Didn't get the job

So I set up my own shop instead! :P

As I haven't received a call from the potential employer today, I'm presuming they're not leaving it till midnight to call me with the great job offer and instead have given the job to someone else.

Ah well! Have set up an Etsy shop today which may help to supplement my non-existent income while I carry on the job search. Am hoping to sell digital prints on canvas board however, first, I need to get some digital prints done, which I can't complete till Tuesday, so working on things to sell till then!

Link To My Etsy Store

Though I'm afraid that concludes my post-able art for the day! I'm also working on some sprites for the group project I'm working on and have spent quite a bit of today reading a book... The exciting life I lead.

I promise there'll be more up tomorrow! Also, it's this Saturday that I'm going to a 6-hour figure drawing class, if my scanner works I'll post here anything I get completed! 

(I'm also going to be posting some of my work on Shutterstock and CafePress, links in the future!)

I'd be a horrible lazy person

I always have to be achieving something.

Well, I went for my interview today! It went very well, I answered all their questions fully and without hesitation, chatted to a few of the employees while waiting for my interview beforehand, made sure I looked smart, etc.etc. I won't hear till tomorrow evening if I got the job, but I'm holding out hope.

Which leaves me in an awkward position right now... This would be an idea job, it's well paid with flexible hours in a friendly atmosphere. As such, I've been putting off any further job search till I've heard back from them tomorrow. Which basically means I've got nothing to do tonight...
I've played some games (Warcraft for the first time in a week, HOARD till it crashed out and a few flash games), done some art (

), chatted to people, watched TV (The Apprentice was particularly good tonight. Yes, French people DO love their children) and done some odd jobs around the house.
But I'm still left with the damning sense of unease! I want to be working, I would love to be bringing in some money from a job I enjoy to spend on the art materials and kindle I want to buy. But I can't. At least, not right this second.

So! I'm going to spend my night reading up on tutorials to drawing realistically, I did this piece with no preparation but, as I'm planning to do this more often, feel I should probably learn a bit more about the tricks of this specific area of the trade.

(Also, with the eagle piece, I decided to stop here as I've been eying up doing some other fur/feather types on future pieces and want to spend time learning how to do that, while the rest of this image would all be the same long-white-feathers as found on the back of the head, on the right)

Work in progress

Well, I'm rather nervous about my interview tomorrow! Have got my outfit all sorted out and making sure the cats stay away from it, keep double checking the time and thinking over everything FAR too much, to the point of at one time thinking I should take a washcloth with me in case I start nervously sweating and need to dab my head and if I should take a hair brush to avoid wind-ruined hair and blah blah NERVES.
So I did some art!
Decided to try something I've never really attempted before on my graphics tablet, which is a photo-realistic animal piece. As this was purely practice to learn the techniques involved, I allowed myself to eyeball an existing photograph for this piece. The original can be found here: http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/000/cache/bald-eagle_1_600x450.jpg
As for mine? Well, at first, I was all:

And then, I was, like:

 And that's what I did today! I realize the nostril is a little too far up the nose and, as such, is being drawn over by the fur, but this will be one of the many things I correct tomorrow.
Tomorrow!
Eek!

Sketch Dump

[Click for full view]

Afraid it's just a sketch dump for today, I began on the lower right image as a re-do of a picture I did last year:

But then I got bored... Then I tried drawing some more hands, and then I got bored... And then I started playing around with weightings and balance, and just went from there. 

I'm trying to draw more males but I still find females much easier to draw. I may of mentioned before but it's a thought that females can draw females better while males draw males better. Whether this is to do with the female eye preferring S-curves over males or just having yourself as a point of reference I'm not sure, but it's certainly something I want to try to break out of the habit of.

Afraid I can't predict at all what I'll be posting tomorrow. I've been meaning to draw another monster for a long time so that may well be what you get! But I'm off shopping tomorrow afternoon and have some work to do, plus I may well play around with 3DSMax again (if I do, anything I make I'll post on here).

On a side note, I'm unrelentingly getting more views each successive month, so would like to say thanks to everyone who's reading this blog and apparently telling other people about it! It's great to know people are finding this blog interesting, and hopefully not just another thing clogging up their Facebook feeds!

Ah Ahm IronMahn

Felt like I needed to get some practice in drawing hands and feet so spent most of the day swatting up on it. Did loads of doodles but this is the only one I finished off to a decent degree. I'm rather tempted to do a drawing-extremities tutorial, but if you have a quick look online you'll be inundated with guides about this subject matter and I fear I wouldn't be able to add much.

