Fantasy Art Class Week 5 22/02/11

Thought it was about time I posted some student art.
Not many finished pieces from last week, but good work from Claire, Gavin and Orazio.

Here is a sneak preview of the exercise we will be attacking in the next class. If you can please bring a collection of markers, black is essential and possibly some primary colours (blue, red, yellow, green etc), pencils or pastels will be fine. Also a pentel or tipex correction pen will come in very handy. You can pick them up for about £2 from most stationers. The aim is to finish this piece within a single lesson.

In between having to deal with some mental deadlines and clients who can form the word , BASTARD! (yes, with an exclamation mark) with a vein across their forehead, I managed to fit in this clip so you can prepare yourself for Tuesday nights class. Yes, This is what you will be drawing , in colour. Please  bring a collection of markers, black is essential and possibly some primary colours (blue, red, yellow, green etc), pencils or pastels will be fine. Also a pentel or tipex correction pen will come in very handy. You can pick them up for about £2 from most stationers. The aim is to finish this piece within a single lesson.

Fantasy Art Class Week 4 8th February

For those of you who are planning to colour the exercise for week 3 here is a suggestion of colour pallet and breakdown. This is only a suggestion, I hope you will explore other possibilities of colour scheme. I usually use copic markers for rough colour breakdowns as shown on this post. This is an  example of how I generally colour preliminary  rough sketches.

As I have mentioned many times in class, the main reason for taking some time to produce rough thumbnail sketches and rough colour sketches of your intended final drawing or painting is so you can explore the many possibilities of layout and colour before deciding on your final layout and colour pallet. This will save you a lot of frustration later when you are working on your final piece.

How many of you have had a great idea for a drawing and dashed straight on to the nice quality cartridge paper or watercolour paper or board only to find that you have not plotted your drawing properly and either run out of space, maybe you have not enough room to include the feet or some other part of the drawing or that maybe the colours simply don't work and the whole thing looks a garish mess?

Well, that's why it's good practise to do a few small rough sketches first. Many great fantasy artists use this process. Rough Work (see images below) is crammed full of Frazetta's preliminary sketches that went onto become some of his most iconic work.

The benefits of using rough sketches and thumbnails are:
1.Enabling the artist to develop and refine the drawing before embarking on the final piece
2.Saves on wasted materials as the trial and error process has already been done.
3.Saves of wasted time and frustration when it is realised that though lack of planning the final drawing lacks balanced layout, colour or both.



Below is a breakdown of how I produce a colour rough to determine the colours of the final illustration.

First decide on your colour tones, warm or cold. Here the tones are clearly warm and are all of a similar tone.
























Here the flat colour is strengthened by using darker tones to add shading and tone. For this I used a neutral grey 4 marker.

By adding black to the areas that would be in shadow you can give your drawing more impact.

Finally I've added some highlights by simply flicking a bit of white gouache over the areas that I wish to be highlighted. This helps break up the colour and also adds another layer of definition to the image.

You can use markers to colour your final piece and it will still look good. The thing to remember is to keep the ink flowing until you have finished the area you are colouring and try not to press on too hard or the ink will bleed heavily and you will have less control. Also avoiding using heavy cartridge or watercolour paper as these are hard surfaces to lay maker in down  effectively.

If you are using watercolour, I will be giving a breakdown of how to approach this in the next class.

Fantasy Art Class Week 3

Week 3
Thumbnail sketching and speed drawing.
It was good to see that most of you responded well to this weeks exercise.
Fast and loose sketching is a really good way to loosen up before starting a new piece of work.
It is also very helpful in enabling you to decide on the action, pose and physical appearance of your character/creature as well as the composition of your drawing.
I recommend you all keep practising loose sketching as often as you can to develop this skill. I think you will find it will also help develop your figure drawing.

The images below show the stage from thumbnail scribble through to final drawing. The marker thumbnail was only 5 inches tall and drawn in a matter of seconds but enable me to capture the pose of the character and the direction of the action. I worked over the thumbnail to produce a loose construction drawing and then from that, produced the final pencil.

Here is a short clip showing loose sketching. Notice the pencil outline takes less than a minute, the ink sketch in total brings it to two minutes (using the ink pen was purely for clarity as I was using a low pixel camera, otherwise I would have just kept with the pencil), so each sketch should only take one to two minutes if not less.

For Jacqui, Jorge and anyone else who requested it, here is the Frazetta image.
Sorry its not very hi-res, it's the only version I have, which I got from the internet.

For those of you hungry for more Frazetta, I can recommend these books:-
Icon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icon-Frank-Frazetta/dp/1887424717/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Rough Work

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frank-Frazetta-Rough-Spectrum-Presents/dp/1599290138/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Here are a handful of stages from this weeks figure drawing exercise.
Mose of you got this down so I won't fill a blog with unnecessary words, although as you weren't attending Steph, here are some brief pointers.
The centre line is to gauge the position/balance of drawing a page. Often in fantasy are (or any style of art) females are given a stance which tilts the hips. This serves two purposes. It helps project an attitude or mood of the character and also visually helps define the female from the male. The difference should be obvious but will definitely help those of you who's figure work is not quite there yet with female form.

