I drew this for 30 seconds to minuete a day over a 2 month period while waiting for the bus in the morning.

These series of sketches are loosely inspired by Ender’s shadow, the sequel to Ender’s game. I had a lot of free time over the holidays and was able to produce a large painting with the help of my new scanner. I had an idea in my head for some time of what I wanted to draw and started to do a few thumbnail sketches to try and figure the composition.

Thumb nailing, which is something I do while animating all the time, really helped me explore ideas to find the right poses for all the characters.

I then redrew my small layout thumbnail onto a letter size paper 8.5 x 11.

I didn’t like how far the right hand character was from the two foreground figures, and the facial expression on the center character wasn’t working. So I scanned it into the computers and did some touch ups in Photoshop.

From there I printed it out and did a watercolor pass to get some idea of the colors I wanted to use. I scanned that sketch back in and painted over it some more to give me this color study.

I then blew up the pencil drawing and redrew that on an 18 x24 piece of Strathmore coldpress using my light table.  I ended up changing the face so he didn’t look so scared. Then the painting process began.

Finished painting

After a few color correction tweaks here’s the final piece.

Did another tree/japan sketch as a present this past Christmas. Here are some of my rough ideas I had for the painting.

detailed layout sketch ink.  5.5″ x 8.2″

exploratory sketches – ink.  5.5″ x 8.2″

Here’s the final piece.

watercolor and pencil 11″ x 15″

Reformatted computer this holiday, drew this while waiting for programs to install – scanner is also sitting there next to my drawing table

This year my animation school friends did secret Santa where we had to create a piece of art work for each other. I did this initial sketch of a Japanese garden.

I wasn’t happy with it and didn’t think someone would want to hang it on their wall. So I redrew it with out the ink  lines. I was also so inspired by the Totoro forest project book I recently bought I decided to add some little creatures to the image.

This is taken from a photo so its a little blurry, I finally got a new scanner but the painting has been given away.

Finally doing some digital painting again, at least the snow is good for something

Did this in a hurry on the ride home

Been a little bad on the sketching as of late, have a few other projects that are taking up all my time. Still I’ve got some pose studies I did a little while back. I also need to get a new scanner as my other one is no longer available.

Did this as a card for my aunt who loves to ride horses back in England

Managed to do another one