Portraits
I haven't created many portraits in my life but I decided to take up the challenge and this is the outcome. I am happy with what I created and hopefully I will continue to create more in the future.
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Sketchbook Scans
These are a few scans taken from my sketchbook. Every once in a while I get some time to sketch and it is always amazing to me seeing how one progresses through the years. After college I stopped drawing for a fair amount of time, I'm not sure if this was due to anything specific but as of about 4 years ago I picked up the sketchbook again. I had always heard that not drawing for a long period of time was far different from not riding a bicycle, one can not just pick it up again. Surprisingly I found something quite different, initially that act was tough, not being able to finish a drawing yet within a few days I noticed I had picked up my own style. Throughout your K-12 and beyond years one is always copying styles to learn how to create but within my absence of art something turned on. Finding a style is difficult but once you do drawing seems more fluid and natural.
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Post-it Note Doodles
Yes good old Post-it notes, when-ever I'm around these square blocks of paper I can never seem to stop doodling. I find them to be the perfect form of tiny office sketch book. Not to large as to distract from work and productivity but not so small as to be hard to draw on. Doodling goodness!!
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Flash Character Head
Every once in a while I start trying new ways of rendering objects in flash. Usually, for the most part, I am stuck rendering mechanical and hard edged objects for my current employer. Sometimes I have enough down time to work on something new. I use this as a way of testing new ideas. This is one of those times; a nice little character head with a helmet on that is very similar to a Spaceball's helmet. Weird, I know.
Down time doesn't last forever so I was only able to create the face, but I hope to one day finish the character. Perhaps a 1990's bike cop kid? The techniques I used for this were mostly straight up vector art layers but I added in a lot of blurs to really give the idea of soft shadows with nice blends to the different forms. This works really well in giving that soft feel that characters deserve and allows me the opportunity to show the difference of the helmet material vs the texture properties of flesh.