Fantasy Art Class Week 1&2

This blog is mostly aimed at new students; Mohamed, Mark and Gary. Your work this week shows promise, so don't lose focus and pay attention to anatomy proportions. For those of you would like another stab at the last exercise, here are four stages which should be enough for you to work from.

Figure 1

Note the guide here on the right, roughly marking out the proportions. Pay attention to the size of the legs in relation to the upper body.
When you have loosely sketched out the figure, ask yourself:
Are the legs too long?
Do they look like they are supporting the body in a strong stance?
Is the head the right size?
Do the arms look strong enough to be carrying a heavy weapon?
This is the stage where you should be checking this stuff.

Once you have got all the limbs etc in proportion, then you are ready to move onto the next stage.

Figure 2

Develop the figure drawing by defining the muscles and face.

Figure 3

This drawing gives you an example of one direction you could take to cloth the character. Of course, you can clad him in heavy duty armour etc, feel free to explore this as far as you can take it.

Figure 4

Here I have kept the shading as simple as possible to show how to apply a small amount of shading to give shape to the muscles.
Note also the simple approach to adding highlights to the hair . Before you can graduate onto doing more complex shading and hair detail, it is best to keep things simple until you become more familiar and confident with the basics.

Below are some drawings from Michael Oeming sketch book. I 've posted these as the theme is relevent and also one of them is pretty much the same stance. you can view more of his work here
http://michaeloeming.com/
and I STRONGLY recommend that you do.

Oeming has a very similar style to Mignola; very simple (but do not underestimate the skill and craft that goes into each drawing), very effective and powerful.
Note the use of black against white to offset the character from the background.
I could do a long indepth blog post about  Oeming's work ( and maybe I will sometime in the future), but I have  deadline's to meet and I'm out of time as it is, so instead go check out his site and sudy his work, you will learn a lot from it.

Here is Vanessa's response to this weeks exercise.
A very good start to the new term.
Way to go Vanessa - Keep it coming!

September-December Week 10 13/12/10

Exercise 5 Part 2
For those of you wishing to complete , revise or redraw the final exercise of this term here is a recap.
For those of you who missed last weeks class on 7th December, this post provides a conclusion to the exercise that began in last weeks post.

Step 8
In the previous post the light source was established, in this case from below, and the appropriate shading was applied.
You will notice that the drawing has been adjusted. The dragon's wings are now fully extended and the ground details have changed slightly. The ground is now made up of broken rock and molten lava, creating the main source of light.

Step 9
Here the darker areas have been blended in with the lighter areas by carefully smudging the layers. If you are planning on doing the same, make sure the tissue is clean or if you are using your fingers, make sure they aren't greasy, or it will produce a grease stain that will be near impossible to remove.

Step 10
Once you have finished shading and blending, create the final highlights using an eraser and tidy up the outer lines, giving more definition to your figure work.

Feel free to e-mail me your results at flameboy_1@ntlworld.com or post them on facebook and I will comment back.
Have a great Christmas and it will be great to see you all next year.

September-December Week 9 07/12/10

Exercise 5
This exercise will incorporate composition, figure drawing, lighting and storytelling.

As always with these exercises, I began with a series of thumbnails to help decide the point of view of the image.

Although thumbnail 1 (above) is very dynamic and intense, I felt it was not going to allow you to develop other areas such as landscape and a narrative, so I pulled back for a wider shot.

In thumbnail 2 (above) we can clearly see that the hero battling the beast has ended up on the top of a ruin of which there is no easy escape and we can also see the terrain he has battled through, and also there is evidence of  possibly, previously failed attempts at slaying the beast..
With his composition, the image can also be cropped tighter to cut out the landscape and give a shorter narrative.

I also considered the benefits of the dragon having his wings wrapped around the battle area or fully splayed out.

I will leave it to you which version to follow. You will notice further down that I have drawn the wings folded, but I have since decided to have them fully opened, so if you decide to do otherwise, refer to the thumbnail. Part 2 of this exercise will show the revised wings.

Step 1
Loosely sketch out the rough shapes that compose the image.
It may help to draw a faint vertical centre line to help balance the shapes.

Step 2
Still keeping the line work loose at this stage, sketch out the limbs of the dragon and mark out the spiral steps.

Step 3
Try not to rush the steps as this could spoil your drawing. Take time to plot them. They don't have to be technically precise, because they are part of a ruin and show decay, but they want to look convincing so keep the spaces in proportion.
I have also added a rubble of skulls and bones as a device to lead the viewer into the scene. This however is optional.

Step 4
Here the dragon has been defined.

Step 4 (Detail)
Here is a blown up version of the warrior so you can get the muscle detail.

Step 5
Now establish the light source.
In this case the light source is from below.