The Hunchback's Manor - 1

... No post for the start of this new year... Until now !

Those are very quick sketches for a personal project that has been sleeping in my drawers for a long time.

I still struggle a lot with values and composition, but it's a start.

I'm just getting back on track at my own pace, which is very slow, but at least I'm making progress.

Justine sketch

Just a quick sketch from memory.

Movie Color Studies - Repo Man

Color studies from Alex Cox's awesome movie "Repo Man".

Sketch Practice

(...and fooling around with PS)
Just trying to obtain that old photograph feel...

I know how artificial and (kind of) cheap the process is, but I really like the way it looks. Here are the ones I did first, experimenting and trying to simulate that good old film grain

It also does a fairly good job hiding the crappiness of the drawings.

Movie Color Studies - Ran

Finally decided to study color a little bit more seriously. It is so frustrating not being able to see colors accurately... So, there we go. One study per day.

It's hard to find better source material than Kurosawa's masterpiece, Ran, which is easily one the best looking movies ever made.

I guess it probably wasn't a smart idea to start studying color with that movie in particuliar... Some of those are way off.

Portrait of a Girl

It started as a little drawing. I haven't been drawing at all these days and it really shows.

Then, I thought : "I mainly do line drawing. That's so lazy, I'm not even trying... Heck ! I'ma put some colours !"

It doesn't look pretty, but it has a lot more substance than the sloppy drawing above. Up to this point, I still have no idea what I'm doing. I feel so uncomfortable when I have to do color. So I proceeded to do some blending.

Her face seemed kind of flat. So I changed the lighting (it's also more consistent with the shadows).

Some touches here and there. And that's about it.

There are parts of her face that don't read clearly, I squashed the back of her head (something I don't normally do), the lighting is erratic... It's not polished at all and it's full of mistakes. I'm SO out of practice.

I'll do better next time.

Life Drawing Studies

It's been forever since I posted something, so... Here we go.

Sorry for the quality.