BPM's daily doodles

[BrennanPM]

Hey all. Slowly getting settled into the community and I thought starting up a sketchbook would be a good first step.

May 06

[kingkostas]

First of all welcome to Conceptart.org. I am sure a lot of artists will help you here.
About your images i have to tell that i like the colors, specially in the first one.
I think the black eyes in the second one(i mean the way they are drawn with just simple black line) dont match the general painting style of the second painting. Anyway thats just my opinion.
Show us more :D
keep them up!!!

[brennan]

A robot from last week and environment I did tonight.

I'm probably going to start doing lots of those environment studies. I want to focus on colors mainly in the beginning. My goal is to identify not just how something looks but why it looks that way. That way I'm studying rather than just referencing an image.

That one took 40 mins, but I think I'd like to chop that down to 30 minutes with more emphasis on the study rather than drawing.

Some points of interest in tonights environment was the subtle reflections of the orange cloud and darker bluff in the water. As well the wet sand was remarkably dark and I'll have to remember to look into that.

[Wilbur]

I like the forms you use but it seems like you waver between too little definition (first post) and cartooniness (robot, which is still quite badass). Your colors are nice.

[UnSharpened]

Very nice start, and welcome:D!
The latest study of environment looks great, and those details do interest me. It reminds me that I should pay attention on what my study of photos for:P. Other digital painting are fluid too. Looking forward to see more.

[brennan]

Have been painting a bit for the work project so just the daily studio speedpaint. The subject today was spaceships.

As the beetle look emerged I noticed that the shape was reading oddly and made that adjustment in the second stage. Looking back I think the original design was more interesting. If I were to do a version 2, the first thing I would do is integrate that vertical segment properly. The lighting setup ended up muddled and I need to work on locking down the exact rig and doing a strong lighting pass that I commit to.

[brennan]

First sketch out of my head. Yes I sold out and decided to try some custom brushed. I must say it's pretty shocking how easy it is to slap down a convincing amount of noise.

The second is just a cool reference of a canyon I had in my folder.

[brennan]

I forgot my environment at work, so just some color/portrait studies I did tonight.

I've been flipping through Robogabo's sketchbook and he's really got me inspired to do these fast ones. I'm finding it really liberating to just pick something to be objective about as it takes the stress off all the other areas that you're normally sweating over. I recently pulled out of a huge creative drought which I think was largely caused by this stress. Trying to attack every little thing in every painting you do makes booting up that fresh canvas so daunting. A big thanks to all of you for reminding me how exciting this is and should be.

[brennan]

Just a one hour reference study.

[Jamie Romoser]

cool colors and i also like your painting strokes. keep it up!

[Munin Raven]

I love the design of the blue deep sea diving suit (?) thingie, and your faces are superb.

[rawas]

You how alot of nice work here...i love the forth one from the bottom amazing work so far :D

[brennan]

40 minutes. ref'd.
This one really would have benefited from an initial sketch to nail down the masses.

[Hive_minD]

Wonderful stuff here!
Really caught my eye!

Chris

[brennan]

@ kingkostas Yeah that's a good point man. I noticed that once I got home. A definite problem with painting so fast is that you make some of those glaring mistakes.

@ Wilbur Thanks for pointing out one of the areas I really need to improve on. It is so important to have that balance of clear shapes and higher frequency detail to sell your designs.

@ UnSharpened Thanks man, I'll do my best to keep up the pace. It helps when you have people motivating you. I appreciate it.

---------------

Some more deep sea diving suit ideas. Also developing that idea from the first post of the large central mass with stubby hamster limbs.

[remmy]

wow your enviros are sweet as... i suck at that stuff. Post some sketches if you can :D

[Grafguy]

wow, ur paintings are super
It might be a challenge for urself if u tried to do a detailed enviorment?

[Ashok]

Nice work

[brennan]

Spent another 30 mins on the hopeful one.

[Lotet]

cool doddles, keep em coming, u need to work on ur desings n shapes.

[dchan]

Nice enviorments doodles. love that fisrt canyon doodle great mood. keep it up

[jenzi]

I am loving that suit so bad!! MOAR! pls!

[brennan]

@ remmy I usually sketch in my book only, but I'll see what I can do :) I'm hurting too which is why I'm doing these speedies. Environments are tricky, and I think most artists know less about them than they think they do. That's the case for me at least, especially with color balancing within scenes.

@Grafguy That's a good point Graf and I agree with you. For now though I'm trying to stay motivated by studying a broad range of qualities rather than focusing and inevitably losing sight of my objective. Right now that objective is to learn.

@Ashok Thanks :)

@Lotet sure.

