Recent posts on Fantasy

Guardians to the Wall

by Thomas Schmall

Another drawing done at Amsterdam’s weekly Draw-Club. And with this I added new features to the webshop here: You can order this as poster print.

I’ve done this one without a plan or sketch (except for the dragon). Got me a very odd perspective there, but the flow and eye movement feels better to me than I even could have planned.

Guardians - Marker Drawing

“Guardians” – Markers on A4 paper

So in the shop next to the original, are also several art prints. It’s the first one, I’m planning to do more when this works well. Was quite a bit of work to figure out the shipping and setup.

A2 Poster Print - Guardians Drawing

The A2 Poster shown on the wall.

Red Pencil Witch

by Thomas Schmall

A little experiment with red pencils – thanks to David and Nadia for the tip. I think I overdid it a bit though … as usual. The paper got wavy from all the shading and going with white pencil over the red (even if erased) is impossible. Could be interesting to adjust my style to the material.

Cute Witch - 2012 - Red Pencil on Gray Paper

Cute Witch - 2012 - Red Pencil on Gray Paper

Ship Your Art!

by Thomas Schmall4 Comments

A great blog post I found the other day about shipping your program early. Found it on “Seth’s Blog“, another unmissable.
I like to read blogs from programmers and entrepreneurs. They think sooo different from artists. But their job is highly creative too – so much of what they say applies to painting.

How many artworks did you not “ship” because it was just not perfect? I hear this often. Many artists never finish bigger works, because there is always mistakes and room for tweaking.

Of course there are differences. Iterating an artwork is not always possible. But there are tricks to push it out there: Get time limits! Maybe join contests, or, as I like to do: Draw from real life. The obvious reason is that they force you to say “I have to stop now”. Maybe more importantly, I feel they also force you to only work the parts that really matter.
Because – you know it if you ever painted – any image can be infinite abyss. There is no limit to the time one can spend on even a single background detail.

But it makes me also think: Especially for our digital work it is possible to make new version numbers. Why do I do it so rarely? Just take an artwork from some time ago and make it better with what one learned. And show it off even if it’s not perfection.

Very hard for me… but now… uhh, oh, wouldn’t it be hypocritical if I would not post an artwork that I’m scared to show as it’s not done yet? So well, ok – here is one:

"Origin Princess" - beta version 0.2

"Origin Princess" - beta version 0.2

It’s a painting from one year ago and I started tweaking again. Right now the values are much better (heh,no need to release older version) – but what to expect for version 0.3:

  • Revamped anatomy of the hips and left arm.
  • Redesign of some important edges in the background (the boring long wall edge is bugging me).
  • Fixing the two-dimensionality of the dress.
  • A new pose maybe… if I get an idea for something more meaningful than “holds hand up”.
  • Anything the users might tell me – so if you see somthing you don’t like: Please, write a bug report in the comments. :)