What a productive week, folks! I took the opportunity to study more about scenarios creating, first, thumbnails and then working on the composition and details and, wow, what a breakthrough I got! Check out everything that happened this week just below:

The cool thing about working with thumbnails is that you can explore various ideas using only simple, loose shapes. I chose to use three colors to emphasize the shadows and lighting: an almost black gray for the shadows, a medium gray for medium shadows, and almost pure white for the lighting.

The ideal is to make several to explore the same scene, so you can then choose which one best fits what you want to do. This also applies to concept art works. From what I read and learned this week, when the client asks you to make several thumbnails of the same scene, place, you explore various ideas and then some are chosen to be finalized — finalized in the sense that you then work more thoroughly on some thumbnails, giving more composition and detail to the piece.

As I really liked the result of that thumbnail, I decided to work on a composition on top of it, adding color and more depth. I had an immense breakthrough practicing this way, creating what I named “Volkalien”, an alien Earth formed by volcanoes and different rocks. Since I chose to use pink as the main color, I used green to emphasize some details - as it is a complementary color to pink.

I found it very difficult to work scenarios across lines only. Exploring thumbnails I came to the conclusion that working on scenarios works best for me when I use shapes - such as squares, rectangles, etc. This is for working on the initial sketch, then, when I go into detail, the use of lines is essential for me - especially for lighting.

That's what's cool to practice a lot. Little by little you realize what is best for you, which path to draw and/or paint works best for you.

When it comes to making portraits and/or drawing entire characters, I still prefer to create initial lines that I then paint little by little. I'm really enjoying sketching in shades of gray and then painting. As I mentioned in previous posts, it helps me to define painting values even better.

And that's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed today's post and, as always, there will be more next week! o/