Oldies but goodies

I ran across some old sketchbooks from a couple years back, and it was interesting to see how much my illustration style has changed over time; I can definitely see a progression. Here are a couple pieces that I only vaguely remember drawing, but which I think are pretty nifty:

Some sort of cybernetic warrior dude, 2005

An adventurer named Annabelle whose backstory I don't quite recall, 2006

Paranoid guy, 2007

I may have to go back to drawing with a ballpoint pen, especially now that I've been working with value more and more; I remember being able to do decent gradated work with them.

Thanatos

I started out this painting as a Colors! 3D doodle, after being inspired by reading a blog post  about the work of Ivica Stevanović on Muddy Colors . I had initially intended to make it more illustrative, but it just organically grew more painterly as it progressed, and I just went with the flow...

I didn't realize until about the halfway mark that I had defaulted to painting with local color; I have to remember to take into account the color of the light. I ended up trying to go back in with some transparent washes, but it's not ideal. I just have to keep working on it.

Also, I turned down the brightness of the screen on the 3DS XL, and that seems to have helped with picking more correct values. The image isn't as washed out as it's been previously; that being said, there's still room to push the values even more...

Once more into the breach!

I was up again far too late working on this painting, one of those instances where I got lost in the flow:

Hardsuit 85
(A bit of trivia: the 85 is a nod to Robotech, which had 85 episodes and first aired in 1985.)

Tried to concentrate on a couple things in this exercise, with varying degrees of success:

• Contrast/1-2-3 read of form
• More detail in the light, less detail in shadow
• Unified color palette
• Working with more opaque paint, rather than building up transparent washes

Painted with the app Colors! 3D on my Nintendo 3DS XL. Here's a playback for your viewing pleasure:

Marble mesh

Thought I'd try my hand at using gradient mesh for something made out of glass. I like the way the swathes of color turned out, kind of painterly.

Finished apple mesh

Here's the finished apple created with gradient mesh, with some texture added, all done in Illustrator. It's not a picture-perfect copy of the reference photo, but it gets the idea across. The original pic is actually pretty grainy/pixellated, so it's a decent trade-off.

Vector apple WIP

More gradient mesh practice, fruit seems to lend itself to these kinds of exercises.

Apple mesh work-in-progress

Without texture it's looking a little tomato-ish...

Adventures with Gradient Mesh

Gave the gradient mesh tool a go in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and I think it turned out pretty decent:

(Original photo taken by benjamint444 and used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)

Not a total copy of the original photo (all the little details would have been incredibly tedious to re-create, but I've certainly seen others go to those lengths) but I think it gets the point across fairly well. Eventually I'd like to make a face with gradient meshes, but hey, baby steps... There are also a couple things I'd like to try to create some original illustrations with it. Let's see where the road takes us.