And here we go again, this time with some aircraft something something.. and some sci-fi thingy.. with some vague inspiration of Red Alert vehicles and Unreal Tournament, but no references used. I have been practicing that perspective drawing I mentioned before, which is two-point perspective in this case.
I had a lot of fun doing this drawing, and it usually makes the result so much better! And the reason it went so smoothly this time i think, was that i wanted to cultivate that feeling I have when I just grab a simple ink-pen and some printer paper doodling around. Nothing fancy, just experiment with forms using simple lineart. This picture is done digitally though, but I made a "ink-pen brush" and a printer paper pattern as background. The brush is made setting pen pressure to dependent size, transfer set to transparency slightly set by pen pressure, dualbrush with a grainy textured brush, noise enabled and some color noise applied. The background is my "printer paper pattern" which i made by scanning in a simple paper, and made it tileable using the filter/other/offset tool. There will be a more refined version arriving soon, with value and color.

Major doodle-O-mania and perspective drawing!

Well, i haven't been as active here as I hoped to, but I guess life itself is kind of an obstacle sometimes.. I have lately been working as a Workshop Assembler for personal cars (nothing fancy and definitely not creative, but it helps paying the rent at least). But as i feel the urge to develop my creative side, i have spent almost every lunch and coffee break on drawing some random doodles. And now as that employment is over, i wanted to make a collage of every piece of art i made at that company. Everything is done with a standard ink pen and some printer paper, and fused together in Photoshop. It might seem like a huge mess, but there is actually some kind of silver thread beneath the chaos. To the left-hand side there is some clothing, folding and animal studies, in the middle there is fantasy/steam-punk, Lucasarts inspiration and perspective studies, and to the right-hand side there is sci-fi, mechanic, cars and human anatomy studies.

The most valuable lesson i have made from these drawings is the power of perspective acquaintance. Just draw some different shapes like cubes, cylinders, bent pipes what have you, over and over again until you get that unconscious competence which makes making new concepts so much easier. Before i got to learn about 3D-modelling and game development, I had the presumption that drawing in perspective as a concept artist is a waste of time, since you only need to focus on orthographic views (front/side/back) and let the 3D-modeler handle the rest. But as I have developed my understanding for perspective, the concepts I make now is so much easier to get a grip on and understand, because a object have some much "more to tell" from different angles, than a single flat front view. Nowadays it feels like I'm rendering 3D-objects in real-time when i draw, and that is kind of cool feeling actually =)

So to all you guys over there who hates to draw in perspective and find it hard to nail, stop for the moment and go back to the basic primitives and draw them "mindlessly" over and over again, because if you make it too hard for yourself, it will fry your brain and you will put down your pencil, which of course is kind of counterproductive. Just google and youtube perspective drawing, and you will find all you need!

Good luck and have fun!!

From this very moment, I've decided to rehash my old and quite dusty "blog". This was kind of an alpa version of my portfolio, but since i created a new and slightly more "serious" portfolio with Wix (http://tommykarnerfors.wix.com/artbytommy) I thought that this could be more of a progress related blog, where I share a little more than just a couple of pics that im proud of. It could be anytning I've learned through the day, but of course it will relate to art, design, games and aesthetic of some kind, since that is my biggest passion in this present life.

My first contribution of this new era will be my practice in develop my understanding and feel for the beautiful art by Lucasarts, and I think that I share a particular love for the art style of "Curse of Monkey Island". The distorted, slightly fisheye perspective, tottaly exaggerated in all kinds of ways, vibrant colours and solid lineart. This is my progress so far, and from what i have learned so far, it's best to build everyting upp in cubic boxes and build upp everytning in 3D so to speak, and then distort it in a way that just feels right! And I think that quantity before quality is essential for learning a new art style.