Disney Princess Wonder Woman - Piece Breakdown

So earlier this month, my good friend Ward Silverman told me about this auction a local comic shop was doing to raise money for charity. The theme of the auction was Wonder Woman and since I am a MASSIVE DC fan, I decided that I had to participate. I'm pretty pleased with how this piece turned out considering I lined it! Now in the past I've mentioned my dislike of line art and how I finally found a way involving the line tool in photoshop Since that post I've used that method a few times, most recently in this piece, however the one thing I haven't really liked about it is that it doesn't feel natural. With line art, I want to imitate the looseness of my initial sketch and I felt like with the pen tool, I wasn't able to accomplish that. However I recently found this tutorial which covered a way of lining that I had never tried before, and I must say I'm pretty proud of the result! Alright now that I've rambled on about line art, let's jump into the piece breakdown!

So the very first thing I did for this piece was to sketch out the post I wanted. I found some reference pictures online of Wonder Woman in poses and decided that the one I sketched out was the one I liked best.

After I finished the sketch, the next step was the long process of lining the piece. As I was lining this piece, I realized that the face I had was a bit too masculine and that the eyes weren't quite "Disney" enough, so I completely redid those.

The next step was to throw in some color. For this part of the process I just went with the flat base colors I wanted to use, as later I would add dimension with shading.

Now that the piece had color, it really started to come to life! I added shadows using my custom airbrush and used a method of picking color that my good friend Amanda Bell taught my last year.

At this point, I was really happy with the piece as it was all starting to come together.  Throwing in the highlights though, really did the trick.

The final step was to add in a background! I actually lied, because I made this background early on in the process, but I wasn't committed to it until the piece was done. All that was left was to throw in the Wonder Woman logo and to recreate the Wonder Woman title from the comics in a Disney-esque font!

The auction is on December 13th and the deadline to submit art is November 30th, so I hope that I can get this printed, mounted, and turned in on time. I really had fun with this piece as it let me get into my own art style a bit more. Now that I feel a bit more confident with my line art, hopefully I'll have more pieces like this soon. Also over Winter Break I plan on working a lot traditionally to hone my drawing skills, so expect those blog posts to be full of sketches!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

Time Traveler Minimalist Art

So one thing that I have always loved, is minimalist art. I'm not sure why, but the fact that we can recognize objects or people from such few details, fascinates me. Now anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am a HUGE fan of time travel. My favorite movie of all time is Back to the Future and I even have Doc Brown as my text alert. Now thanks to a few of my friends, I have begun to watch Doctor Who. I'm only on the first season, but I am in love with the show. I decided that because of my recent focus on time travel and my love of minimalist art, it would be cool to do some Time Travel inspired minimalist pieces.

I'm very happy with how these turned out and I definitely plan on doing some more Minimalist art in the future. 

Enjoy!

~Josh

Spock Portrait Tablet Class

So as most of you know, I learned how to paint by going to tablet classes that one of my seniors Trey taught each week. Since I'm now a senior, I decided to continue that tradition, and teach my juniors how to use their tablet. The first tablet class I taught how to paint a portrait and decided to draw Spock as our subject matter. It was a fun class, and the portraits turned out great. Here are some pictures from the class:

As you can see, we had a lot of fun! Now I didn't get a chance to finish my painting during the class, so I went back and worked on it and I finally finished it. First here's the sketch:

I was quite happy with how the sketch turned out, because I think it looks a lot like Zachary Quinto, which was exactly what I was going for. Several hours later, this was the final result:

There are a few things I might have changed, but overall I'm quite happy with the finished product. For someone who only recently started painting portraits, I feel like I have gotten the hang of them early on. As always thanks for checking out my blog!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Figure Drawings!

So the one thing that I have always been told when looking into animation, was to learn how to figure draw. Every single person has told me how important it is to be able to draw from life. Before I got into the program I thought that I was pretty decent at figure drawing, however since I took all of my art classes at a different school, I learned that my peers had an advantage when it came to life drawing. All last year I struggled with figure drawing, so I decided that this year I really wanted to get better at figure drawing. I also realized that when it came to my portfolio, I had very few traditional drawings, so I knew that I needed to beef up my portfolio.

I am currently reading two books that have helped me with my figure drawings. The first is "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" by Stan Lee. This book talks about starting off each drawing with a wireframe, then building up on that wireframe with cylinders, before finally going back and adding detail. I found this method works pretty well for me as I can quickly capture the pose and then build up the drawing. The other book I'm reading is called "Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators" by Mike Mattesi. This book is fantastic and covers how to capture movement in your drawings. The drawing style taught in this book is the way I've always wanted to draw, so I'm really trying to work my way through this book to get better.

Our final drawing lab for the semester was Friday and these are some of the drawings that I did this semester that I feel were my best.

These were some quick, 15 second warmups.

This was a 2 minute drawing, where I tried to apply some of the concepts from the Force book

I'm pretty proud of these and I can't wait to improve. I plan on going to a zoo soon to do some life drawings of animals as well. I feel that if I can master figure drawing, it will greatly improve all of my art.

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh