Fallout Fanart Teaser

Here is a teaser of what I'm working on currently! Wanted to share before it got too late and couldn't keep to my post per-day! Her name is Red, a Fallout Brotherhood of Steel babe. Will be entirely reworking the power armor to account for perspective. It's been tons of fun, linework removed on the face. Looks like all those studies are helping out! Didn't initially think I was going to follow through with this idea.

Had an idea for a character, photo reference was used.

Draw Box - Photo Study of a Creature

Hey everyone! I've just completed a photo study of a big cat, a panther! Considering this is the first time I've ever drawn or painted an animal, I'm pretty happy with the outcome. The challenge was given to me as a draw box master study, with an emphasis on creatures. However I decided that having no experience with animals whatsoever, I figured a photo study would be best. Check it out guys!

What is Daz3D?

Evening all! Here to share another experiment with you all. This time around, in my slight procrastination of doing master studies, I decided to look into what Daz3D was and why it was mentioned so often in the videos I've been watching lately. What is Daz3D? Well apparently it's a free program, had no idea, that allows you to play with figures in 3D. Meaning I can put the male or female figure in any pose. This is a great way to build a foundation for a piece or character concept, assuring that the anatomy is rock solid. Now for my favorite part, allow me to share! What do you all think?

Took me a few minutes to get the pose to look convincing enough. Let's say the baldness conjured a character in mind.

Jack from the Mass Effect Trilogy! Extremely rough test of what it might be like to use Daz's models in my workflow. Suffice to say I had fun

Here is a link to the programs website and a little about Daz3D. That's about it, alright, yep. No more procrastinating! Master studies will be tackled in the coming day.Check back then to see what I do!

What is Overpainting and Photobashing?

Hey all, had a change of plans for today. Instead of delving into master studies, I started my morning off with a cup of hot chocolate, warm breakfast and the second episode of Art Cafe. This episode featured Anthony Jones and Dan LuVisi  and covered the topics of Painting, References, and Photobashing. What is Art Cafe? I'll provide the video I watched this morning below.

Having watched this, I decided to change up my direction for today's artwork. It gets a little stale when doing master studies, so I broke it up with my first attempt at an over-paint. Now if you've watched the video above, you'll understand that this kind of "cheatyness" is fair when used well. Using it well means having a strong understanding of the basics, value, perspective, color theory, shape lingo, etc. At the moment, I'm not there, but it didn't stop be from playing around!

The below painting did use a photo to start with, funny enough I stared at it for a good minute before being "okay" with working on it. I'm very happy with the outcome, completely changed the values and hue from the original picture let alone hair and other elements.

Was a ton of fun, however I can tell I'm not quite yet ready for photobashing / overpainting. 

Master Study 1-22-16

Hey all, ran into some hiccups today! It would seem my computer is unhealthy and needs some attention, so I had spent the day more or less doing maintenance. Luckily I found some time to complete a study of "Evening Mood" from William Bouguereau. Having discovered him when looking for master studies, I noticed that his figures are extremely well done, anatomy, values and even mood. I've got a lot I can learn from this guy if I wish to become a character-focused concept artist. Suffice to say, I'll keep studying this artist.

Surprised myself by completing the initial shapes in 15mins. Spent an hour refining, had a bit too much fun!

Since my computer was preoccupied today, I had a chance to get bac to some reading. I'm almost done with reading Color & Light by James Gurney, I look forward to trying out some atmospheric perspective in my next environment. Something I hardly accounted for (but knew) in my last environment attempt. Speaking of which, my next master study that I post, for tommorow, will be from one of James Gurney's work!

Draw Box - A Highland Meadow

Today I took my first genuine shot at environment and landscape painting.. ish. Today I was given the challenge of creating an environment, a Highland Meadow. Learned from my lesson yesterday by actually doing thumbnails this time around. Also decided to keep it purely grey scale as to continue working on my values. I know where I want to go with them, but can't quite nail it. I've got a list of master studies for later tonight that may help. For now, here are the thumbs and rough of the Highland Meadow. Both took about an hour each.

Thumbnails. Kept the values subtle intentionally. 

Rough of 2nd Thumb. Light source was to be on left side. Added lighter and darker colors, also played with edges. 

Tonight I have several master studies I plan on completing, and in various subjects as well ranging from people, environments and creatures. Each should only take about 15 minutes, or at least that's the time I'm allotting to each.

Draw Box - "Damned" Alien

Not everything I'll create will be awesome, and that's okay. While I may not have been able to impress myself and outdo previous work, I did have fun! Today I was given a draw box challenge, "create a monster for the game Damned." Personally the idea of slender grey aliens wig me out, so I figured I'd do that. Under one condition, I decided to stick to a monochromatic color palette, meaning one color and varying ranges of saturation and value. This was to hopefully get me to focus more on better values. Still need to practice, a lot. Master studies are on the menu for tomorrow.


