the Missing April Megapost

April was a kind of busy month for me. But I did man­age to get in some prac­tice doing things I’m just not used to, and start focus­ing a lit­tle more on work­ing from imagination.

So let’s play catch-up in one mega, mostly chrono­log­i­cal post:

A speed­paint done explor­ing some new things I’d learned about light­ing. Done with less ref­er­ence than I had recently been using.

As you might have noticed from the blog, I don’t tend to draw ani­mals often. So it’s a bit of gloat­ing, but for my first time draw­ing cock­a­toos (piec­ing these guys together from ref­er­ence and imag­i­na­tion), I’m fairly pleased with this one.

The back­ground was not such a suc­cess though

This one was inspired by my own per­sonal Easter week­end alarm clock. Thanks, guys.

I’ve always been a bit ner­vous about exag­ger­ated car­i­ca­ture — it feels a lit­tle like the extremely skilled but at least mod­er­ately evil twin of por­trai­ture. One very cool car­toon­ist on Twit­ter sug­gested these were more car­toony por­traits, which I’m a lit­tle more com­fort­able with.

Although I really do want to crawl up on char­ac­ter #1’s cheeks and fall asleep. *_*

Prac­tice with envi­ron­ments, some­thing I very much need. Nei­ther from reference.

A bit closer to my paint­ing roots after a bit of a mad week — sim­ple, four tone paint­ing (not includ­ing eyes, back­ground or cloth­ing), form and light­ing from ref­er­ence. Lately I’ve noticed that I seem to be able to crack out of a tough art time more quickly when I’m paint­ing my favourite muse…funny that.

And to cap off mega-post, a quick speedpaint.

Good­night, everybody!