Here is my entry. A huge thanks to all the people who provided feedback and motivation to keep working on it.

Here is my entry. The story about a boy who sets out to hire heroes to save his town, only to realize that he must take matters into his own hands.

The Gentle Giant Inn - the final resting place of a careless giant has been turned into an inn by entrepreneuring mice.

Like others I find the 1200x1200 pixels of the template to be quite restrictive. The same goes for the 500kb limit to be honest. If that is how its going to be, though, I guess you have to take that into consideration early on in the design. My image is too detailed for that size I think and had I realized this earlier I would probably have chosen another subject.

This is the initial sketch for my May entry. Its a bit lacking in details apart from the wagons, but I'll try to work in a few extra touches such as animals, mushrooms, etc.

Seems lots of people are making red pandas. This is my take

Hello!

I've been enjoying the courses on this site for a couple of weeks so I figured I would present myself and see if the forums is something for me as well. My name is Morten and I live in Denmark where my day job has nothing at all to do with art - unless you call software development an art (which I guess you could ).

I've always liked the idea of being good at drawing but it never really got anywhere. I tend to lack patience for the part of learning a new thing where you're not very good at it, which turns out to be a bit of a show stopper. However, last summer I figured I would give it a serious go and see where it would lead me. I've had the opportunity to have a day off from work each week for the past 15 weeks, which has helped a bunch.

Apart from an evening course in classical drawing, I've been completely self tought - mostly from watching youtube videos. The amount of great resources freely available has been staggering to say the least but this has also lead me to jump around between all the different options, never settling on one approach or direction. I followed the draw-a-box course for a while but it felt a bit too time intensive for the limited amount of free time that I've had available. So far SVS has provided a great way to structure my learning and I think it works better than combining a disparate collection of videos and tutorials into a study plan.

While it seems to be a primary focus for this site I'm not particularly into children's book art - but then again, I'm still quite new at all this art stuff so who knows which direction I'll end up taking. Either way, this place seems to have lots to offer.

I'm looking forward to checking out all the great art in here and maybe get in on some of the competitions as well.

I'll leave you with the closest to a children's book drawing I've made so far If you'd like to see more, you can find my instagram account at @mortenchristiansenart and my DeviantArt account here.

Hello there, this is the initial sketch for my fairy tale inn submission.

A careless giant who long ago turned to stone has become the host of a mouse-run inn. Beetle steeds can be parked under the foot and food is served by the chef from the hip-hut. The proprietor of the establishment lives atop the lofty perch of the knee-house. Mips the trusty lookout is keeping an eye out for any roaming cats from atop the old giant club.

My initial attempts to draw the giant in anything resembling a correct perspective failed miserably, so I posed a character in 3D software to get it right instead. This actually turned out to be a great alternative (or complement) to thumbnailing, where you move the camera around until you find a composition that looks good.

Hope you like it - feedback and ideas are very welcome.

@Asyas_illos @chrisaakins Thank you guys

@dantter Cool, I just learned a new word

To be honest I've kept postponing the next part of this drawing a bit, since I was afraid I couldn't realize the feel of the initial sketch. The combination of lighting and texture work has been daunting since I have to capture a specific mood. Now that I've begun I think its not looking too bad. Currently I'm playing around with gradiant maps in photoshop, which allows me to map the grey-scale range to specific colors for the foreground, middle ground and background in isolation. In this example I'm testing a sort of evil looking green light for the background and a desert lighting for the foreground. I'm undecided if I like the idea that the foreground is the mouth of the cave, exposing the scene to daylight. The middle ground ties the two color schemes together with a subtle blue lighting. What do you think?

My first mermay drawing. It was for May the 4th, so I used the chance to sneak in some star wars stuff (it's a lightsaber she's grasping at - I'm not sure how obvious that is). I have been doing the Painting Color and Light course, so I wanted to experiment with some interesting lighting. I intentionally kept the rest of the image very simple.

@Matthew-Oberdier I actually didn't plan on doing much more with the main character - mostly due to my lack of experience with character design - but your comment prompted me to try and go for a more detailed and well defined character.

@Sabrina-Gosselin It seems that your hat suggestion might make it into the drawing after all

Seems lots of people are making red pandas. This is my take

@Janette Yep, he is resting on a ball. I only noticed the problem because my girlfriend mistook it for a huge belly. It hadn't crossed my mind before at all but I can see how you would make the mistake, especially since the ball does not really fit into the narrative. I will think on a solution. Maybe I can get the fat-belly idea to work

I'm pleased with how this one is shaping up. Here is a work in progress as I render it out.

Do you think it works with the ball in the bottom right pose or does it just look like he has grown super fat after eating all the cookies?

I had some ideas to fix the composition, but I couldn't really make it work. So I dropped the concept and switched to something else which I think works much better. In this one Arnold plans and executes the Great Cookie Heist. This is the initial sketch but I expect to render it similarly to the one of Arnold above.

I'm going for a red panda for this one. I guess I'm not the only one @Janette Luckily we're not going in the same direction.

I have this idea for a set of scenes where Albert goes through the various poses, but I'm not sure if its too busy and gets away from the main thing of showing the character. You can see a rough sketch below. The idea is that the four painterly scenes are what the girl and Albert imagine while they are playing, but as their mother calls for dinner the central scene shows the real world (drawn in a different style to set the worlds apart).

Do you think this is fits the prompt?

I'm not totally happy with the overall composition though I like the idea. Does anyone have any suggestions to things which might improve it?

Here is my entry. A huge thanks to all the people who provided feedback and motivation to keep working on it.

@Matthew-Oberdier I actually didn't plan on doing much more with the main character - mostly due to my lack of experience with character design - but your comment prompted me to try and go for a more detailed and well defined character.

@Sabrina-Gosselin It seems that your hat suggestion might make it into the drawing after all

@Janette Cool, I like him

@Matthew-Oberdier I think you might be on to something. The cave is certainly too evenly round now that you bring my attention to it. I like the following cropping - it brings the viewer closer to the action which I think strengthens the tension. Thanks for the suggestion

I thought the drawing was a bit empty in many places, so I added in some details. With most of them I try to reinforce the sense of forward motion. Is it too much or do you think it works well? Do the rats read as running? When I look at them closely, I kinda think they look stationary, but I'm unsure how to fix them at that small scale.

@ajillustrates @Janette You may find the design of the carts a bit familiar

@Melissa-Bailey-0 The front cart is supposed to be the main focus, with the pursuers the secondary focus. I had deliberately held the front cart in neutral colors so far because I wanted to get the background colors down first. I'm closer now to its final look, but there is still some tweaking to be done to isolate it from the background.

When I added the lamp to the cart it naturally drove the mood to better fit without daylight in the foreground.