Lightships Lightbox

[Lightship69]

Welcome to Lightships Lightbox this is a collection of ongoing experiments and new work by Graham Nightingale, Some of it I like a lot and some of the images are fails where i beg peoples indulgence and help. I hope you guys like some of it too and take the time to go through and leave a comment or two.
I used to say that I blamed sketchbook squarely on Jeffx99, because he said to me in a post "you should put some stuff up in a sketchbook!" That has now changed and I now send a huge thank you to a great many of you who take the time to help me out including JeffX99, Arenhaus, Tinybird, Mr Corlan, Velocity Kendall, ShiNin and of course LtPlissken for stopping me taking myself too seriously, Thank you all.


Ok enough grovelling and on with the art:-
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This one was a copy of the one by frank Frazetta in the front of the Icon book (buy it folks its brilliant). Anyway I was looking at anatomy at the time and got bored and copied it for practice, I am not doing anything else with it because its basicaly Franks and I have enormous respect for the man and his works, what an inspiration tha man was, a very sad loss to all.

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An old dude from inside my head somewhere He occured whilst doing the loomis thing, draw a ball and put the lines in etc etc. anyway carried on with one and he happened.

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This guy is supposed to be moving cautiosly forward, sneaking up on something and he just looks like he had an accident in his trousers instead so he's not going anywhere either! Lol

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Again I was practising anatomy and started to think of how the anatomy of a centaur would go together (kids were watching Narnia).

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some of the practice bits, hopefully by constant repetition I can add them to the figures without them looking like Mr spocks love child with quasimodo, hopefully Lol

[Lightship69]

Some more doodles and anatomy from the archives, I quite like some of these hands, but not others you'll see what I mean
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[Mike Tenebrae]

Keep up with the studies! Hope to see an update soon.

[Dannyphoto]

nice sketches, if i were you i would study andrew loomis, his books are revolutionary, keep it up mate

[Lightship69]

Thanks very much people, actually most of the anatomy I draw is from loomis, well that and a couple of other books I found, including a large format type greys anatomy book that I picked up for less than £10:00. That was about six bucks if you are across the pond in the states.

I rather think though after looking around in this forum Loomis is the biggest anatomy reference source around, certainly everyone qoutes sites where you can download .pdf books from whenever a member is moaning about lack of ref materials.
Come to think of it i would be interested to know if there are any others around that are downloadable that we could add to the reference section.

[Lightship69]

This is all from a childrens picture book that I am writing, Its on hold at the moment because these images are wrong, they are quite good for the age group I am aiming at and are simplistic enough but sadly still wrong (no room for text). So I am re-writing to reduce the text and bring it in line with the target audience of 5-7 year olds.

The main reason however is that I am half way through another book project too, which I will post some images on here and in W.I.P. for feed back.

I was quite flattered by this first image Someone thought the blackberries he is picking were from a photo, YESSS I thought I'm Talented LOL somebody was fooled by my realness!! Hee hee !
Another true fact from this image, when I was first putting it together Alan Lathwell (famous artist and author) helped me with it in making the character look like he was supposed to be in the image, anyway I said thanks a lot mate and had a look at his website. Then went back online and said wow mate you are really good you should get an agent and do this for a living or some other inane rambling, he was very kind and didnt make me look a fool or anything which was good but I still have a cringe when I look at this image.
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[Lightship69]

Here are another couple from the Gnomes set and a few others that just happened, some while at University (as a very aged but not very mature student) where I discovered that programmers are very very rarely artists but they all wish that they were.

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(edit) I forgot to put the big bad wolf in from the three little pigs story, I want him in because I really enjoyed making him up!
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[Lightship69]

I found this in my archives and thought I would post it up here just to show that its not all childrens picture book stuff that i do, lol.

This image is from a, well almost still life drawing model as you can see from the picture. The whole thing is a quick time movie that was given away on a cover disk of Imagine magazine. Its pretty cool you can rotate her through 360 degrees. Anyway here are the images.
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as you can see the sketch has issues when you add the armour to the woman the pose isnt strong enough to take the weight, her right leg needs to move or rotate to the right from the hip I think, anyway feedback and tell me what you think

[libellchen]

You can rotate this? What an awesome recource!
About that right leg, it looks unconforatble, the way the lower leg is in front of the thight. I tried to kneel like that and ouch Even though it might be different with the armour on I would stick to the reference in so far that the lower leg is still beneath the thight. The boot would be squeezed and partialy covered by the thight.
When I look at the shoulderplates I have the feeling that the one nearer to the viewer should be bigger compared to the one in the back.

I like the bottom right hand in the second pic in post 2!

[FootstepsBeckon]

keep going man \o/

[tobbA]

Hey. Nice stuff, man. Looks like there's some heavy of use of the burn tool in those images. I would suggest staying away from that one completely. It doesn't actually make the darker tones the color they should be. Pick your own darker colors from the pallet. And I suggest reading more about color. You could pick up Color and Light by James Gurney. It has a lot of useful information. But perhaps it's better for you to just focus on painting/drawing in black and white right now and learn values. When you do that coloring will be a lot easier later.

[Zephyrion]

I would say to do some more light and anatomy studies.

[The Jeso]

Yea man, good stuff, but better paint in value instead of color like tobbA says, practice the figure. keep it up

[Lightship69]

Thank you guys for the comments, you are absoloutely correct the burn tool is much in evidence, its an impatience issue that I have! Even though digital is way faster than normal paints I still try to rush things, Its a really really bad habbit that i've gotten into, and its proving hard to break, however I am working on it.

The bulk of these illustrations are in the bin now and are not to be used in the book that they are for. The writing process is under revision and the pictures/ are to be re-done with the text spaces more in mind.

This environment is an exercise in patience, I wont even tell you how long I have been at it on and off because you will all laugh at me ! Lol None of it is real and its all painted digitally, but "MY GOD" its boring !!

The image info is as follows:-
Res 300 pixels / inch
width 3508
Height 2504

Painted with a mouse because I cant afford a tablet yet after buying Photshop "creative suite 4 Web premium".
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I forgot to add the reference Image so rather than stick it on its own in a new post I thought i would plonk it in here Thanks for the reminder chris..
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Thank you for the comments

[Chris-Garrett]

It may be taking you a long time but I think its definitely paying off. The left peak in particular is looking great and that is obviously where you have invested time in the detailing so far. Are you working from a reference for this?