Also, something I've been putting off for ages! Well, not actively putting off, more completely forgot about while busy with my third year project then continued to be at the back of my mind for the last few months... oops. Anyway, a while ago, my sister's-now-roommate asked me to design a tattoo for him, I kindly obliged and my work till recently on the matter included:

And that's where I finished 3 months ago (Yikes! A long time to forget about a design ><) Click to full view any of the above images~ But aye, as you can see a general idea was set on early on, though many small changes were made from that original view, so I spent this evening mainly working on trying to finalize a few pieces for this tattoo piece, and below are the results!

If this gets decided on as the finalized pose and outfit, there will still be touching up and the like to do on it so expect to see this piece again!

Phew!

Looooong day! Started with a job offer and ended with teriyaki steak!
Unfortunately not a concept art job, though I'm not applying for those till after my holiday in Florida. Nope, this is a lovely summer job at a store in my town, have my interview on Wednesday, wish me luck!
I'd barely put the phone down when my best friend Steentrain came to pick me up for our first day out together in far too long. We went up to Xscape, where we usually go snowboarding (not been able to do any yet this summer, hoping to go within the next month) where there's also a load of restaurants, sports shops, an arcade, bowling alley, and a cinema, which on this occasion was our destination.
Long story short, we had a movie day and saw both the new Pirates of the Caribbean and X-Men: First Class. The former having a lot of great one-liners but an ultimately disappointing end (what the HELL happened with the mermaid?) and the latter being a very fun movie with some nice action scenes, and enough in it to have me and Steeny contemplating about it the whole journey home. Neither of us particularly enjoyed the comic-style montage and felt it took away from the film more than it added, but it probably didn't help that we had a kid behind us asking his parents what was happening as opposed to watching what was going on...
ANYWAY!
One of my favorite things to do (usually before movies, but this time after as we got into PoTC:4 25 minutes late) is check out the movie posters, to have a sneak peak of what's coming out in the next few months but also to see how different movies go about advertising themselves.
This interest continued when I got home as I checked out a few classic movie posters, and then I noticed something...interesting.
It began with this:

Obviously a very famous piece, but I found it a bit..eerie when I looked over it this time. Carrying on my search, I quickly discovered the reason for my unease:

 Ofcourse! The strong male lead holding up a line of pure light in a straight line into the air with a seemingly submissive female at his side, surely a great solution for a movie cover!
Except...
Well...
I don't believe it is. The point of the straight line is to create an incredibly dynamic image in which I believe symmetry would appear much more powerful. The image fading to black is a common theme across both but the second character takes away from this and rids the image of it's solo-superhero look that a singular character would. In my hope for a more pure version of this, I was thankful I had my movie-going from earlier in the day to provide me with a good place to start...

Perfect! A much more powerful image, showing off Cyclops to his full strength here. The fade to black is more prominent here than in the previous two images with the glowing fog providing an ample background for his legs to be drawn against. But while I feel much happier with my little search, having found what I believe to be a much purer 'poster' than the previous two (I'm fully aware this latter image isn't from a poster) I'm left with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth from the  'submissive' women used in the prior images. And this all lead me to my picture for today!

Portrayed above is Noel Vermillion from BlazBlue!

I WOULD write up a little post about working on this piece, but I'm actually giggling quite a lot at the moment due to a mistake I made halfway through. 

Right, to save my back before I get dubbed a certain kind of artist! Here's the manuscript, taken from Steam, of my conversation with The Boy (name changed here) which best describes what I was thinking...

Krillatron: Did her in her 2-guns, one point up, one down pose
Krillatron: And they're both shooting
Krillatron: And I thought a cool energy ray would look cool
Krillatron: So the down one's hitting the floor
Krillatron: And I thought, hitting the floor? Lets have sparks and stuff coming off!
Krillatron: And have it all glowing and stuff
Krillatron: Only...
Krillatron: It looks like she's peeing.
TheBoy: that's brilliant!
TheBoy: :D
Krillatron: I have the foresight of a lump of marzipan

Under the sea..

Finally finished the underwater piece I've been working on for my parent's bathroom!
The final piece hasn't turned out exactly as I hoped, and I've created 2 versions, a monitor-friendly version (the piece showed) which includes darker shadows and the like, and a higher contrast, generally brighter printer-friendly version to be the final piece to be printed onto canvas.

[Click to full size]

I also made sure to save frequently and created a walk-through for this piece! My last walk-through gathered quite a bit of interest and ended up being my most favorited piece on DeviantArt, hoping this one also serves to help, or just interest, people!

[Click to full size]