Pirate

Here is a little piece I did to help a friend of mine. He and his wife are writing a nice story and I'm creating some visual for them.
I think the lighting is pretty successful but I need to work hard on my anatomy skills... I should say application of my anatomy knowledge.
I know quite well anatomy. construction of it and physiology but I'm having a hard time putting it down on paper. I always something is off. I'm still doing a lot of practicing; fold study, poses, colors, light and shadows, composition, storyboard....etc.

I'll make some test with different value, I'm still trying to decide if I'll work with only black and white or like this one, with value

new work

I'm preparing a new type of work.
My inspiration came while thinking of a project that my friend Dave Fierson and I are working on.
I can't really talk about the project itself as it is in development.
But I can talk about my work. I've always be interested and attracted to composition, framing, light and shadows. I was researching some interesting camera angle and thought it would be interesting to work in a italian format, long and narrow. this format as always be pleasing to me. it's a little more than a 1.85:1 ratio. I could talk for long about that ratio but I prefer to talk about my ideas.
So, what I'm trying to express in my sketches... that I hope will become painting. Is a piece of a story. I have does frames in my head, maybe from movies, maybe from books or life itself. I'll present them and it's up to the viewer to make up the story, bring a story around it.
I'm first going to work with big plane of black, I'm still not sure of some aspect of the project.
-will I work in series with theme like :western, fairy tales, 50's space movies
-what medium am I going to use? gouache, ink, acrylic?
-will I only work with black ? use different values of gray? colors?

anyway, here are some that I did digitally, I'll try to post the one that I did on paper later today.

lunch sketch

...about 40 min sketch from an old photo. I found online.
Just trying to get different value with brush strokes.
I didn't want to set it symmetrically as the character is asymmetrical.
I'm not very satisfied with his eyes though.

head sketch

Just practicing. Using a nice brush from Mark Behm reacting like a real brush and gouache.
I sued as reference a set of photo from Paul richards blog. (caution there are some NSFW stuff there, amazing work though).
They aren't all in character but that's in purpose.

lighting

Long time no post!
but here is a test painting of indirect lighting.
more to come...

I continue to work on value and Lighting.
Still working based on photography found online. I tried here to recreate the under exposed feeling of photography.
about 40 minutes. I also liked the strong deformation the perspective was having.