A lazy week hardly worth writing about

I've really slowed right down this week, pretty much because I've been lazy and been sleeping a lot.

 

I managed to finish the values of my centaur archer and have started to consider colours but its very slow paced.

 

I also did a quick cloud study just to do SOMETHING. Although I watched Mad Max this week so I intend to do some fanart soon!

Centaurs everywhere

This week I decided to take a step back and do some stuff just for fun; my energy was starting to run out and I'd been doing so many studies I just needed to draw again for fun. 

Ragnar (TV series Vikings) portrait

Statue study

The first of the Centaurs

 I've recently been watching Spartacus which is set in Ancient Rome and is mostly about Gladiators. I really felt like drawing Centaurs again as they were one of my favourite things while I was younger but I always lacked the ability to draw them how I wanted to. I thought it would be a fun idea to paint a centaur and give him gladiator style armour. This way I got to do a little reading and visual research and produced this. I didn't do an awful lot of concepting, which I'm kinda guilty about but at the same time it was just for fun!

Centaur 2

 I still had some different ideas and styles of armour that I wanted to try out so I just kept sketching!

 I then decided I wanted to make one into a more interesting illustration so here's a WIP. I think once I've finished this one I'm going to look into more Greek mythology and try and concept some of the characters from there. Fortunately a lot of creatures in Narnia and Greek mythology cross over so I can tie these projects into each other.

It's only been a week?

I find myself checking the dates of my last blog post because it feels like it's been so much longer since I last posted.

Picking up from where I left off; last week was pretty unproductive and I ended up getting stuck with art block and I was determined not to waste my time moping around not doing anything.

Study

Firstly I'll start with this study above. I've been really put off doing environments/landscapes for ages because they never turn out very well. I really didn't want to give up because I can't stand the thought of being terrible at it. Like really. So every so often I have a go at a study and see if I can do it. For a long time I was working on this study and it was looking very flat and just not right when something finally clicked, and I realised what I'd been doing wrong for SO LONG. My colours weren't de-saturating the further away they got. It was that simple. I really don't know why I just didn't get it.

Everything changed after I realised this, and I was buzzing with arty energy once more!

Male torso study

Practice

To see whether it was really true and that I had infact discovered what I was doing wrong I tried painting some more (keeping to trees for simplicity) and it still worked! Although this painting wasn't as good as I obviously wanted it to be I was overjoyed to finally see some progress in my environment pieces.

Photo study

I looked for some fairly simple photos to study because I didn't want to overwhelm myself too early, especially considering I'd only just got the hang of it.

Queen Jadis final concept.

Taking a break from environment practice I continued with my Queen Jadis/Narnia project! I really enjoyed the process and I'm rather pleased with my final outcome. I'm still debating whether I need to try and push my concepts further to get more strange and unique designs or whether I kept it quite reasonable to fit in the 'Narnia' universe? Still not quite sure yet.

Study

'Lexa' portrait

Changing things up again I thought I'd work on a quick portrait of a favourite character from the show 100. My work is still being successful!

Photo study

To finish up the week I did another photo study- still quite straight forward but its not trees!

I was so excited to have improved in my art I neglected to go into labs except once, where I sat there staring at 3DS max and getting grumpy. Considering my improvement, I'm feeling like my time will in fact be better spent working on my paintings and concepts rather than getting grumpy at 3D work. Although I realise its important to work on my 3D, when I'm in such a good mood for painting I don't think it should be wasted. Perhaps next week if I'm not feelin' 2D I'll work on 3D, but for now I'm just enjoying life non-art blocked.

First week without uni

This first week in which we have technically been set free from game art (although technically still sorta not) has been a bit of a shambles.

I went home for a long weekend after the final hand in and came back on Tuesday, completely out of the swing of things; without the structure of lessons and lectures I didn't know what day it was or what I should really be doing. I knew there were things I wanted to do but I was severely lacking in motivation which ended up in a mighty fine art block.

Fortunately, I managed to kind of try and get over it and force myself to do other productive things like re-organise all my social media things:

https://twitter.com/HazelTheHobbit
http://hazelbrown-art.blogspot.co.uk/
http://hazelthehobbit.deviantart.com/
https://www.artstation.com/artist/hazelthehobbit
https://www.pinterest.com/hazelthehobbit/

I just wanted to clear things up a bit and make things such as my twitter a little LESS personal. 

Once I'd done this I decided to re-do one of my old studies that I did at the beginning of the (academic) year. 

September 2014

April 2015

 It was incredibly motivating and also interesting to see the areas I improved on; I actually used my original line sketch and changed it a little around the waist and voila! In colour too!

As I mentioned last week I started dabbling in a Narnia personal project and I managed to do a little bit of work on that too: 

(Preview)

For the rest of the week I think I'm gonna allow myself a bit of time off watching films and playing games and then I'll finally get myself going into labs again to re-do some of my projects from this first year. Exciting stuff!