The Not-So-Usual Suspects...

Yesterday while reading the techniques section in my new favorite book (The Fantasy Artist's Figure Drawing Bible, hereon known as TFAFDB) I had an idea while looking at page 44 and 45 on relative proportions of fantasty characters, it reminded me of a police lineup...so here are the suspects, a female drow Elf, a dourhand dwarf and a dark wizard....I don't even want to imagine what the crime was ::shudders::

I took a break from the water colors and used my Faber-Castel artist pens (less pretentiously known as markers).  I'm reasonably happy with the outcome, but I'm most pleased with the dwarf...I'm apparently better at drawing people shorter than I am....which considerable limits things  seeing as I'm 5'3", so I will work on taller beings some more.

From the Sketchbook: Dwarves

Another day another page of the sketchbook, this time two pages actually.  Once again, I used the Fantasy Artist's figure drawing bible, this time to work on drawing dwarves.  Here are two excerpts I'm fairly proud of, once again I used pencil and watercolor:

From the Sketchbook: Wizards

Some more sketches using  the Fantasty Artist's Figure Drawing Bible, this time Wizards...I'm less happy with them than I was the hobbits I made yesterday...but it's progress...wizards are much harder to draw than I thought they'd be:

From the Sketchbook: Hobbits

I apologize for my brief hiatus, my birthday was Saturday and Easter was the day after, so Hubby took time off and from work and we traveled a little and bummed around watching SG-1 the rest of the time, It was fun.  For my birthday I picked out a book called "The Fantasy Artist's Figure Drawing Bible" by Matt Dixon and it is wonderful.  I used his character guidlines on halflings to create the doodles on this page:

The sketchbook I'm using is for multimedia so I decided to experiment with watercolors on my pencil drawings, I like the effect, here is the closeup of the female hobbit:

Try, try, again...

Mermaids seem to be the one bit of fantasy art that gives me the most trouble, I'm not sure why...so today I decided to get help on it in the form of a tutorial I found on elfwood and while I was at it I joined elfwood and made a profile.  Without further ado, here is the mermaid...looking at least a bit more normal than the others....I pencil drew her and then experimented with brushes in photoshop:

The Salamander

The Salamander is a legendary beast who seems to have two identities, there are ordinary salamanders that are quite normal (for lizards) and then there are the mythical salamanders that erupt into flame, there is a long list of accounts of fire salamanders on wikipedia, but one of my favorites is by Leonardo da Vinci who wrote this about the salamander: 


"This has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin. The salamander, which renews its scaly skin in the fire,—for virtue." 




 Today I made a piece of jewelery with wire and beads to represent the salamander:

Everyone's favorite bookworm...

Unless you're some sort of muggle I guess...but seriously who doesn't love the character of Hermione Granger?  Today I drew her in a classic Hermione pose...I was going for a more comic book feel but got a children's book illustration feel instead...wonder why? lol
 Oh and once again I used Deviantart as a resource for finding the reference.