The art files

I've been bitten by the art bug lately, doing a lot of sketches and generally just trying to get better. I thought I'd post a couple of recent things that I think turned out cool.

First up is that cover to Countdown. I made a tracing/impression to start with, but once I got painting it took on it's own shape a little.

I must be a bit dense. It suddenly occured to me that, while my drawing is lacking, I have logged hundreds of hours painting thousands of wargame miniatures (and am pretty good at it in my not so humble opinion :p), so I do actually know how to handle a paint brush. This was done purely as an experiment, hence my copying it and not doing something from scratch, but I think it came out great.

As is probably evident from my growing art collection, I visit eBay regularly (daily) to see what new stuff has been listed. Lately I've noticed some sketches coloured in greys with a splash of colour somewhere. Not a new idea, but I thought it might be fun to try, so I went to the art store and got a bunch of pens. The result:

I think it's pretty decent for a first attempt. It requires the exact opposite approach from painting models. With paint I go from dark to light, whereas with this you need to work backwards from the highlights. My faces need a lot of work, but I knew that already. I cheated on the detail on the hands (read: fingers, which I suck at still), but it actually looks alright.

And lest this post be entirely devoted to showing off, a cool minimalist sketch of Firestorm that just arrived, by Jamal Igle:

Man it's frustrating as a novice trying to get better, to see something like that, haha. Total economy of detail, but it clearly looks like Jason. $10US, can't go wrong with that.