jhubert

Well, it's been more than three years, but I've finally decided to plunge back into art. This spring I started with some minor scribbles - buying Corel Painter X3 in the process - and last month I decided to spend the cash for a Cintiq Companion Hybrid - that's the Cintiq model that can also double as an Android tablet.

Which, as you can imagine, was a major paradigm shift for me - suddenly, digital painting is a lot more fun and a lot easier than before. Having direct line of sight between my eyes, the stylus tip, and the plane on which I am actually drawing is as useful as I thought it would be. What I didn't expect is how important the ability to pan, zoom, and rotate the screen with touch gestures would end up being.

I have been reading some books on sketching and designing, in particular these two (which I strongly recommend):





And decided that at first I should put the focus on rapid sketching of scenes instead of spending lots and lots of time on any particular image. Sketching the essentials of a scene is also one of the essentials of painting and drawing in general - if those basics don't work, then the final image won't look much better no matter how many hours you spend on it! My two major sketching projects at the moment are requests made on Google+ and sketches based on reference images I took on bicycling tours.

However, these two use reference images and, admittedly, a fair amount of tracing. I also need to draw from real life, which is where my Cintiq's Android mode comes in - I plan to do lots of "urban sketches" with it, capturing scenes as I see them with my naked eye. Unfortunately, this has been somewhat frustrated by the cold spell Germany is currently going through, but I plan to follow up when the weather gets warmer again.


So what are my goals? Well, ultimately I plan to create illustrations for my own future role-playing game supplements. The first one will be my "Cold Frontier" wilderness campaign, which should be the easiest, since wilderness paintings are not particularly complex or difficult. But in the long run I also want to create illustrations for the "main area" of my "Urbis" campaign setting, which will require a lot of expertise with architecture - in particular, 19th century/early 20th century architecture. And, of course, I need to practice drawing actual people (including fantastic ones, like elves, dwarves and other fantasy races) at which I am very bad at.

In any case, expect a lot more updates from me in the future.

If you have a Google+ account, you can request portraits from me. The rules can be found here.



All donations for finished portraits will currently go towards buying a replacement desktop PC for the one that broke a week ago.

I hardly did anything on this site for the last year. The reason for this was that I was too stressed out with writing my PhD thesis, and thus had no time for drawing.

However, as I have successfully defended my thesis last Monday, this will hopefully change - and I have some vacation coming up in August.

Furthermore, I have decided that I will spend a large amount of my pay rise on this device:



This is a iRex 1000S. It is the largest ebook reader currently on the market, with a screen size even larger than that of the Kindle DX. And what's more, it comes with a Wacom tablet embedded into its surface - which means that this can be used as a digital sketch block!

Here is a video demonstrating this feature.

Sure, sketches done with it will require some postprocessing and further work on a conventional screen, with a conventional tablet. But various artists have told me that I should go out more and practice drawing from real life instead of online references - and this gadget will help me do so while still working digitally in every step of the process.

I will throughly test it and tell you how it works out for me.

I've mentioned the Arcana Wiki before. Now I've posted a call for art contributions to the Projects Forum. Take a look if you are currently looking for something to draw.

And I am sure that painting a man sticking a ferret down his trousers will appeal to someone...   

I frequently post to the Politics forum of DeviantArt. And all too frequently, some posters start threads with completely unsubstantiated claims of the type "My secret research indicates that Global Warming is a Hoax/Obama is a Muslim/Killer Bacteria from Space will kill us all!"

But now I have the ultimate answer to such posts:



Feel free to use it as well.