Friday 26 August 2011

The 'B' Range Pencils

So on with another day, and in-between doing, planning and thinking about doing stuff, I had a little sketchy time this afternoon. I've been gathering up plenty of inspiration pics for concept and illustration work, and a couple for my sketchy pieces.

And I must say, today has been much better. I managed to get my hands on some 'B' range pencils to get those bolder lines and a bigger shading range, and my work looks a lot better now. Minus the fact that scanning is much better than taking photos of work. It's better in person. Enjoy :)




As I was drawing my little piece today I also had a small moment or two reminiscing the good old times where only the HB pencil prevailed. I remember starting out in primary school with my HB pencil during art, and the other classes, namely maths. (I couldn't believe it when I found out you had to write out sums in pen at High School. At 10 I was pretty shocked :P ) Then as you move up year by year in High School you become exposed to these 'others' that are available to you, to do great things with. By GCSE all the HB was left for, was during the mapping out of a piece.

At A-Level, it was outlawed. HB became infamous and it was utterly unspoken of to be caught using one, and this is where the 'H' range played a better and far bigger role. It started to be used in light shading and mostly as the base for a final piece or an outline to adhere to when shading.

Ah, HB, the times we had. Never fear though, I'm pretty sure your still the most popular choice of pencil in life when it comes to everything but professional Art.

Thursday 25 August 2011

Sketching is Underway

Yay! Awesome things are happening now. Well, I say awesome, but they're just a few quick sketches with a pretty naff pencil (2H) as I couldn't find anything else, so it's all a bit light. The first one is alright apart from proportion issues with her eyes, they're a bit poppy outy. But that's because I didn't have a rubber so I just had to hope for the best and it turned out better than I thought 'cause everytime I've drawn people and faces before, I definitely need a rubber. The last sketch I did is the one I'm most pleased with. I'm happy, happy about it :) And I got two pictures for the second sketch I did (whole and close-up) to make up for the poor attempt I did with the first lady's face.

I think now I've warmed up a bit to drawing people again, I'll carry on with a couple more (hopefully with a better pencil range) and plug them into photoshop for a bit of rendering. Maybe. If I can get my skills up. Enjoy :) Oh and please excuse my poor photographing skills, the light source was terrible, that's what you get when you're away from a scanner, ah well.









Wednesday 24 August 2011

Plans are Underway!

So it's been a while since I've been posting around, but not because I've been lazy! Well maybe a tiny bit, but, that's irrelevant, because I've been planning and thinking away on how best to approach everything to do with keeping your online presence 'alive' as they say and organising a whole pile of files, and thinking about what precise objective I am going to work towards.

First off I've gone back to basics. Back to the beginning where everything starts. The computer. Now for all this updating blogs and finding inspiration stuff I use my laptop, solely because I can take it everywhere with me. If I'm off going wandering to different places I need access to my inspiration that will help me on my way to do some work and stay in the loop. If I just want to pop downstairs to do some work, I can. And I absolutely love it for that. (If it dies I'll have no idea what to do.) But the laptop served another purpose for the last few months of uni, as my other and extra working space, so I'd be back and forth between the tower and the laptop for certain things. Recently, it annoyed me, having to look at all this out of place stuff so I started the long task of organising everything and putting it in the right place. (Phew, glad it didn't take long.)

After that my mind is now a lot clearer and I can start the other tasks of thinking of a goal and doing blog things. So I now have my little online notebook back up and running again and I hope my posting will be very frequent as my procrastination involves gathering up inspiration. :) Constructive procrastination I call it! I have fully refreshed the spirit it used to have and it's keeping my dashes of inspirational things all neatly organised together (which is another weight off on my shoulders, literally, and making my mind clearer all the time.) Along with this I've done a quick revamp of my blog (mainly because I'm the one looking most of the time and get bored of the colour or the font or something :P ) but more importantly to get a more professional edge to it, so there's no backgroundy pink stuff happening behind the title, and I've got some pages! Just an about me bit, that I think just waffles on about some nonsense about games and animation, and a portfolio bit where for now I've just thrown in my life drawing until I do the next step.

After planning my notebook came the objective. So a week or so ago I finally managed, after a long time planning, observing and gathering plenty of information and inspiration, to figure out what I'm working towards and what I'm going to do. The plan is to completely start afresh with a showreel and to completely start anew with my portfolio (the drawn stuff) and since I've done a few animation tests and a few illustrations and life drawing type sketches. Which reminds me of the old assignment thing again, so with that in mind I'm working super extra hard as I used to. :)

Step 4 to world domination, I mean, er ... plans, after I work super hard to do the best work I can, I'll put together a good bunch of animation shots for my showreel and a good amount of sketches, life drawing and illustrations (and maybe concepts if I get any good) for my portfolio; and then I'll revamp my website to show only the awesome stuff! I'm going to think about the design and layout, but I think I'll keep the base the same because it works really well for me and is in-keeping with the rest of my online presence. I'm going to tweak some of the images that are on there already and maybe something with the text just cause I get bored of looking at it easily, then again as I say, I don't like being extroverted about myself and for just anyone to know about me. (Unless I become a celebrity animator, and I may divulge 4 lines more on the about me bit in this case :P )

So that's all for now about me and what's going on, and hopefully I'll be doing some weekly or fortnightly posting about the progress if all is going well, and not so well just to do a moany post 'cause I haven't done one yet hehe.