@dchan Yeah finding cool refs definitely spices up the study! Cheers.

@jenzi Yeah your last post with that square grid of 4 of your characters practically made my head explode. I'm a big sucker for warm and cold mixes right now and you totally nailed it. I'll probably have some more explorations of that underwater theme for characters up soon. Cheers and happy drawing!


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Tonight: Some enviro color studies. Averaging 10 minutes each. I feel very liberated getting back into learning mode and out of beauty-core endless rendering mode.

[brennan]

Started with silhouette and built up from there. Obviously heavily referenced clint eastwood covers. What a fun look though!

1.5 hours.

[jenzi]

pretty sweet man, love that you exagerated the colt! really nice, only thing I would do is put some scull or some thing in the background it kinda looks a bit flat, perspective wise, he looks kinda huge. I enjoyed this piece alot, thanks mate!

[brennan]

@Jenzi Good point Jenzi, I'll have to revisit that one for a few more minutes.

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Thinking about defining spaces: flow, focus and such. I've been digging around the web for reading on architectural principles and theory. It's been surprisingly hard but I figure I'm just not looking in the right places. I'm also guessing the right place is simply the library rather than the web.

The goal of this sketch was to define a space that pulled you in and then offered a number of attractive places to flow towards. Also trying to soften edges, frame different focus areas, separate areas by depth. I think this space needs more thought and development for sure, but hopefully this is the first of many to come that will get stronger as I feel these principles out more.

[brennan]

Just some 10 minute color studies and one of my first architectural doodles in Sketchup that I sketched over in PS for 20 mins.

[brennan]

I'm supposed to try out training with a buddy tomorrow, and I've had boxing on my mind lately. Also following Robogabo's big boxer dumps have me pumped to try some studies out.

25 mins.

[Azalin]

What a cool SB, love your enviorments specially & the Clint Eastwood guy is lovely, keep posting!

your using Painter right?

[brennan]

Ref'd. Photoshop CS3. 30 minutes.

[brennan]

Space study.

15 minute google sketchup blocks and then 25 minute sketch in PS.

[brennan]

A fresh study of one of our characters for the comic project. I had some great reference of Masai tribes kicking around and I was trying to capture the earthy,literally mudcaked look they often have. And then I shamelessly stole some of Wood's tricks.

1.5 hours. Photoshop.

[BrennanPM]

Yes I'm back. It's been a while but I finally feel the burn to get some studying going again. I also got a new rig set up which is actually much worse that my old one. Apparently I got some bad ram which causes my comp to randomly bluescreen and restart with a fatal error whenever it pleases. Not so good for painting....or anything.

Anyways I'm gonna ride it out until I solve the problem and save a lot :)

First to speedies. Basically color studies. My goal is to improve my color recognition so I spend less time identifying and laying down the blocks of color and more time considering shapes, spaces and lighting in scenes.

These are definitely from refs which I'm far too tired to post tonight. I was on fire and feel like doing more but I just got back from camping and I'm either sick or intensely sleepy. Either way I'm off! Many more to come on a nightly basis.

[BrennanPM]

Down to almost no color picking at this point. If I do then I make sure I've laid down a color after observing and then I check the color with the reference to see where I was wrong. I find I'm quite slow at identifying the colors...but that said I'm realizing how it's really about pulling out each quality of the swatch, step by step.

Some quickies tonight...ended up having a good chat with my roommate that cut into the painting time ;(

[BrennanPM]

I really need to keep pushing the quick studies. After only 2 nights of getting them going I've totally noticed a difference in my drawing at work. Somehow the quick practice puts you in confidence mode or something...

I had some more time tonight :)

[kamal_anjelo]

lovely environmental studies, i like your style...and the colours

[BrennanPM]

A long awesome day of drawing. Now however it's time for some Dexter and a snack before bed!

[BrennanPM]

Just don't have the energy tonight...

[BrennanPM]

Full day of drawing. Started on some ideas for a game project which is purely conversational right now. I'll post it with some other sketches on the weekend hopefully. Until then..the usual :)

[gustavo desimone]

Your very good handling your color

[BrennanPM]

A bit more detail tonight...

[oalexis]

your dedication to studies is great but i'd like to see some more finished stuff :)

[BrennanPM]

@ gustavo : Thank you sir. I like how you crank the color and texture in your work. You might find it helpful to do some thumbnailing before you dive in to your polished color comps ...or maybe you already do :) Keep it up.

@ oalexis : Thanks for the interest Oalexis. I certainly will get to some more refined work. At this point though I'm entirely interested in the process and refinement of information, rather than rendering. Your coolest work to me seems to be those loose sketches where you can tell you're having fun, like the sasquatch-ish man or the panty girl life drawings.

