082812_late night sketch

I've been way too busy these past few weeks between my internship at MK12 and my part time job which means I get no time to do my own stuff. I've been drawing a lot in my sketchbook but rarely do I get to touch color.

     This is a 30 minute sketch I stayed up late to do while listening to the Escape From Illustration Island podcast.

     I'm really interested in caustic color right now, I'm particularly in love with the work of Robert McGinnis because he's incredibly brave and bold with his pinups. The way he paints flesh is usually not in such a way that it's believable, or even has blood pumping through it, but the women become chameleons in their environments, fusing with the color compositions or fighting against it.

      I really admire this boldness because I feel it flies in the face of a lot of what I see more commonly practiced today in illustration which gravitates toward the perfect peach flesh tone in pinups of white women. I don't say that necessarily disparagingly, because I adore Gil Elvgren, who I feel is the supreme master of that Coca-Cola babe complexion, but it is really refreshing to see a figure become almost sickly looking because of the color relationships within the image.

   Sooo what am I trying to say? I guess in the exploration of my own work there are some things that I need to define for myself, one of them is how I'd ideally like to use color. I have undying respect for the way some of these artists use graphic shapes and since I've become obsessed with the Mod aesthetic recently, it's natural that I would gravitate more toward graphic color and shape. I don't quite know how graphic I will get but I feel myself being pulled. Thanks for reading.

eth.

31312_speedie sketches

A bunch of silly sketches. Nothing too fancy or finished. I need to escape this color of blue, it's become a little bit too much of a staple of my work and I don't really care for my work to become a parody of itself. Pardon the sloppiness of these, they're all relatively quick pieces. 30-60 min.

eth.

mudboxing

Well folks, I'm back after a short break. Things got busy this past week and I've been trying to recover. I feel like that makes me sound like a real weakling, that whenever something rocks my boat I take a week off to recover. The real problem is not that I stop painting or drawing, but that I stop doing personal work. And that's a problem. That aside, I don't really have a problem showing/discussing weakness because I'm not a consummate human being really. I do, unfortunately, slack off (curse you TF2!) and waste time on stupid stuff.

Buuuuut I'm getting back on the horse, and this time, in the form of 3D modelling.  I know it needs to be a part of my portfolio soooo this is what I did to start. Mudbox has a really friendly user interface that I could quickly wrap my head around and mess with the hotkey settings until I felt like I was painting in Corel Painter, my weapon of choice.

I knew I should work from some point of reference in this exercise, so I chose this guy:

Bad idea. First off, it was really difficult working from an unresolved sketch and I ended up abandoning perhaps much of what is there because it was either above my skill level to accomplish with my tools, or just nonsensical. It made it very clear to me that I need to push so that my own designs are much more structural and clear in every way possible. 

My sketch above has some ambiguous dome head, no definition to the ears, and very little structure in the face. I had to really work to keep him from turning into Yoda.

I've included a couple of shots, feel free to comment and critique -- I would love the opinion of somebody that knows more about 3D modelling than me.

2 hrs. Mudbox 2013.

eth.