise I was able to test my ability to start with a definite idea and be able to stick to it till the end. I'd give myself a ... 40%? x_x Bleh, nepotism. Without blabbering on for any longer, here's the painting:

You don't even need to place them together. :P Its obvious. Sorry for the long post.
 

Trying out my new PS CS5 :D

Goodbye baby goodbye

It has been some time since I seriously colored a drawing and put it up here, my fault. I've been listening to K-Pop a lot this month (last month I was listening to Arabic Pop) and when I was coloring this sketch MissA's Goodbye Baby was playing in the background. So I ended up calling this blogpost by the same name. ^_^

I was pretty rough with the drawing. :/ But I like how it turned out because lately I haven't had much faith in my ability to draw. :D More coming!

I think of love sometimes

I'll have one for myself one day.^_^

Queen Land

I've been trying to organize myself better while I color my drawings in PS. the arrangement of layers, etc. In that process, I ended up coloring two queens that I had sketched. Here they are:

The first queen is styled after the Mughal rulers of India (mostly based on a film I saw over the weekend). The second was inspired by the Ottoman way of dressing brides. I had no reference picture for an Ottoman queen, somehow. The comparison helped me see how different cultures interpret beauty. Whereas the Turkish style is bold on the colors and the use of jewellery, the Mughals were much more subtle and gave attention to detail, you could say. I had a lot of fun making this.

Lighting practice

I've been absent

on blogger, because it was too slow. Couldn't upload images. Here are the things I've been doing.

Inspiration: The Kathak dance.

I don't even know where I'm going with this now

But I'll keep moving. ^_^

Have had some days off so I made these:

First time I ever colored water. :)

Something for Valentine's Day.

So I'm watching this new series called Young Justice which is awesome. Its a little like ATLA as far as animation's concerned. Kinda inspired me. ^_^

Long time again

I had exams again. But I think I'm free now. 

Anyway, I'm still trying to warm up to drawing and coloring once again. While I struggle with this phase, here's what I tried doing and kinda failed.

 And I'm reading the Spenser detective series by Robert B Parker. He describes his characters in such an interesting way that I wanted to draw them. So below is Bradford W Forbes, his first ever client. This is from The Godwulf Manuscript.

 

I liked it sketchy. So I didn't clean it. :D

After a long time

Hey! Its been a while. I had a test. I had to study.

Sob story over, lets move on to what I drew today! I discovered this Harvey James blog post about 'Pick a Cat-Draw a Girl'. So I picked one and drew. :D

Have a nice day. And vote for me whenever you get the chance to. =D

Bush Dai-Dai

So this week's challenge at alphabeastiary.blogspot.com is the Bush Dai-Dai. She's a succubus that seduces its victims and shape-shifts to a jaguar/bat/wolf to attack. She's usually found in the jungles of the Caribbean, her origin. She has been cited in African legends, etc.

In my opinion, playing the way succubi usually do, a Bush Dai-Dai would probably appear as a hapless maiden whose father/husband/brother has been attacked by a jaguar and who lost her way in the jungle. Thats what I'm trying to portray below. She is the kind of monster that has to carry its other skin with it after it takes it off. So there.

I'm not participating in this project because: I don't draw beasts as often, I don't think I'll be able to meet their awesome standards and because I'm focusing on learning comic writing.

But when I saw the entries to this week's challenge, I just HAD to draw my own version.

I didn't work too hard because: I have to study for an exam coming soon and I'm not submitting this anywhere.

EDIT: Tried to correct my mistake as Rashi pointed out. Let see. :D

Finally got the haircut.

So I went from looking like this:
 

to looking like this:

Yes, I'm just glorifying it. >_> SNAZZY.

Metro Girl!

It is so much fun to visit an artist's blog and see something they drew based on what they saw around them. Anything. Inspired by one such artist, I started looking at people around more carefully and noticing things. That is how I found Metro Girl.

One morning, when I was still a trainee at a power distribution company in Delhi (which was a couple of months ago), I was waiting for a metro train, I saw this woman (girl?) also waiting at the opposite platform. The first intriguing thing about her was that she was reading a book as she stood. Which looked slightly strange. I've never seen someone standing stiff and reading a book (unless it was a chemistry exam, which I know lots about). The second strange thing (to me alone, i guess) was that she was wearing only yellow and green items on her. Even the book was yellow and green. O_O Which made me think, wow.

What was she doing? Hoping a good artist would see her and get inspired to draw her? Well, that didn't happen. Did she dress up like that everyday? Were yellow and green her superhero colors? Is she a superhero in disguise? @_@

So many relevant questions. Metro Girl, wish I could draw you better.

Haircut time

My sister has been on my case lately, mostly about my hair. Which also means that she's been nagging me about other things which will completely bore you (much like they bore me). Anyway, I've plucked up the courage to face the lady that-doth-my-hair. >.> For the sixty-seventh time, i think.

Below is a pictorial depiction of my fantasy of a day when I'll be the angry one and she'll be cowering above my head.

 

In any case, I am not very proud of the drawing. I tried a new style. Thats all I'll say. >.>

Experimenting with colors

So I was looking at a blog update by one of the people I follow and one link led to another, the next thing I know I was reading this awesome article on coloring. And though I haven't finished reading it, I felt inspired enough to try out some stuff. The results are for you to see:

Mild Insomnia

where you stay awake till 2 in the morning. Normally, when I stay awake, I get these dark thoughts in my head: people I want to kill/beat up/cause immense and acute pain and how. A benevolent soul connected my pen tablet to the computer and now I feel more like a saint.

So now, I stay up and draw.

I submitted something on time

Which never happened to me before, I think. Hence, the reason why I don't normally enter contests. Anyway, DA has this Freeze Frame Contest where you have to pause a scene from a movie and draw it. I did this scene from Zombieland:

After Rashi advised me to use halftone, this is how the final thing looks:

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