Crashed Near the End of January. Emerging From the Wreckage. Eh, Just Another Superhero Origin Story :)

I scanned about 30% of the studies I completed in January. I started with +200 gestures, did around 20 faces and some figure drawings. Before I start cloth I'm going to do value and light/shadow studies. This is an area I don't have much experience in so I'll spend as much time as I need to before moving on to cloth and color.

This is from February and done in Sketchbook Pro 2011 (before the 'Fill Transparent' tool, argh!). Lacking a lot of the functionality of Photoshop, SBP forced me to do things the long way (not being able to make selections and having a pretty useless blend/blur/smudge-type tool).

Custom brushes with low opacities were used by default. I used a pencil brush to outline and the airbrush at different sizes to add light and shadow. I've gotten a much better feel for the pressure sensitivity of my Wacom Bamboo and I'm hoping this translates to me getting the most out of the Intuos' increased sensitivity when I upgrade (later this year, probably).

To get around SBP's lack of a selection tool (like the magic wand), I'd make a new layer and draw an outline of the shape with the base color I was going to use (usually medium gray). I'd fill the space outside of the shape outline with white. The layer under it would be filled with medium gray and I'd create a new layer between these to for adding value (three layers).

I'd merge the layers when finished with all three shapes. Didn't figure out a short way to create the shadows so I wound up erasing part of layer outlining the shapes and drew the shadows on another layer under it. This shadow layer was filled with a darker color so that I could better see what I was erasing on the shapes layer.

This was a value study of a black object and a white one. I tried to add a bit of temperature to the reflected light. These studies were from cgcookie.com/concept. I've been googling more traditional sources, but haven't found a lot of resources yet. Black & white photos should do for now and I'll probably open up 3DS Max and render some primitives in different lighting setups for reference.