Tag: sketch

Industrious Illustrating #56 – Botanical Gardens

Robin Leave a comment

Hey guys! This week I visited the Matthaei Botanical Gardens with my classmates for ARTDES 364 – Visualizing Science and took a lot of notes on the guided tour. We’re working on a project to revamp the Botanical Gardens’s map, so I made sketches of the general layout and where the different plants of interest are located.

I also took note of some botanical facts that made me imagine sci-fi speculative evolution worldbuilding for my own projects, especially the Indian banyan tree’s ever-encroaching roots that try to suffocate any plants in their path. In my own imagining they become the inspiration for giant biomechanical tendrils slowly engulfing ruins and wreckage from a bygone era.

All in all, I’m really glad that I got the opportunity to learn more about the botanical gardens for various creative projects that I’m gradually working on! Next week I’ll be selling in the Artist Alley at Katsucon in National Harbor, Maryland, so my weekly post will likely come later in the weekend than usual! Have a great week!

Industrious Illustrating #55 – Study Step-by-step

Robin Leave a comment

Hello and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m doing a quick breakdown of how I do digital painting studies to brush up on my fundamentals and improve my mental visual library for my drawing and design work.
It’s generally better to do studies from life rather than from photographs because cameras distort reality and also you can understand the subject from more angles if you see it in real life. However, for this exercise I’m using a Shutterstock stock photograph because trying to find and draw an excavator on-site during the winter months is too much hassle for me personally.

My first step is to draw color blocks to get down the idea of the subject matter while not worrying too much about complete accuracy. It’s way easier to work with a drawing that already exists than with a blank canvas.

My next step is to tweak the proportions and start adding in details to represent what I see in front of me.

As I work on details, I realize that some of the proportions aren’t correct and fix them. This is also how I work on my regular art pieces — mistakes are just a natural part of the process and can be overcome!

The finished study now looks like this! It’s not a fully refined drawing, but I feel like I’ve done enough work to better understand how the different parts of an excavator work together, which was the goal of my study session anyway.

I even draw shapes over my study to solidify my understanding of what the basic building block shapes in an excavator are.

Of course, this is only one way to do studies, and there may be a way to learn that makes more sense to you! I just hope that talking through my process like this helps you discover what might work best for you in the future. See you next week!

Industrious Illustrating #53 – Life Drawing 5

Robin Leave a comment

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week’s update is a little brief, since I’m just recapping the trip I took to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles over winter break. When I was there I took the opportunity to draw some of the fossil skeletons on display to better understand the construction of animal bodies, as I hadn’t seen some of these skeletons in real life before and I want to make more creature/scientific illustrations in the future.

Something interesting about my trip there was that there was a glass windowed viewing area to look at scientists at work cleaning fossils recovered from the “tar” pits (which are actually filled with liquid asphalt!), and there were a few informational plaques and displays sitting on the windowsill ranging from excavated bugs and microshells to stuffed animals of the animals most commonly found in La Brea. There was also a scientific illustrator on staff (who I assume drew the lovely drawings on some of the plaques) who was actively working on a scientific illustration on their iPad when I was visiting. I especially enjoyed the puppet of the now-deceased mountain lion P-35, as I’d just read about his story in the excellent book “Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet”.

All in all, my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits left me feeling more inspired and motivated than before. While I doubt I’ll pursue scientific illustration as a full-time career, I still want to explore different subject matter I find interesting as much as I can so that my work will be versatile and never grow stale or predictable. And of course, there’s no need to travel far from home to do so — even back in Ann Arbor there’s several resources such as the Natural History Museum, the Leslie Science & Nature Center, and the Creature Conservancy that all have skeletons or live animals on display to see and understand in real life.
That’s all for this week! What would you guys like to see me discuss next week? Let me know!

Industrious Illustrating #29 – Early Drafts

Robin Leave a comment

Welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! First off, I’m happy to share that my drawing of Tappan Hall on the upper right of this picture was on display at the art-themed UMix last friday in the Michigan Union. I’m planning on making more illustrations of UMich campus locales in the future in the same style!

Additionally, I’ve been making sketches and drafts for some new sprites that’ll be used in “Flamechaser” when the prologue and additional scenes are added into the game. I also sketched out a new UI design idea (larger sprites) for the game, which will be implemented in the upcoming 0.6 build of the game. Quick concept ideation like this is helpful for getting feedback from other people on the project and figuring out what I want to do with the final drawing before I commit too hard to developing the concept further.

Let me know in the comments if there’s any topics you want me to discuss or expand upon for future Industrious Illustrating posts!

Industrious Illustrating #28 – Character Concept Sketching 2

Robin Leave a comment

Truth be told, I’ve been having a hard time maintaining a regular regimen of drawing at least partially because I feel like I’m clocking in to a day of grueling work every time I sit down to draw. It’s a feeling I have to continuously deal with if I want to continue developing and monetizing my art as an illustrator, but I haven’t found a good remedy aside from drawing self-indulgently and not worrying too much about what the final drawing looks like. As a result, this week I have more quick character concept sketching to share.

The above character, Wenet Tozawa, is another character in “Blade of Seafoam”‘s post-apocalyptic world. I still need to develop her backstory more and draw out her full design, but here’s the character description I currently have written down for her:

“A traveling medic known for her ability to regenerate the sick and injured almost to the point of giving them new life. She’s apparently close friends with Rashida, though the history of their relationship is unclear to outsiders.”

I’m planning on developing and showing off more character designs from “Blade of Seafoam” soon, so look forward to that if you’re interested in seeing my character designs!

Industrious Illustrating #26 – Character Concept Sketching

Robin Leave a comment

While I’ve been trying to get back into a regular artistic workflow by working on more sprites and illustrations for “Flamechaser”, I also feel like I could benefit from exploring new ideas more. Because of that, I found some time this week to sketch out a character design for an original character I’m going to call Rashida Kuromiya. She’s a cybernetically enhanced freedom fighter who dons a helmet shaped like a canine’s head in battle.

While I haven’t gotten around to fleshing out a full backstory for Rashida, I enjoyed drawing her and I want to draw her more in the future. Eventually I want to implement her into a story idea I’m working on called “Blade of Seafoam” that follows an amnesiac super-soldier who’s traveling across a post-apocalyptic archipelago to find clues about his past. I’m not sure yet whether I want to make this idea into a comic or a visual novel, so I may have to adjust the character designs based on whether I’m drawing them just a few times to make sprites and illustrations, or a hundred times for each panel they appear in. I’m working on character turn-arounds for Blade of Seafoam for my ARTDES 220 iterative projects, so I’m looking forward to being able to share them with everyone once I’m done with them.

In other news, I recently sent applications to several conventions happening this year hoping that I’ll be able to get into at least one or two Artist Alleys. I really enjoyed my experiences at Con Ja Nai, Anime Park, and Youmacon, and I’m hoping to make more good memories and sales at future conventions!