Back to Basics with Digital Drawing

  I've been going back to basics lately with my drawing skills. I've had a nagging feeling for honestly quite a while that my colour depth palette has been rather muddy. I've noticed I get lost in getting the shade just right at the expense of how clear the composition is. So, back to basics; getting familiar with the essentials of blocking colour first before moving on to tackling light and shadow.

  After all, many projects are 20% crunch, 80% cruft. You want to get that 20% foundation right or the whole thing just doesn't work.

  This new approach I feel has also given me a chance to back away from relying on dark lines to delineate shape. The pictures I have been drawing lately have been moderately popular on Reddit which is good for exposure. I'm getting plenty of feedback and starting plenty of conversations about what I've been working on. It could be some time before I'm back to full-shade digital painting like I've been doing before: I'm taking this one step at a time, so when I am ready to start adding shade again I am definitely ready.

  Moving away from the same old character subject, I've experimented with map design using Adobe Illustrator. I've found it and PDFs amazing for condensing enormous images into something I can easily send to clients. When I tried buildign something like this on Photoshop, it would slow my computer down as the images, plus layers, might be over a gigabyte in size. Which my computer did not like.

  But it was mostly fun to try map-making, which I have found to be an amazing way to build a setting as they say you can tell a lot about a place by reading into how the local inhabitants drew their maps.

Finalist nomination: Red and the Kingdom of Sound

   Word on the grapevine is that Red and the Kingdom of Sound, the animation project I contributed to back in the second half of 2017, has been named a finalist of the 2018 Le Petit Cannes film festival. I wasn't in attendance, as I was but a humble animator on the project and it was the district and project leads who got to tour Europe with the film. But it is wonderful news to hear that the final outcome did so well at Cannes and is being so well received across the continent and beyond.

  Win those accolades Red! It was an amazing experience and a beautiful project to lend a hand with and I couldn't be prouder of being a part of making this massive accomplishment happen.

First Week with Zbrush

  The past week or so I've been experimenting with Zbrush. It's quite advanced compared to Mudbox and I can see why a lot of studios are asking for experience with it. It's versatile, complex, and I've found I can get an outline of something after about half a day of working.

  So for now I've mostly been trying to see what I can make out of a single ball. As I had hoped, my experience with Mudbox translated well. I've yet to try texturing, that's going to be something of a later stage experiment.

  Considering how long it has been since I last touched sculpting software I was slightly surprised at how well I was able to create a face I've had people describe as handsome and good-looking, That's likely a very good thing when this is my first attempt at human features and started out with a generic template head. The drawing classes  msut have contributed considerably to that.

  Overall, I've enjoyed the product so far. Really glad I invested in it. I've already been asked by friends if I could sculpt their own characters with this, which means I'm either appealing to eager friends or I might have a creative skillset I can really sell.