The draw box challenge is capped at two hours, in the future I hope to learn how to better budget my time and raise the bar of quality. For this one, again I loved the challenge but the execution flopped.

Silhouette / Linework of the basic idea. Had a weird skin peeling back to reveal teeth idea. 

I could critique this for days. I think the most valuable lesson I've learned however is don't skip thumbnails. 

What's with the orbs of light? Something something teleportation, something something hint to the player that you're about to encounter the creature.

Recon Operative and Drawbox Challenges

Good news, I don't necessarily need my right index to make art! Well, while I technically knew this, it's good to see proof. So what have I been up to? Not as much as I'd like to have normally done due to the injury. Thankfully it's starting to heal, but it may be out of action for a bit longer. Here's to hoping that I'll be able to get full range.. normal fingerness soon.

Not wanting to touch the Motoko piece until I'm healed enough, which may be now, I decided for the last week to read books and work on a comfort-zone painting. What better than to paint a cyberpunk chick! Specifically inspired by the Deus Ex universe. I absolutely love the design aesthetics in that game, and look forward to the next installment.

Until then, here is my take on a character in that universe. Stupidly I went into it full swing, and failed to do as many design iterations as I think I should have, but I'm happy enough with the final. Below are some process shots as well as the final.

Final. Started off as a simple doodle, decided to do more with it and experiment with different stuff.

Process Shots. Sadly her expression got lost in rendering. Oops, lesson learned. 

Last but not least, I have another quick practice piece I did in about two hours. Long story short, my girlfriend has created a "draw box" where I pull ideas out of a box that she wrote on a slip of paper. Depending on how much I like it, I can take it anywhere from a sketch to a full rendering. These as well as more master studies (which are included in those boxes) will be my daily submissions here on my blog.

This "first draw box challenge" is to create "a god or goddess inspired by quartz & crystals." what came out was a simple coloring and line-work. Had no idea how to render crystal, and the planes-of-face practice got killed in the color sadly. Unfortunately that's where I spent most of my time too! So didn't budget my 2hrs well.

On the plus side, I do love the background.

I'm looking forward to competing another challenge tomorrow, roughly I'll spend anywhere between two to three hours on them. Be sure to check back then! Thanks for reading!

Master Studies 1-8-16

Busy day today, however I was able to tackle my Master Studies for today. Using  Week 1 of Noah Bradley's Art Camp  from yesterday I decided to do quick color studys on John Singer Sargent and Albert Bierstadt. My goal was to grab the right colors and roughly put them in the right place. Was so much more difficult to nail the colors than I expected!

The Bierstadt initially gave me problems when trying to get the right colors, a lot of relative based colors there. 

Master Studies 1-7-16

Hey all, stitches are finally out! Woo! Unfortunately I'm still painting and drawing without a normal grip on my pen, and muscle memory is making it tougher! However I've decided to not let my injury slow my progress, so I decided to train my eyes! I figured what better a time to study the masters and compositions.

Last night I took a moment to sit down and watch Week 1 of Noah Bradley's Art Camp which was targeted at Master Studies specifically, and how to get the most out of them. I decided today to take a swing at composition studies, shapes and value representations of the master's pieces. Thanks to artrenewal.org I was able to find a subject to study!

Below are some studies of Jean Leon Gerome's work, which I just did today! More master studies tomorrow!

 I'm also doing studies involving still-shots from the movie Oblivion, so I'm using movies as reference for teaching myself good composition and color. Here is a work in progress on that, been really training my eye to pick out those colors and shapes.

Top right didn't finish the ship, but it communicates it enough!

A place to put a few things

How to start? Just start. I often have to remind myself that bit of good advice. My name is Doug Burbridge, I'm 24 and this blog's goal is to share my journey to take my hobby and turn it into a profession and lifestyle. I am an artist, a digital artist, aspiring concept artist and illustrator, more importantly I’m an ideas guy; a conduit of projecting an idea to an image. My thing is characters and character design. This blog isn't strictly about showing off my art, it's not just about business, it's also about how I'm making that art, who I’m studying, what I've learned, why you might ask? So, I don't forget what I've learned.

So let's get started, who am I? If you asked me that a year ago, I would have proudly said that I was a Founder & Leader for an Online Gaming Community for Planetside 2, for three years, with up to 700 members. One of those members became my girlfriend eventually, and is my biggest supporter yet. We kicked it off with a vacation in Vegas for a convention, SOE Live 2014.

Truthfully, I've always been an artist, ever since my mother gave me a pencil & paper when I was little, I drew batman, over and over again. It made my teachers insane, they asked my mom, “does he draw anything else, can he?” Eventually I became the art kid of the class. After a divorce and a few years I moved to be with my mother in New Jersey and was lost throughout Highschool, I even had a cool Intro to Maya course that gave me a basic 3D understanding. However, despite this, I was still lost. It wasn’t until the end of my last semester that I realized world building, character making and the designing of weapons, vehicles and machines all came under one roof within art - concept art. Although I had graduated, I had no actual idea on how to get there...or even where to start.

