Hi Everyone, here is my entry!

Farmers, beware of the black sheep!

Hi Everyone! Here is my entry for isolation.

Our cat likes to meow at the wildlife he'll never be able to reach.

Hi everyone, here is my entry for this month's contest!

Lisa's robot invention worked great, until it went for a joy ride!

It was a fun challenge. I wanted to try loosening up more and I wanted to see if I could come up with a narrative that was about a robot but didn't show a robot.

Hello everyone! This is my first post and contest with SVS, super pumped for this months theme!

Made it in! Hi everyone, here is my Nightfall entry

Hey Gang! This was a tough one, but ended up finding a way to have fun with it.

Hi everyone! Here is my entry! I had a ton of fun with this one and for the first time, I tried out the red under painting Will showed in this past week's live sessions. I liked that process a lot and I'm pumped about using it more.

Hey everyone, here is my entry!

Hey everyone, here is my entry for the contest!

This is so awesome! I really like see how other people work and love sharing my process.

This piece originated from wanting to have two characters scoping out an alley. Then through exploring ideas turned to the woods, then hiding from someone. Eventually I had the idea of it being a giant crow. Next was to figure out where they would hide. I liked having the characters in the woods but, knew there was a way to up the danger so, I moved them to an open field. Looking to further this I thought it would be interesting to have their only cover by a group of cows that could move at any moment. Lastly I was looking for little story details to give them a reason for running from the crow, the green bag, and the holes in the crown to hint at whats in the bag.

Thumbnails

I wanted to have some understanding of crow and cow anatomy so I did a few sketches to give ideas on how to simplify.

Taking the piece to photoshop for the cleanup, value, and color test.

A big challenge was figuring out a pose for the kids. There was even more exploration than this in the digital file.

Final

I hope you enjoyed. I love talking about this stuff so ask away if there are any questions.

@dafoota @Jeremy-Ross Sorry to hear. I haven't checked if the stream is up on svs' site, but last I checked you could view it on their facebook page in full. Hope that helps!

@Coley I haven't seen Will's watercolor class but it sounds like you're talking about blend modes. Sorry if this is old hat. Thought I'd show a couple quick screenshots. That box that says "Normal" is where you can find blend modes and I just show what it looks like off, normal mode, and set to overlay. And when I am painting this, I have the watercolor texture on from the start.

Hi @Coley thank you! I did try out a flipped version. definitely worth a shot, but I think the way I composed it made it not work. You can see it in my comment

And this piece is all digital. I do have some watercolor textures set to overlay that I made and scanned into the computer though. Maybe that counts as mixed?

Thank you, @carlianne @LauraA @Rachel-Horne I appreciate you all taking the time to provide feedback! The suggestions all kind of played off each other, hope it's cool I tagged everyone in this one post, plus I wanted to easily share the exploration.

I see how having the periscope looking to the right makes sense. The monkey is traveling to the left and it scoping out the oranges there. But it seems like maybe thats not as noticeable on a first read. This illustration was set up as a full spread. My thinking was the reader would turn the page, and look from left to right. And I show where the spine is in the gray scale image.

I explored two options for the periscope. In both I added some tree variety to the right, and I moved the text over a bit to the right. I'm trying not to get too close to the gutter. That's also why the periscope is designed the way it is, plus it seems silly. On option 2 I tried out having the periscope turned towards the viewer. I think it could work, I might have to make it draw less attention though. I'm leaning more towards the simplicity of option 1 and I hope it makes the viewer look in the background to try and see what the monkey is looking for.

I also tried out a flipped one just to see. When I look at that one it leads my eye off the page a little too quickly.

Option 1.

Option 2.

Flip Option.

Grayscale + Spine.

That's where I'm at with it right now, I'm going to sleep on it for a minute. I do have less experience with an actual illustrated page set up. I've really only done standalone images. If there's something I could be on the look out for, maybe not on this piece but on future ones, I'm all for hearing it

Thank you all again for offering feedback and the kind and encouraging words! It gave me some great ideas to explore

Hey Gang,

After todays top 16 I wanted to try out some the suggested edits I received. I'm digging the piece a lot more. Before there was something off a little, but I couldn't quite place it. I think it makes more sense too from a story perspective that the lantern would be close by the monkey.

Wanted to share the update and see what people thought

SVS Submission.

Edited version.

@Lorna-H haha yeah getting those ideas in your head out right on paper is a real struggle XD but it gets better!

Hi @LisaF I think I'm running into the same issue. My subscription renewed around the same time and I haven't been receiving live event emails either. Are you able to help with this? Thank you!

@Lorna-H Thank you so much! I got a kick out of yours, we were on a similar wave length haha!

@carlianne You're very welcome, happy to help

Oh yeah, you got it lol.

Hi Carlianne,

These are awesome, it's great to see people working on the figure! I do have some feedback for you, I hope you don't mind but I drew over your drawings a bit to help explain some areas. Really two things stood out for improvement right now. Life drawing can be a life long endeavor, the figure can just be hard to draw sometimes.

The thing that stood out to me the most was the balance being off on some sketches. You'll see I have some blue lines on some characters, this is to show the area where the center of gravity is. I've head you can find this in a couple places, like from the ear straight down to the ground. I think generally you can find this with feeling, but I'd try to see if you can find the center either on one of the ears or the chin. And when I say ear, I mean when you can see the head in 3/4, not so much for front on views. I see with the batter, as you redrew the pose, you put the character more in balance.

The other I see, is the ground plane. when I was doing figure drawing regularly, I would draw a little ellipse to help show me the ground plane so I could better plant the feet.

There's a million things to think about with life/gesture drawing. There can be a lot more to discussing balance. It's a little difficult to summarize in a couple draw overs and some text. Hope this gives you a good jumping off point. I love see you do these in non ballpoint pen. Maybe get some tracing paper if you don't have some already. Thats fun for going back and trying to figure out the structure underneath your gesture and experiment with pushing the pose.

Please understand this is a great step, can't wait to see how these progress!

(take the running character with a grain of salt, that was mostly just drawing over it for the sake of drawing over it)