From the Sketchbook #1

I've been doing so much digital work lately, I've been wondering if my traditional chops were going to crap or not. Well to be honest, for a while I had a really hard time drawing ANYTHING in very well in pencil and it began to depress me. It gave me mixed feelings about doing so much digital art recently. I love watching my digital skills get better and better but I always want to be able to maintain my traditional skills as well, they always come in handy. After a long sketching funk. I've finally done some stuff I'm happy to share!

Here's the first page of my brand new sketchbook. A lot of people always say the first page is the scariest but I've never understood that too much. I like to think of it more as a fresh start, there are tons of pages are ready to be filled and I just want to jump right in!

The top left piece was somewhat inspired by a creature found in the first Silent Hill game. It's not exact, and I wasn't looking at any reference at the time, but I was definitely thinking about Silent Hill when I starting drawing that guy.

For the bottom drawing I just started drawing the eye, with no real direction in my mind at the time. As I drew I decided I wanted the eye to be sitting inside of a really saggy eyelid. Then I thought about how this guy would blink, so I added a very scrunched upper-lid that folds back like a hood, I then tried adding interesting shapes connected to the bottom of it and it started looking like a worm or a caterpillar so I just went with that idea. I curved the body around to add some interest, then decided to hint at an environment behind him with the plants. I'm really happy with this one and I plan on taking it to finish as a creature design piece for my fantasy portfolio.

For the top right drawing, honestly it was just something I drew to fill more of the page. I don't really know what it is, just a cute little face I guess.

As you can probably tell by the "#1" in the title, I plan to make more posts showing my sketches in the future, I'm really gonna try and push myself to draw with a pencil more. Stay tuned for more posts From the Sketchbook.