Silhouettes and Tangents

These two articles talk about a couple of important things to remember when you are designing characters or setting up enviroments and scenes.

Silhouettes:
'The reason silhouette value is important is because it's a great aid to "foolproofing" the clarity in your drawings - it helps make sure that everyone can tell exactly what your character is doing at all times.' This article is from a series titled ' a Kick in the head' on Mark Kennedy's wonderful blog Temple of the seven Golden Camels which is about drawing, storyboarding and animation.

Tangents:
'If silhouette is desirable, tangents are not. Tangents occur when lines or shapes begin to collide hap-hazardly, usually right on the contours they are describing.' Will Finn is a colleague of Mark's and writes about tangents and why to avoid them in this article on the Small Room. This is something most pro artists do instinctively but sometimes it gets overlooked.

The Art Center: get some advice from the experts

'The Art Center is a brand new place where Artists will share Ideas, Tips, and Tutorials. It will quickly grow both in content and artists from all the different art mediums. The Art Center will be a sister site to the Character Design blog'
This is a relatively new site but already has many fascinating posts full of advice about drawing and design written by pro artists. You can follow this blog on Twitter to be sure not to miss any great tidbits.

Coolvibe: digital art to inspire you

Bobby Chiu

There is a great collection of digital art on this site. I especially love the first pic by Bobby Chiu of cute beasties on a branch!

Imagine FX new issue out now

The latest Imagine FX mag has some good stuff this month.There's an article on how to make up a good portfolio, some interesting workshops including 'paint smarter, not harder' and another of their series of development sheets for game concept art.

An article titled' Photoshop vs Painter' takes on this endless argument, which I think is a futile one since they are both useful for different purposes. Anyway the contest ends in a draw here which makes sense. It is worth reading this article though if you are not familiar with one or either of the big P's, as they use 10 good examples to show how and when to choose Photoshop over Painter or vice versa.

3 Art podcasts not to miss

I am a podcast addict and recently came across some really good art pods via Twitter:
Escape from Illustration island podcast
Chris Oatley artcast
Art and story podcast

the guys who do these podcasts also have super sites so have a look at them while you listen to their pods.

Imagine FX magazine #50

The 50th issue of ImagineFX magazine is a real smasher. On the DVD you get a demo of Manga Studio EX 4 that has no time limit, this alone is worth the cover price. There is also an article on Craig Mullins, just about the best digital painter ever, a sci-fi workshop with James Gurney and a list of the 50 best living artists. This is an interesting list but I don't agree with a lot of it, and why did they leave out Alan Lee??
I'm really chuffed because my beloved sweetheart has got me a subscription to this mag, so I shall be reviewing it a bit more often on this blog!

Mike Dutton One Swoop Fell video

One Swoop Fell is a fantastic webcomic made by Mike Dutton. It is one of the best webcomics out there by far, really well drawn with beautiful backgrounds. The story is poetic and sometimes dreamy but also funny and exciting. Something about it reminds of Miyazaki so I was not really surprised to read that he took part in the Totorro Forest Project
There is a film on Vimeo of Mike drawing an episode, I especially loved the inking part of this.

Nic Klein Takes Us Inside His Process

Nic Klein shows his process for painting Viking, a new series for Image comics in this interesting little article. He must work really fast to do two of these a month. I really like the mixture of an acrylic monotone base and digital colours.
I wrote about Nic a while ago on this blog.

New hub page

I have written a new article on Hubpages called 3 Essential things to do if you want to learn to draw well

Aviary online applications : vectors

the Aviary online graphics suite have just released a new vector app called Raven. You can read about it on their blog. If you have no idea what I'm talking about read my previous post about Aviary here.

Work process by Alon

Alon's Art Work blog has a very interesting process of how he painted this fantastic Waterfall castle. He shows how he to use photocomposition, 3D models and matte painting to bring all it all together.

Create a Cute Vector Monster from a Pencil Sketch

Blog.spoon grahics has a quite detailed tutorial on creating a character from scratch using vectors. It's well explained even for those who haven't much experience drawing with vectors. When you've made a monster you can then learn how to create a scene to put it in. They use Adobe Illustrator for this one. I aslo quite like to use Flash to draw with, but if you have a tight budget and prefer free software you can also use Inkscape

Conceptual Art tutorial in Photoshop

There is a good tutorial on painting an enviroment with Photoshop on the idrawgirls site. He shows you how to start with a large brush in b&w and and then refine your shapes and add colour and a bit of detail without losing sight of the whole picture as you go. This technique is very useful as it enables you to work really fast and I work like this a lot. Here are few of my sketches made this way:

2D Artist online magazine

2D Artist is a downloadable PDF Magazine on concept art, digital and matte-painting. It is full of articles on techniques, tutorials, interviews, galleries and a lot more. You can download a 'lite' version for free or pay for the full one which is $4.50 or €3.24. This is pretty good value. I wish there was a print version, although it would probably be very expensive, and I suppose you could always print out the bits you really like.

Dan Blomberg

Dan Blomberg is a concept artist who lives in Spain. His sketchy style and vibrant colours remind me of Goro Fujita and Craig Mullins. There are some fantastic images on his website, and be sure to visit the sketches section.

Artzmania: Free e-zine n° 9

There was an issue of the free e zine Artzmania in July that passed me by, but happily you can still download all the back issues here. These zines are packed with interesting images, issue 9 has 478 pages.

Color vision and Art

Color vision and Art is a site about color theory and the way we see and respond to color. It is fun to read and concise without being simplistic. There are also interactive examples so you can experiment with certain effects for yourself. I wondered who wrote all this and then found a credits page with art historians and neuro biologists. It's well worth a visit.
This site led me to another interesting one called Causes of Color. this goes into detail about why things are a certain color. Some of this involves a lot of physics which gets a bit complicated (well for me, anyway) but it's still fascinating.

My Drawing day favorites on Flickr

June 7 was Drawing Day. These are my favorite entries from the Flickr site. My effort is the monkeystack at the bottom! Click on the images to go to the artist's Flickr galleries.

Joe Bluhm

Draw like a Ralph

this little comic sums up character design in a nutshell and it's also very funny!I hope he does some more of these.