Digital Art: Nights of Winter Snow

Some time ago, I decided to ask about a title prompt, and one of them was "Nights of Winter Snow". It quickly became the favorite, however, it took me about a year to get an idea about what to draw.

Music tends to be a big inspiration aside from movies and comic books on my art. This picture was a product of music and imagry. The idea came to me while listening to Rush's "Bytor and the Snow Dog." The thought was that I was going to make a picture of Bytor (a concept I never drew up unforcunately), fighting the Snow Dog, who in my head came in the form of a strange elf-werewolf hybrid. Eventually, she would loose the tail and the wolf ears and become a plain elf, albeit with a Frazetta touch to it.

This was perhaps one of the longest and best projects in digital art I have ever done since school. It challenge me to create a good background and a character with good shadows. Backgrounds still tend to be my weakness, but I don't like detailing them too much. This also brought me back to the pen tool in Photoshop. I was introduced to the pen tool during college, and even though it is a tedious process, it has a great look. I decided to use a pressure sensitive pen tool to this, to mimic the look of brush pen work. The overall color palette was to envoke night and darkness in general, since the character herself was traveling during the night. The finished product, as seen here, is perhaps my favorite so far this year.

A Word on Basic Sets: A Little Rant

I love using markers, they're one of my favorite mediums besides watercolors and Photoshop. But when it comes to buying them, I find myself stopping and looking through the various premade sets online or in the store only to find myself asking myself, were they serious with this set of colors. Case in point: the Prismacolor Basic Set of markers, with it's six colors of purple, green, black, red, blue, and yellow. While expense is always an issue, it's not really a starter set, since mixing and blending colors is something left out (no colorless blender). There is one of each basic shade, and when it comes down to it, it's not a particulary great starter kit, unless you add in two more markers of each shade with a colorless blender, and a pad of paper suitable for markers and ink (I found out about that the hard way).

If it's something I find irritating it's the lack of intermediate colors in "basic" sets of 8 or less. It may seem like a good idea to present someone with a "basic" set of four colors, but when it comes to it, you're better off getting at least three markers/pencils/pastels of differing shades of the same color, in addition to the set in question. This deliema of sorts is a minor one, unless you are used to using at least three to four colors in creating shade/tone/highlights in their art. It's nice for a kid just starting out, but overall, basic sets need to have more variety in them if they're to be handed out to the older artist. This is probably the reason for various 12 piece sets, especially regarding the new basic sets for manga artists, like the new double-ended Manga Set for Prismacolor, or the established Copic 12 piece basic sets.

It's good to see how basic sets are changing with the times, especially with the influence of manga styled work. The good basic set now comes with two different greys and two seperate shades of each primary color. Although not all basic sets come with blenders, it's always a good piece of mind to supply one with a basic set. Even then, the new basic set is a far cry from the simple set of four you got for Christmas.

This is my Art Blog

I'm restarting this blog now, with some new starts. I might make some companion blogs, but this blog will primarily about art, art history, and various other artsy things. My love of art, and art history as well as the best art supplies and how to better your artwork. And where to get great deals on art supplies and great art books to go through.

I will also be doing updates on my writing project and various other projects. If anyone has some advice, that would be very helpful.

Thanks and I hope this is the beginning of a new year for me and this blog.

Still working

So I'm still working and sorry I haven't done a lot in the area of working on this blog. I sort of abandoned it for a while and now I've updated it to speak. I will be uploading some new posts if anyone cares.

Hi I am not dead

I'm not dead, I just haven't been updating this for a while. Then again, I don't have any viewers. Oh well.

Summer's been fine, been in surgery and trying to get an internship has been hard though.
School is starting up by the end of this month and I hope I can get a job on campus, for my internship hopefully.

Small Update

As of 10:14 pm May 7th, I still can not put my comic on scrib'd. It says the process will take a few days, and I will check it out every day or so to see if it surfaces.

Until then, the pdf I have sent to my teacher will have to surfice.

Last Apprasail

My last apprasail for the year. I have a pdf file I was trying to upload to scrib'd, but so far scrib'd has been stupid and ruining my uploads. I think I might just attach it as a pdf file to an email.

As for my website, I played around with Blogger and I came up with this, so you can see some additions and stuff I have brought up.

Thanks.