Avalanche drawing session

I decided to work on improving my use of color, so I've started bringing my laptop to the live drawing session on Fridays. Doing a caricature from life is, in some ways, easier than doing it from a photo. However, translating the colors and lighting from what I saw to the computer was more difficult. I'm happy with what came out, though.

Moody

I'm taking Don Seegmiller's digital painting class, in the hopes that I might be able to break out of my characteristic way of painting and vary up my style a little bit. I tried doing this guy with completely new brushes, mainly Painter's loaded palette knife. I did this during class, and at BYU they've got Cintiq tablets hooked up to Macs, two things I'm not familiar with. Maybe it was just too many new factors, because I found myself unconsciously muscling the brush into the role I wanted it to fill, resulting in a technique that looks very much like just about everything else I do. Hrmph. Oh well, the semester's just started.

Elf+Magic+Fairy+Girl=Normal

Another one for the "Bad Fantasy Art" challenge on the Avalanche Blog. I wanted to make a design that poked fun at the stupidity (both in concept and intelligence) of the standard female fantasy character. However, I didn't get the chance to take it as far as I would have liked. That big round loopy shape in the background was originally a dragon looking up at her, but I ran out of time and patience. Someone suggested I should have also made her a "furry," half-cat-half-human, decked in revealing armor, but I wasn't sure I could paint that and still retain my sense of dignity.

New avatar

I stuck with the pug merely to keep a tradition. It's not that I have an obsession with pugs---I don't plan to even own a dog, ever. But there is something about their goblin-ey faces that I really like to draw.

Here's the full version.