[Dan Valkar]

nice stuff mate!, ur studies r very good, but as oalexis said, i wanna see some charcters, really like the scuba kind of suit...keep it up!!

[2100]

Nice to see you posting here! Awesome sketchbook, it's great to see you've been practicing lately. Your studies are looking good. Color matching is great practice, and you should also practice by observing from life too. That's when you really begin to put theory into practice.

[Nettle_Mountain]

Damn nice stuff, those studies really help. I like your painterly style so i bookmarked this sketchbook. More stuff please

btw: do you paint with 100% opasity? what brush?

[BrennanPM]

The word of the day is...patterns! I'm pretty obsessed with colors right now, so who better to turn to than South Americans. I'm going to try to move into other kind of textile patterns from here that focus on other aspects like line and shape more than pure color or tone.

As you can see I had some trouble reading the tones of these color patterns. To be fair the refs I was using had some pretty extreme lighting in them which made it hard to pull out that midtone just by eyeballing. A really great challenge though. I found the real patterns had subtler interactions between the tones where as I tried to really bash in what I thought I was seeing. Enough yapping.

@2100: Great advice...I'm gonna try and set up my lights in my room and find some marbles or something.


@Nettle_Mountain: Hard round, full sensitivity combined with some burning and dodging for gradients.

[Addiso]

insane color studies, congrats !

[2100]

cool studies, it looks really hard. You were pretty close for all of them, your selections seemed to be just slightly brighter/more saturated.

[BrennanPM]

We are different people every second.

[BrennanPM]

45 minutes. The word of the day is edging...and that was the focus of this exercise. Hards and softs, hards and softs.

[Hive_minD]

Great SketchBook!

Chris

[forgeman]

love your speed painting... I need to practice that. Nice stuff.

[BrennanPM]

The portrait is a 1h 30min edging study. Trying to capture the likeness totally killed me...I re-massed that right cheek at least 5 times.



Photo:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=856199&op=1&o=global&view=global&subj=514210106&id=504128630#/photo.php?pid=754518&op=1&o=global&view=global&subj=514210106&id=504128630

[BrennanPM]

30 mins. Really had to rush this one tonight..Great expression , no time to spend on likeness or details though.

[maeshanne]

nice painting, like the cowboy and the robot

[BrennanPM]

45 minutes. Studying a couple refs. It took longer because I had a hard time tackling the flow of those lines. I still feel like I missed a lot of the intricacies, like paths crossing and fading and breaking.

[Joce]

kool style

[m.c.miller]

Thanks for your comments on my sketchbook!

Your focus on careful observation and study is going to take you far.

If I have any advice for you it might be to consider your use of the hard round brush. Painting with this brush will certainly force you to do every bit of painting on your own, but I find that the way every stroke terminates in an arch can be kind of counter intuitive. It can take a lot of work to create angular shapes that do not have bulges at their corners. You might find brushes of other shapes more versatile. Mullins uses the round brush quite a bit, but usually just as a base or where the forms benefit.

I used to avoid brushes that lay down texture or shape because I wanted to be in control of everything, but if you look at any great traditional painter you will realize that the texture of the canvas and brush interaction is fundamental to the creation of surface and texture.

My solution to this problem is to use one or two brushes that provide shape and texture for the entire painting. This way you simulate the randomness of traditional media, but restrict the novelty of overusing custom brushes.

I think that painting with a hard round brush is much harder to do than any traditional painting medium...it is up to you.

[BrennanPM]

Just felt like playing with brushes tonight.

[pokepetter]

Great sketchbook you've got here :)

A lot of nice studies. You should try to use what you learned from them in a painting.

The last one is epic btw.

[Giorge]

lots of good studies and sketches , are yiu planing to forward some finished stuff?

[jedininjaman]

good work on concentrating your efforts mate you will learn way faster that way

[Danuh]

You've got a great eye for color

[Evergrey]

Wooo, nice sketchbook. Wonderful to see your dedication, actually makes me wanna do some studies too. That colour study-thingy could be interesting... Keep it up!

[BrennanPM]

So my roommate and I have scheduled out a personal project and started working on it. It's a very short fable written by Mike Wilson and illustrated by me. I'm calling it the Lonely Desert for now until we get a real title.

This is a WIP of one of my first assignments. It's a world study of the main setting. The point is to consider all the elements, features and feel that will pop up in later illustrations. Designs will also be done for the characters and and style so that by the time the actual story illustrations roll around, there's no guesswork remaining.