Fast forward to 2014, at SOE Live I got to meet an idol of mine, the Art Director of Planetside 2, Tramell Ray Isaac. He gave me some solid advice that helped get me on the right track. At the time, I had the ambition of going to art school, specifically Art Center College. However, after being given said advice from TRay, along with artist Noah Bradley'a artcile about not going to art school, I said, “fuck it. I’ll teach myself.” I decided not to be that guy in debt, but the guy that overcame shitty odds.

I decided I needed a change of environment if this was going to work, escaping into artwork wasn't good enough to do the job, so I moved back to my fathers in Missouri. In the summer of 2015, I had a glimpse of how hard I could work: uninterrupted, unmoved, and finally focused. That didn't last too long. I had to get a job with a set of skills I didn't have, tried to make the best of it. Decided it wasn't for me, and moved out with my girlfriend to our own place. Calm, quiet, relaxed and focused.

So there it is, most people say hello, but I went ahead and shared my life story. Since moving in I've been cracking down by studying, reading amazing textbooks on art such as “Drawing the Heads and Hands” by Andrew Loomis, “Dynamic Figure Drawing” Burne Hogarth, “Dynamic Anatomy” by Burne Hogarth (thanks to my HS Art Teacher, I should have opened that book a lot earlier to actually read it) and “Color and Light” by James Gurney. Below are some of the studies I did with all those anatomy textbooks.

Head & Feature Studies using Loomis Method

Torso Studies of Hogarth's work
(bottom right my own shenanigans)

Leg Studies of Hogarth's work

Outside of those traditional studies, I've also been listening and watching lessons, tutorials and interviews from industry pros of today. I owe a lot of my education to Matt Kohr with CtrlPaint, Anthony Jones and Shaddy Safadi. The Laws of Increasing Awesomeness are going to be my compass henceforth. Naturally I drool at the work of those, at the peak of their career; people like Dan Luvisi, Maciej Kuciara, Eytan Zana, and others they all serve as a reminder to me that if their hard work can get them there, so can I, right?

My Rulebook

Ultimately to say I'm a self-taught digital artist, would be a lie. I'm a student to the masters before me, and those around today. My appetite for knowledge is just as intense as my actual appetite for food, and I'm a big guy!

So, more importantly, I'm here to share my art and process. So let's get to it.

Recently, most of December, I've been working and studying full color compositions, because well I got sick of looking at linework from anatomy studies. Besides, it was time to learn something outside of anatomy so my quality could improve because it's still bad.

Out of the gate I went to my comfort zone, let's do a study of a pretty lady's face, because let's face it my faces are still rough and they need work. So I considered this a culmination of all that anatomy study plus some color & lighting practice. This was the final, I was and still am super proud of it, but know I can still do better.

Used a film grain effect thanks to Dan Luvisi

Using a photo ref, for both the anatomy and scene lighting I came up with a composition featuring Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. I felt its composition, at the time, was pretty nice, it came out quick and read well early with the lighting. Below are a handful of iterations. I decided to hold off on full render until after the holidays. I regret that now, but, more on that later.

Basic Sketch + Paint

Deciding the Scene

Does depth of field look cool here?

Introduction of Red/Blue Light Blending

Anatomy Fix - Thanks Liquify Tool

Final Rough.. Note, maybe different pants for classy sake.. 

After this I decided to mess around with something different, how quick could I sling (digital) paint down to make a scene. Well, it more or less came from when I was working on gestural figure warm-ups in the morning, One of the poses reminded me of a woman in a kimono, so since my girlfriend is all about Japan I decided to surprise her with this quick paint. It was done in about an hour of work. Most of the time wasted went to noodling around with techniques. I was impressed with what I did, and so quickly. Something I must get better at if I aim to become a concept artist. Quick to produce, and easy to read, right?

Tried using photos for texture detail, levels adjustment broke some values, oh well, it's super rough.

To future and current readers, this isn't the beginning, but it is a huge step forward for me in my pursuit of becoming a professional. Naturally I don't want to be alone in this journey, so that's why I'm sharing it with everyone, also I desperately need peers!

Unfortunately late Christmas Night, going for that extra piece of refrigerated cold fudge, I cut myself like a dumbass with a butterknife, a visit to the ER and 5 stitches later here I am. Stitches come out on the 4th, and this is why I regret not attacking the render on the Motoko piece. Luckily I wrote this out, and can still do eye-based practices and can still paint blobs! I'm currently working on some thumbnail studies of scenes from the movie Oblivion, again focus on composition and "storytellingness." Those will get shared here in a few days.

Lastly, I also have several Ctrl-Paint portfolio builder courses to check out, hopefully I'll have more design than just pretty women to offer in my portfolio!