Sketch Dailies

Posts Tagged ‘Sketch Dailies’

Summer Art Dump

Sunday, August 23rd, 2015

Oh, it’s been ridiculously long since I last posted, hasn’t it. With a full-time illustration job and a weekly webcomics I hardly have any creative juices left for extracurricular doodling, and when something does finally let itself out onto the canvas, I usually rush and post it on Facebook or Twitter for the immediate gratification of audience feedback.

Some things have accumulated, though.

Commissioned Work

My good friend wanted to surpise her roommate with an original Kyrandia-themed poster (one of her favourite games) for her birthday. How could I say no to that? Do you know how little Kyrandia fan art there is online? Well, now there’s a little bit more.

I was approached by an Israeli publisher who’s translating The Dresden Files series to Hebrew, and wanted my illustrated Dresden on the cover. It took a while to get me on board (so busy, no time, what stress etc), but I’m a big Dresden Files fan, and have already done some character designs a while back that the publisher liked, so now Hebrew Dresden has my art on the cover!

My new obsession in the realm of content conusmption during work is the actual play podcast One Shot. Actual Play podcasts are recordings of tabletop roleplaying game sessions, and the group in charge of this one is full of improvisational comedians who make every episode an absolute joy to listen to. They try different roleplaying systems and settings every month, so you also get to learn about new games and get a glimpse of how they work before trying them yourself. Their other podcast, Campaign, is a single ongoing game set in the Star Wars universe and played in the really cool system Age of the Empire. I’m not a Star Wars fan, but I adore this story and the characters in it. So much so that I couldn’t help but do some fanart for one of the episodes, which happily led to also being commissioned to draw a T-shirt design for their Patreon’s T-shirt club.

Doodles

Whenever I feel like doodling something but have no place to start, Sketch Dailies is still my go-to place: if the daily topic tickles my artistic fancy, it’s a great trigger to get sketching.

There’s also an Israeli group on Facebook that serves the same function, but focuses on hand-drawn sketches, with a time limit of 30 minutes. Awesome for getting back to classic media sketching and practising quick execution of ideas.

And when all else fails, one can always resort to a quick fanart or a bunch of random face doodles. Or, uh, an illustrated daily food diary (lovely idea by a Twitter friend, but unfortunately I lost interest after just one (albeit yummy) Sunday).

The usuals

I’ve also been doing some fun new stuff at my day job. After drawing my “Freddie and Friends” characters almost exclusively since I started working with Viber, I recently designed a few new characters, slightly less furry this time. I love my foxes and panthers, but it’s cool to shake things up and do something a bit different.

And if you’re into webcomics, gaming or general geeky stuff, I hope you’re following Eran’s and my webcomics, Up to Four Players. Here’s an exclusive peak at the sketchy phase of one of our recent strips. See the final here (is that considered clickbait?..).

That’s it for now! Hopefully next time will be before 2016…
Aviv

Tags:fanart, One Shot, Sketch Dailies, The Dresden Files, Up to Four Players, Viber
Posted in Illustration, Sketches and WIP, Work | No Comments »

See ya 2014, Hiya 2015

Sunday, January 4th, 2015

Ah, New Year’s Eve. That magical time of the year when I remember I have a blog, and it might be a good idea to update it every once in a while, even if it does take more effort than just throwing images on my Facebook Page (which I recommend following for more frequent – if less verbose – updates).

Lots of things happened in 2014, but everything also stayed the same. Like every year. I started a job, left a job, started a new one; made new friends, drank new beers, made cupcakes; we got used to our flat, found a new one, learned to despise one specific UK gas and electricity supplier; got married. Same as always.

And like always, work and every-day life tried to steal away my time and energy, but occasionally I showed ’em and managed to draw something, and this year several “support” groups helped.

I’ve mentioned Sketch Dailies before, and here are a few more drawings this group pulled out of me in recent months:

The Israeli Daily Speed Sketch group lets its members pick from three different subjects (or combine them) every day, but the twist is that you have a time limit of 30 minutes, and must draw on actual paper, like in the days of yore. It’s a cool challenge, and even if you don’t read Hebrew it’s nice to see some of the interpretations – and try to work out what the daily subjects are. I haven’t been very good with keeping up and had to scroll way back to find these three sketches of mine from the group’s page…which, curiously, all feature birds.

But what made me draw on paper most – and even get a new set of inking pens – was INKtober, a whole month (guess which) where you draw a small piece every day, using only inks. The only prize is feeling part of an internet-wide art project and flexing those inking muscles; and it’s apparently enough, because people created some gorgeous stuff, some of which can be found in INKtober’s Facebook Page. With superhuman efforts, I managed to ink about half the days of the month, and you can see the results in a dedicated album on my Facebook Page. Here’s a small selection:

Not sure if I mentioned on the English version of the blog, but good friends of mine are running an Israeli podcast about roleplaying games (“On the Shoulders of Dwarves” for you Hebrew speakers), and they recently ran a very successful crowd funding campaign. I donated two character portraits based on supporters’ descriptions, and here are the results, Connie and “Gentle” Gorthang:

Teaser!

One of the stretch goals of said campaign was for me and Eran Aviram, one of the podcast hosts, a good friend and long-time creative partner, to start a webcomics about gaming and gamers. It’s been brewing in the background for some time, and will go live in a couple of weeks. Here’s a small sneak preview:

The webcomics is called “Up to Four Players” and will be updated weekly in both Hebrew and English. More details coming very soon!

Have a wonderful and creative 2015, and here’s to updating more!

Aviv

Tags:character design, New Year, Sketch Dailies, Up to Four Players
Posted in General, Illustration, Sketches and WIP, Up to Four Players | No Comments »

Drawings from here and there

Monday, June 23rd, 2014

It’s so easy to toss every finished piece on my Facebook Page and forget to properly upload any of them to my blog. The plus side is that every now and then you get a nice big apologetic post full of forgotten stuff.

Two commissions (more or less). The first is for a bidder in an Earth Defense Force 72-hours charity marathon held in Israel, who wanted a combination of Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore and Marvin from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for his profile picture. The second is a birthday present requested by Leigh Lahav for her husband. She got several of her artist friends to draw him as a character in his favourite TV shows, and picked Firefly for me.

Character design and sketch pages inspired by The Dresden Files, an awesome urban-fantasy detective book series by Jim Butcher.

And three pieces for the Sketch Dailies Twitter group, which comes up with a daily topic and has pretty much the entire artistic internet draw their interpretation of it. The topics here are Goldilocks; Rapunzel and Tarzan; Captain America, Lady of the Lack and Unicorn. There aren’t really any rules preventing topic mash-ups, which is good, because otherwise I’d be missing on a whole lot of good ones.