The Epic Owl Masterchef

Final Copy - Watercolor and quick bg in Photoshop

New Character Design challenge Character! Woot!  A Masterchef, who I based off of an old owl concept, back from college. Here is all my not so shitty process work (there is another mountain that will not see the light of day). Hope you enjoy!

 

Decided to take some photos as I painted. I don't really set the colors in right away like I did here but I'm happy with the result. : )

Testing out different body types

The first thing I usually work on are heads. I asked my very supportive better half's opinion and it took many takes to come p with a design that wasn't "generic"! Bottom right won!

This was the original design I settled on, but decided to make the face a bit more expressive and turn up the eyebrows.

The full body design of the head rotations above. Happy with the body shape but the head needed work.

When toddlers go Walking Dead

I asked a few of my students to make all sorts of faces, and took a bunch of pictures to play around with on the weekend.  I found 2 amazing little art shops tucked away on a small street while biking around and of course decided to blow a bunch of money on art supplies I definitely did not need more of....anyhow. Trying out some watercolour paper I got I started off with this cutesy cotton-candy-funfair sort of feel....

...and then I remembered how much Walking Dead I have to catch up on. My lineart was still in the same style as the one above. I just went nuts on the shadows. Amazing how easy it is to change the mood with one colour...

 

Walking Dead, the Toddler Edition - Coming soon to an IMAX near you!

Récherches: Arbres/Trees

 Pastel on sketchbook....scanned these as soon as I finished them as I realized how bad of an idea it was to draw with something so messy in a sketchbook you bring everywhere...

Back in...7th grade or so, a friend went homw to Korea and brought me back a bunch of cutesy stationery. (think sharpener with cutesy bunny ears and unicorns vomiting rainbows...) Obviously you don't ever actually use souvenirs...so I took a bunch of erasers and made stencils with woodcarving tools I have. Then I used some nearly dry acrylic paint to make a few of these! The color choices are a bit boring but..

Pastel on actual pastel paper. So nice to have a medium tones bg to work with.

Watercolor on paper. Referenced a few old russian art books I had for color mixing and such. Gotta admit...russian how to books (on anything) are sooooo much better.

Chinese Ink stick ground into powder and calligraphy brush. Had no idea I owned a kit...

Bilingual tree studies! Now you know 4 useless words in french. : ) You can thank me later.

 

And my usual favorite...putting in colors that don't really belong and trying to make it work. Watercolor.

 It's ironic how now that it's actually cold and snowing and generally unpleasant, all I want to do is go outside and adventure. BUT. Of course, portfolio comes first...one more month! As much fun as it can be, and as much learning as I'm getting done, I'm really keen to get back to my own projects with actual...you know, meaning and humor in them! But still, I'm not one to get bored easily, so I decided since I was going to spend a few days drawing trees, I'm gonna spend a few days EXPERIMENTING!!  And what does that mean exactly? Elementary: gather any and all old art supplies from good old highschool days (where you blew 50 bucks on wood carving and sculpting tools you never used....that kind of crap) and see what happens. So....these are all pretty varied. I'm still trying to settle on a style for my current animation pitch..but that's next.   

Also coming this weekend: new lifedrawing! It's been a while, so don't expect too much.