A first attempt at painting clouds (actually a first attempt at trying to paint anything other than a figure). It reminds me of caramel. I used a reference very loosely: http://www.nesky.org/gallery/colorado_album/day3/hires/Sky.JPG. I just wanted to get an idea of what a sky looks like since it's been a while since I stepped out of the dungeon.

I wasn't confident enough to really go in there and paint with full blown contrast. Hopefully as I get more practice, I can do these a lot more quickly and with more variation in colors and values.

I tried to be fairly systematic with my approach so that I wouldn't lose myself in chaos. I worked from darks to lights with bigger, less opaque brushes for shadows and worked towards smaller, more opaque brushes for highlights. I didn't allow myself to go back to the previous steps for this one.

I want to focus primarily on drawing fantasy people and creatures, but I'd like to be able to sketch in some very basic backgrounds some day for these characters to reside in, so I'm starting off by practicing clouds.

Just some quick practice sketches to warm up.

Used a reference of a tortoise for this one: http://www.backfromthebrink.org/speciesimages/13/1_gopher_tortoise.jpg.

Tried to emulate my pencil technique with the tablet, but it takes longer and doesn't look nearly as good.

Just a doodle of someone I don't know. Ref: http://www.feebonics.org/images/portrait_ref.jpg. I was chatting with Marcello about Lascaux while drawing it, so I didn't spend quite that much time on it.

Like the William Dafoe one which turned into some dark warrior elf thing, I didn't bother so much to draw the person in the picture (though I was a little less sloppy this time). Halfway through the picture, I started seeing some resemblance to Connie Nielsen, so while I wasn't deliberately trying to make it look like her, I did start thinking about her halfway through the drawing and that probably had some influence. I didn't deliberately try to change much this time. The only place I consciously and deliberately changed was the neck area (I really like long necks). The rest is just inaccurate. The upper half of her head and her eyes bother me a bit, but I started rendering the details in those places too early and it'd be a pain to change them now.

The line work is pretty bad. I'm really uncoordinated with my graphics tablet.

The picture frame was a challenge, and maybe I should remove it. I just wanted to try making rounded corners with a fillet style effect, so I drew four circles and just drew tangent lines with the line tool. To make the lines look smooth, I used a thicker stroke with lighter opacity first rather than using antialiasing.

Trying to draw some figures without a reference as practice before I attempt to correct that guy on the left in the previous drawing. I'm kind of screwed with the previous drawing since I drew the figures based off a reference (loosely, but still with a lot of aid when it came to proportions, anatomical detail, perspective, etc.). If I'm going to draw my own figure in there, I'm going to have to try really hard to convincingly make it blend in with the other two figures without making my own figure look like a badly drawn cartoon.

It's been a while since I've attempted to construct a full figure without looking at anything - I've gotten pretty rusty, but I think I've improved at least on the feet a little after all the anatomy practice I've been doing (I realize the ones in this one aren't too great, but for me, they are an improvement). Feet have always been one of the hardest things to draw for me since they have to be planted firmly on the ground in perspective, and that's one of the parts where I can't really fake the perspective as a result (and I have a really hard time constructing any sort of organic form in perspective without some sort of reference).

I was originally planning to save this one and delete it as with the majority of my quick practice drawings, but this one didn't turn out too badly. I might keep it around for a while and see if I can refine it a bit.

Just a doodle for practice.

Using a reference for the basic idea (a screen capture from Flesh & Blood). http://www.feebonics.org/images/flesh_and_blood_ref.jpg

I'd normally put something like this in beginner, but I really wanted the extra canvas space. I hope it's okay.

Just a quick doodle while I work. I started with an ellipse. My hatching skill with a tablet is pathetic.

[Edit]I just marked it as finished. Was thinking about coloring it, and maybe I will later, but I want to make some more drawings first (studio full).

Practicing skulls at various angles and trying to figure out how the muscles and skin wrap around them.

Recording my personal observations about the forearm. Note that these are just my personal notes based on things I've observed by looking at multiple pictures from my anatomy book, and I'm not sure they are 100% correct, though they appear to hold true for all the cases I've seen. I'm using my anatomy book as reference for the anatomy. I couldn't find these exact poses of the arm and hand, but found some pictures that were close enough.

The ulna and radius seem to remain fairly stationary as the forearm rotates around the area where they connect to the humerus. The axis of rotation appears to pass through the individual centers of these two bones around these areas, and thus the bones simply rotate in place around the elbow without shifting position. At the wrist, however, the two pivot axises of these bones appear to converge around the center of the wrist, and so the position of the bones change primarily around the wrist where the pivot is no longer centered inside the bones, but outside the bones at the center of the wrist.

Studying skeletal structure with 'Anatomy for the Artist' by Barcsay. The pose is not inside the book: I'm just using it to try to set up a proper skeletal structure by using multiple pictures from that book as reference. I had a particularly hard time with the forearm and pelvis because I couldn't find a drawing in the book that had the angles I needed to understand the particular forms in 3d space, so I also looked through some references on the internet a bit and felt my own forearm to try to get an idea of how those bones curve around each other. I'm still not quite sure about those areas. It'd be nice if I could figure out how to simplify them somehow.

After doing my last picture here which was a very mechanical attempt to achieve photorealism where my only aim way to copy the photo, I wanted to go in the opposite direction, getting back more to what I was trying to do in the intermediate boards, instead attempting the loosest attempt to draw from a reference yet, with an attempt to only use the reference without drawing the reference at all. Accuracy to the photo is not going to be a criteria in this case. It's going to be about speed, looseness, and improvisation. I just finished a lot of work, so hopefully I'll have the time to focus on something challenging.

I'm going to try to combine what I've learned from both my practice in drawing with references and inventing forms without references to make something that hopefully doesn't suck too much and doesn't require too much time spent on it (hopefully something I finish by the end of the day). By using a reference, I'm hoping the result will be more convincing and anatomically correct than some of my doodles on this board where I didn't use any references at all. By not drawing the reference directly, the end result will hopefully be something fairly different than the photo and interesting on its own. Most importantly, I'm hoping it will be a useful exercise that will help me get better.

Reference: http://hq55.com/scan/willemdafoe/01.jpg. After cropping out the text on the left, I decided to flip him horizontally. I just liked it better that way after removing all the space on the left. I don't know why I liked it better - I'm not a composition expert, but I liked the initial focus to be on the left flowing towards the right, and having the brighter portion of the face on the left seemed to do that more.

I don't really know what I'm going to end up with. I have a fantasy theme in mind: maybe a warrior or a priest or something.