Redesign of a Redesign

The art book is just about finished and I had to rework the cover art. I chose the Kali piece because the color scheme best matched my brand, with the grey and blues. But the original artwork, needed to be revisited.

When I first drew this Kali piece I was very pleased and thought it was one of my better projects and illustrations. A year later after looking at it, I saw many flaws. Things that as a  younger artist I didn't notice, or I simply didn't want to address. There were issues with her anatomy and subtleties in her pose that I reworked.

Normally I am lazy and dont want to redraw a piece but I am learning that redrawing is better than piecing a poorly drawn illustration back together.

I started with redrawing the anatomy. I am a Frank Cho fan.. scratch that DISCIPLE so my initial structure is heavily influenced by his work.

I tend to think my blue lines look better than my final drawings

 I also really like inks over blue line pencils, to me it looks cool.

Final digital inks

I added a tonal value study to get by base values

I then added some general lighting and shadows, followed by tonal adjustments for hue. 

My personal critique is that some of my shadows are still too muddy and dark

 Comparing my original illustration to my current, the anatomical differences are now glaring

Getting in close you can see how lazy my inks were. Now they are still lazy but getting more professional looking. 

Kung Fu Color Study

Today was rough. I am mentally, physically and emotionally spent. I feel awful and have a horrible migraine.  I have had very few days just to draw what I want and relax. I did my art exercises today (check my instagram) but today I added a color study. Enjoy.

Initial Pencils

Color Study 2

digital chalk pencil study

Developing the online brand ... and the growing pains associated with it

As a requirement for final portfolio I must come up with a website. Here are the three different views

480 Breakpoint for Mobile Portrait View Ports

 760 Breakpoint for Mobile Landscape View ports

  1280 Breakpoint for Desktop View ports

I am blessed that I already purchased my domain name and hosting years ago. I had a site up and running it was very dated. I chose to redesign the look and feel of my page so that the branding matches across all media, blog, face book, business cards, sample prints and printed art book

I wrestled all this past weekend getting the layout correct for my website. After literally fighting with Adobe Muse, I got my  break points to work right.  I blame Muse because I am too immature to accept the idea that it could be user error. If I would have only listened to Mary Ziimnik's instruction and paid closer attention to breakpoints in responsive design, I would have gotten this sooner... but hell better now then never.  

The light bulb literally just came on! I was very frustrated because the layout worked on one device and not another. So I went to viewportsizes.com to reference common view ports. This was most helpful. NOTE TO SELF break points are at 480, 760 and 1280! anything below 480 should view well on portrait mobile devices, 760 should  view well on landscape mobile devices and 1280 should view well on most desktop devices. I tested these on two different tablets and two different android devices as well as resizing on my desktop. And guess what! It works!  I like responsive design and used a dynamic style approach but still kept my layout static. The reasoning is that I want the site to look the same and not dynamically change as the view port resizes for this. I will revisit the idea later but for this final portfolio project I am finding that basic is better.

WHAT SUX IS THAT I ACCIDENTALLY UPLOADED THIS SITE TO SOUL OF A HERO instead of DLMAFFETT.COM ! This content replaced my web comic content. No worries though because every thing is backed up. I will be a while though till I get it all sorted back out. The good part is that I needed to clean up the SOAH website and get it ready for cleaner and more polished look, with some wordpress interaction. Ugh. Growing pains and learning lessons!

This may be rudimentary to some but may help give others that breakthrough they needed. If you need to discuss feel free to drop me a line in facebook messenger

for those who are interested below are the old layout and look for my personal art site. once the new site is developed and launched these layouts will no longer be used

home

about

resume

portofolio

If you are a real glutton for design punishment here is my original layout from 2014. VERY Dated!

Here is the layout for the Tactical Pencil Website... This will be changing some too. I will tone it down a bit but I like the icons and look. I want to have a linked and shared brand with my personal art page as well as my business. 

desktop

 tablet

 mobile

Working out with my Sensei today

Got to do do some figure and gesture drawing with my good friend and sensei, Afua Richardson. We did worked in our respective studios but were able to draw together using Google Hangouts and sharing screens. We did 1, 5, 10 and 20 minute poses using  figurosity and new master's academy.  Here area some of today'd doodles, some digital some traditional.

20 min figure gesture (digital)

10 min  gesture (digital)

 1 min gestures (traditional charcoal)

2 min gesture (traditional charcoal)


5 min gesture (traditional charcoal)

Back in the Art Dojo

I have spoken at length with my tutors, mentors and professors and they all have suggested that I go back to the basics to build on the foundations that I have learned thus far. In doing so I am striving to put in an at least an hour a day doing nothing but gesture and quick figure drawings.

 A large criticism is that I dont have a true "style". It was then explained that this is because I look at various different artists and styles and tend to emulate them. Though I would glean important things from them, my style was not developing into something unique and as a signature. I was also told to focus on artists whose style I enjoy and want to emulate, to develop my style. I chose the talented Frank Cho, and Tom Bankcroft on the professional industry end, Orr-Malus on the indie side.  I enjoy both of these two because they have such basic clean lines while their styles are highly expressive. So for these next few mothns I hope that you will see an influence of both of these great artists in my style as it develops.

These 5 min studies are done using traditional charcoal pencil

 These exercises should strengthen my understanding of anatomy and flow for my drawings. I've noticed some progress just this week. For that I am thankful.

Hue and Value? That is another story and struggle for another day.