Especially because I only consider this 1/2 done I'd lovelovelove to get some feedback! Cheers!

-BPM

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@pokepetter: Thanks pokepetter. I'll be applying some of my learning in some larger works start tonight. I'm working a project with my roommate and I'll be posting pieces of it from now on.

@flamable: Yup going to be starting some more "finished works" in the very near future.

@jedininjaman: That's the plan! :D

@Danuh Thanks muchly.

@Evergrey I would totally encourage you to do some some. I find them extremely rewarding and enjoyable. There is just so much to take in from the world around us that taking tons of small bites makes for some wholesome digestion.

[Josef K.]

awesome colors man! impressive!

[BrennanPM]

Spent another couple hours on the world study and made a bunch of improvements based on some incredible feedback from Aaron kambeitz.

[Nettle_Mountain]

Really good, honestly

You are improving mister, would you like to give us too little nuggets of advise what changed between these two versions and why? (something short)

[BrennanPM]

Ahh of course Nettle. Here are the notes:


----------------

-The right shore seems to be in a different perspective than the left – the horizon line for the right shore looks to me like it would be way higher than the left shore’s horizon.

- the foreground element sits almost on the right shore’s tangent, so the shapes sort of flow together. The whole point of the foreground/midground/background concept is to use overlapping forms to create the impression of depth. I think that the shape of the right shoreline could be tweaked to fix this.

- the horizon line for the picture is way above the top of the image. That means that the nadir (or the ‘south pole’, if you wish) is not to far below the bottom of the picture. The picture would be a lot stronger if you used the vanishing point at the nadir to better effect. The big rock wall on the right shore, for example, could be made vertical, so it pointed at the nadir. You’ll see what I mean in the paintover.

-it’d be nice to see that rock wall dip its toes in the stream. It doesn’t need the skirt of sand, I don’t think. If that water is flowing at all, then it’s likely that the shore and bottom of the stream will be strewn with rocks, since the sand would be washed away from around them.

-it’d also be nice to see through that water, and/or liven up the surface.


----------------


Glad you like it.

[Knarf]

just pure "wow". You got me staring at those digital enviro's hoping that I'll get there one day. superb color and edge control.

[BrennanPM]

@ ALMOST: For sure you will achieve greater if your heart is in it and you stick with it :)

A whole bucket of yikes on this one. I was just not in a state to perceive those colors tonight. Still felt it was important to try though :)

-BPM

[Nettle_Mountain]

I like the latest one, keep on doing those likeable photostudies as well (i haven't been doing them for a while i have to confess, but i will tomorrow...)

[BrennanPM]

Bigger dump :) My computer at home is fried so I've had to start speeding at work...hence the hiatus.

All from photoref.

PS. You know what really sucks...the new upload system. Sweet jesus.

[DStraX]

nice digitals :) looks like you have a great understanding of form, but maby a bit to lazy on some of the rendering:P but arent we all... hehe
PS. those shadows on the spaceships, how did you do that? it looks so prefect! and yes the uppload system sux!

[2100]

what the hell, man...

[Meilin]

Nice update. I really liked the portrait of the girl, it's like all I've read about different lights sources, reflected light, shadows u.s.w is there. Sweet stuff :drinkup:

[BrennanPM]

Vehicles :D

[BrennanPM]

Portrait took ~1h40 mins. Vehicle sketch was like 25 minutes.

[BrennanPM]

Morning warmups. 20-30 mins.

[headlessAdi]

awsum studies man.................really love the way you study n color
keep posting!!
-Adi

[Jakers]

DO LONGER STUDIES! hahah calm down now.

These look nice sir, you know how to work up the whole image fairly evenly which is important during these fast studies I think. I imagine you are learning a lot. Anyways you're doing good, stop by my book, I need your opinion on my bugs!!

[Two Listen]

This is an interesting sketchbook, found it from your response to another artist's sketchbook.

You've got something I can really get a feel for, really get my...eyes around. You seem to have a lot of understanding in what you do, even if it isn't the best of the best, what you can do - you seem to know it. You seem to know what works, what won't work, and what's more important than what else. I think this is key in developing yourself as an artist.

I'd like to see more finished, polished work of yours. I think it could be really inspiring. Cheers for now.

[RandAlThor]

Cool studies dude. They have a nice sense of depth to them. If anything i would suggest pushing the material textures a little, just to give that feeling of more realistic surfaces... Keep it up dude ;-)

[BrennanPM]

Thomas Scholes (idiotApathy) fanart =P

Really really digging how he lays out those interesting and simple masses. Gold!

[Traveler]

Nice little speedys. Keep it up.