Practice, practice and guess what, more practice!

Hey readers, it's that time again, time to share what I've been up to. As the title says, I've been practicing a lot. Some practices I'll show here, others may become full projects, where as others even got tossed into the trash.

So why all the practice? Well the girlfriend and I decided that the draw box wasn't enough! Now I have a Practice Box that includes things like Master Studies, Anatomy Studies, Texture Spheres and more! The draw box is now being adjusted to creative works only, two hours worth of sketching or quick.. ish, iterations and concepts. Still working on that one, favoring learning fundamentals so I'll let the clock run on some stuff. Which is why I don't have anything to show from that (yet.)

So yesterday I actually had a special challenge of doing 10 different skin tones / textures in the form of a ball. The catch for doing that many, was a trip to get some frozen custard as a reward. Which was totally a win-win since I'm really happy with how the practice came out. I even had a bit of fun with it, rather than doing simple balls of skin, I added a bit of character & detail to each. Admittedly though, it felt like the volume was still lacking. Started off low contrast, so that might have been why, or it could be because of no cast shadows and different lighting on each object. Either way, check it out!

Played with lighting on each ball as well. FX details come from Luvusi's tutorials.

Funnily enough the day before, I had received another practice involving a sphere. An odd one, but it was fun to try to wrap Chinchilla fur around a ball. Luckily they're ball-shaped enough so rendering hair on a sphere didn't require much imagination. Reference picture left on image for fun, I avoided using the grey on the coat, I was shooting more for the texture than local values. 

Ref. pic left on image for viewer benefit. I avoided the coat pattern, was shooting for texture more than local value.

Lastly, I'll be sharing the practice I just completed, thankfully I was using a different set of muscles rather than texture practice. The practice was to study the muscle anatomy of a human back, get it, using a different set of muscles! Ha. I'm funny right? I'll stick to the art. In this study I spent about an hour reviewing some muscle lessons from Proko, as well as observing similar studies to identify muscle location. Not as focused on names as much as location, function and general shape. 

Used a Proko model image to get a rough idea of muscle location by tracing over it and color coding it. Sketched from Burne Hogarth and reapplied coloring to locate muscles.

I've got a character concept in the works as well from a draw box, and that's all I'll say about that. Alright, that's all for tonight folks! Have a good one, thanks for reading!