Sunday, May 29, 2011

Fiachra in Repose

Here are some progress pics of a painting I recently started. (I haven't had a chance to work on it lately, unfortunately.) I wanted to paint my silly female gryphon character "Fiachra", whose an aesthetic mix of a raven and mountain lion ( or cougar, puma, catamount, panther, etc) The pose was inspired by a photo of the aforementioned cat, but I've seemed to misplace the link to it. 
Fiachra is an Irish native, her name is indicative of the region and has multiple meanings, the most descriptive being "raven". Others include "battle king". In Irish legend, Fiachra was also the name of one of the children of Lir, who was transformed into a swan for 900 years.
The gryphon character herself is much like a raven, an optimistic curious and talkative trickster living on future pre-apocalyptic earth. Many of her brethren have been enslaved by an antagonistic Ragnarok worshiping cult, but Fiachra escapes and searches for aid. Here she is resting, a rare glimpse of the boisterous creature.
Anyway, that's enough from my mystical headworld. 
  





After much tweaking, here's the end result-
(any critique is welcome)




Saturday, May 21, 2011

Sketchbook Birds

Most of these are from photos, as I have never seen an owl or raven outside of a zoo and crows tend to be fidgety and keep their distance. The geese however are from life. 
I wanted to be able to distinguish the differences between crows and ravens, as well as be able to simply draw the silly birds (The physical characteristics that distinguish them from other avians are very subtle). Owls are just cool and boast a myriad of creature possibilities. And last but not least there's some excerpts from random life drawing sessions.

Bonus: If anyone wants to draw eagles, check this link out: http://www.farmyou.com/falcon_cams/index.html

 



Some Schoolwork

Some stuff from a couple Digipen classes. The first image is a Master copy of "Jeune Fille Allant à la Fontaine" by one of my favorite classical artists, William Bouguereau. I strongly encourage everyone to look up his work on artrenewal.com. He's amazing. There are multiple small errors, proportion wise and with the face, but I like how it turned out.

The next image contains studies of Raphael, Da Vinvi and Henry Yan, in that order. And the next is a fantasy alien creature created for a Bio Class, and the last is a humanoid angel/alien concept, also for a Bio class.