Friday, December 12, 2014

Gord & Jay Talk Art Episode 6: Careers Day

Episode 6 is a whole heap of fun, as we discuss our current views on how our careers are going and where we want them to go in the future, both near and far.
Here are the all important show notes:
  • Gord and Jay both talked about how their renditions of the mighty Slaine have fared. Gord's wins by not only being awesome in all sorts of ways, but also by actually existing!
  • Jay mentioned his plans for the Realms of Faerie, an accompanying blog post (because he can at least sometimes be organised) can be found here.
  • Jay talks a bit about his favourite all-round artist, Rien Poortvliet. You can see Jay's Poortvliet Bibliography here, and there are some images here, and some info here.
  • Here's the DeviantArt jobs forum. It's great for entry level gigs.
  • Concept Art has great weekly challenges that can be good for creating portfolio pieces. ImagineFX seems to have stopped doing them?
  • This is John Bauer, Troll artist extraordinaire! Jay said that he and his family died in a train crash by mistake, it was actually a steam ship.
  • And that's actually about all there is in the way of notes. We must have been talking about ourselves even more than usual.
You can right-click here to download the episode.

Or you can go to our iTunes channel (be kind and subscribe, rate and comment!).

We used music and sounds by Setuniman, venicesurf, northern87 and indigosierra. We thank them.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Slaine

As part of what will hopefully become a regular segment on the podcast we asked for our listeners/followers to suggest via facebook an illustration for Jay and me to do.  We narrowed it down to a choice between Slaine, Wolverine or Marv from Sin City.  The unanimous decision was for us to do a picture of Slaine the character from 2000AD.

I had a particularly tough time with this, I intended to try painting my version and the combination of inexperience and trepidation about using paint had a negative impact on the initial drawing.  I fell back into a lot of old bad habits and was not terribly happy with the result, the pose was stiff and the anatomy overworked in some areas while unclear in others.  I did attempt to paint it but have decided not to post this as it was not great.  In an effort to salvage the whole project I did a new illustration, just a sketch this time.

The main thing I have taken from this is that I still have a heck of a lot to learn, particularly when it comes to painting.  I will continue to work towards learning to paint, while this project was overambitious for my current skill level I am trying to use it as motivation to work harder. hopefully I will get my painting to a level that I would be happy to share with everyone.

I have posted below the initial sketch before I painted over it and the redraw that I did afterwards.

1st attempt

2nd attempt

I know which one I prefer.  This was both frustrating and rewarding and I know I am looking forward to the next one of these. We will be posting the next shortlist for things for us to draw on the facebook page soon.