Halo, Practice of form and lighting

King WIP

As an attempt to spend more time on my paintings and sit down for longer time periods I am working on this piece, the skin was influenced by the artist behind the Brink artwork. I originally started this concept as I wanted to trying painting some more detailed faces and get a nice skin texture. One thing however I need to keep remembering however is that it is good to study someone elses art and use it but not to overuse one and use a broad arrange, this way I hhopefully develop my own style while not becoming a rip off of another artist. As well as painting a full illustration it is good for facial proportions design and colour.

30Minute Competitions and keeping active

One of the most important aspects of painting and drawing is keeping active and to keep improving your skills and mental memory for everything around us. Myself and a friend Jake decided to participate in our own small scheme of challenge, as we were often on Steam together we would put a timer of 30 minutes and draw to a random subject of choice at the time. We would do perhaps two of these a day. These were useful as it kept us active (and stopped us playing to many games) however there were downsides looking back. One which was not particularly our fault was the lack of varied feedback, with jsut the two of us it became very similar and quite often the subjects were chosen to suit the supplier. We did try mix it up at times with using other course mates to decide the topic and we infact had andy and coral join in one one topic. One thing we did not approach was using reference imagery and quite often due to the short time constraints it has hard to use any. The reason for the short time was to increase the speed of our painting, I realise now that while it is good to be fast, quality is better and so you should take your time. “going slow is smooth and smooth is fast”.

We did attempt to go over one of our previous paintings and develop it further based on critique and feedback, with these we spent about 1-2 hours. Mainly to go off our initial design we usually block out in the 30 minute timer and add some detail and focus. Overall it was a good process and kept us working when perhaps we would have been idle, in the end however the workload of actual university work put this on hold and we never really got back into it.

Below is the blog (and a screenshot) we used to post out art, the idea I was hoping was that more people would get on board but it was not practical for anyone other than the concept artists. http://30minartchallenge.wordpress.com/

Below is most of the artwork both me and Jake created.