Some New Art Updates for June 16th

Its been a little bit since I've posted some art. So I have a few backlogged! I've been a little obsessed with portraits of late, so a good chunk of them are in a portrait style. I've been really studying the works of the great cover artist J Scott Campbell as I find the way he does character absolutely engrossing. I've been doing a very manga style for so long that his style seemed like a wonderful progression in my personal art journey. I'm getting there, but as always I have a long way to go.

On the left here was my first attempt at a portrait. One of the reasons I decided to focus on portraits is I want to get better at conveying emotion with a characters face. I have had varying degrees of success. This one for example doesn't have much emotion, but I feel as though that works for this particular piece. It looks almost like she sat there and posed for it for hours and she's tired and bored. Not quite what I was originally going for, but I threw on a quasi-medival dress and boom! A justification for the sour look look her face. I do like the hair, which is why I call this particular piece Repunzel.

Once again, I would be remiss in mentioning that all of the portraits you are looking at today were referenced by other drawings. Specifically of the great J Scott Campbell. So if any of these look familiar, that is why. Mr. Campbell had an imazing way of conveying emotion and thought with minimal effort. That is why I am studying his work.

So Mr. Campbell, if you're reading this, please don't sue.

This next piece very obviously is a recreation of a J Scott Campbell drawing. Specifically of the beautiful Gwen Stacy. The picture above included some embellishments and liberty that I took, but this Gwen is very similar to the original I tried to recreate. The eyes were kind of an auto fill accident, but then I looked at them and was like "oooh, piercing". So I kept them filled in with black. In actuality, it matched the black and white nature of the photo to begin with.

As far as emotion goes, I think I did a pretty good job emulating the original. She has a taken-aback look that is accentuated with the hair subtlety whipping around like she suddenly turned. The life were surprisingly hard. I have discovered that a big part of how J Scott Campbell conveys emotion is not just through the eyes, but the lips as well. I think thats why the emotion has been flat on my drawings is because they always have closed lips because that is all I felt comfortable drawing.

​Time to explore this more.

A perfect example of the mouth helping the picture! Though the emotion in this one is subtle, you can definately tell she's "posing" for a photo. She's got that model smile thing going for her. Now, the biggest thing that you're seeing is the addition of color. I have experimented with color in the past, but I always feel like I'm not doing it right. Blending is a real area of opportunity I have. I just wanted to mix it up.

I feel like I'm getting closer to nailing it. But I'm not quite there yet. Its a question of finding the right complementary colors to blend for the highlights and shadows. Then its going to be a case of making sure I get the shapes right. One thing I've started to notice about colored drawings is that a lot of what is colored don't have hard lines. Here for this picture I have hard pen lines that represent wrinkles in her shirt. However, I think I should have used some kind of shading to do that instead. It's a question of how to do it without making it look like she has dirt on her shirt.

As so my self education conintues.

I'm not insanely fond of this one. I can't put my figure on why. It didn't turn out terrible which is why I'm including it here. However, I think it is lacking in emotion and the colors are kind of flat. I tried to do some shading to make her features pop, but that shading didn't really add too much depth.

I did try some new stuff with the coloring tools themselves. I used a fine haired brush for the hair which I think gave the hair a much more natural look. I think I got the colors in the hair a little bit more correct as well. The different shades of red seem to go naturally together. Gives it the feeling that light is touching the hair differently throughout. Now this was more an accident than intentional so lets see if I can repeat it in the future.

I also used a different too for the freckles which I like a lot. I think I just need to get out of my comfort zone when it comes to the various tools. The program I use, ProCreate, has so many tools. A jaw dropping amount actually. However, I've just been using the technical pencil, pen, and shading graphite up to this point when there is an ocean of other tools in this robust application. I will continue to explore.

So there you have it. A little insight as to my artistic journey the last couple of weeks. I feel I'm on the cusp of another "ah ha" moment. It defiantly centers around the face and its many forms. I have dynamic poses mostly down. Sometimes I have to scrap a drawing a few times before I get it where I want it, but thats okay. My real frontier at the moment is making faces that are distinct from each other. I als need to be able to recreate faces as well. If I create a specific character, I need to be able to do that character consistently. Anyway, I will stop boring you and let you get back to your day. I hope you all enjoyed look in on my process so far. If this post gets a good amount of views then I might make posts like this a little bit more frequent.

Let me know what you think. Do you guys want me to go in depth about my self guided trek to becoming an artist?