Sticking to what I'm bad at

Over the last 7 or 8 weeks I've had an unusually large number of people tell me how much I suck at characters and how much better my background work is. Most of these people suggested that I work on my characters less and focus on my backgrounds more. This advice was both logical and well intentioned. I mean if I'm going to send portfolios out to companies in the hopes of getting hired, then I better send them some beautiful depictions of the things that I'm best at right? So I decided to go ahead and do the exact opposite. While I DO see the logic in strengthening my oh so "well-developed background muscles", I would be doing my happiness a disservice by neglecting to strengthen my ability to design characters. I prefer to tackle my weaknesses and bring them as close as possible to my existing strengths before going back to the things I'm better at. Over the last month and a half or so, I've been consistently sketching characters in my sketchbook and hitting up the life drawing sessions as much as possible in hopes of strengthening my weaknesses, which I think is my responsiblity as an artist. Above are the fruits of my labors. While I'm not even CLOSE to the level I would like to be at in terms of arting awesome characters, I think I've made some significant improvements.

Boooorrrrrredddd at worrrrrkkkk

Incredibly bored at work and a little frustrated that I wasted like 4 days painting an environment from a retarded point of view. Above is the 10 minute lighting study that resulted from my boredom, and the retarded P.O.V environment that caused my irritation. I'm sure you'll figure out which is which. And I'm sure someone will post a comment asking if the lighting study was the environment and vice versa, just to be a smart ass.

f*ck colds

Man, I'm tired of being sick. It starts off with 3 days of regular cold symptoms, then after the cold I'm up for almost 48 hours because post-cold-coughing keeps me awake. Then I buy new pillows to keep my torso a little more elevated at night so that I can hope to get some sleep. I buy new sheets for these pillows. They give my knees and my face an itchy f*cking rash. Why my knees? I dont know, it was weird as shit. More speedpaintings above.

more speeds

These are some of the speedpaintings done for my class. Most of them are within one hour, there might be one or two that are an hour and a half. At some point I gotta stop doing referenced stuff from photos and work from life more often.

speeeeeeed -

- painting. Took about an hour and a half and it was done from photo reference. I did it while I was at work and kept getting distracted by meetings and tutoring sessions and such.

Pages and People

The comic pages were for a student show type of thing where like 12 of us collaborated to create a comic book story. Each person got 2 pages to tell their story, which had to make sense with the pages previous and the pages following. It was pretty fun, but I kinda wish I had put more time into it. But then I always wish that...and when I DO put more time into it, I overwork it...so..whatever...

The characters are for a fictional fighting game that Enrique and I created last quarter as part of a school project. Enjoy

Trying to keep updating

This is just a rough sketch of an old man done from photo reference. Took about an hour and a half to do, and was really frustrating towards the beginning stages. I rarely ever do these and I probably should start doing them daily because it definitely helps. The funny thing about it was, I didn't really learn anything until about 2 days after I had finished it. I'm not really sure why, but all the little realizations and epiphanies that come from doing work from life and reference didn't hit me until way later.
I definitely realized that one of the biggest things you've gotta do when making these studies is be very conscious and aware of what you're doing and why. Just blindly copying the image for the sake of duplication is almost pointless, you really need to copy and even slightly exaggerate or change things about the image as you're doing it, just so you're making lots of little mental notes. That's probably my biggest problem with the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," is the fact that it encourages you to zone out and become a human copy machine. If you're trying to get good at working from your imagination, you need to be paying attention ALL the time. I got lots to learn.