After watching some critique - videos Wouter did for other students, I edited my designs, based on points that were applicable to me as well. This is really fun :)

Hey guys,

I started a 1 year Schoolism subscription. This is the assignment from Wouter Tulp's "Expressive Character Design Course" week 1.

I do them traditionally to get a bit of a break from all the digital work.

Topic was to push shapes of a reference - photo, after deciding on a topic for the character.

Here are some illustrations, I did a while ago for Ulisses Games Publishing and their Dark Eye Series. I grew up with the Dark Eye and working for that company was such an honor to me. More to come. 

Studies and things I did to practice and help me with the illustration.

To warm up, I did a study of a random google-street-view-location. You can use http://www.mapcrunch.com/ for this. It is great to get better with landscape painting, without spending too much time, finding something to paint.

Hey guys,

a friend showed me this great video by Scott Robertson on Youtube.

So in order to get better at constructive drawing, I decided to study a car. I used Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro. 

I find it better than Photoshop, because it has some built-in tools for drawing in perspective.

I looked at a photo of a cool car (cool to me, at least) and did a side-view study of it. Then I used Sketchbook Pro to plot my own perspective and get to drawing.

I could have cleaned it up way more. Actually Sketchbook gives you at ton of great tools for cleaning up, like ellipse guides and even french curves. But since it is only a study, I figured I learned enough from it.

It was definitely out of my comfort-zone and I struggled in the beginning. But after I managed to get past the initial problems, it went quite well and was actually fun.

So, if you are having trouble with perspective and constructive drawing, give this a shot and tell me what you think.

All the best,
​Flo

Hey guys,

I am back from a 1 week trip to Florence, capital of Renaissance art in Italy. It was a really good experience to see all those amazing statues and paintings of the old masters.

Being an illustrator I would never have guessed, that the statues actually impressed me more. So much story and expression with so little to go by. Only the human body and here and there some accesoiries can say so much. I will add a selection of my favorite statues to the end of this post.

Needles to say, that we spend a lot of time inside the museums, nerding out in front of statues. We talked about gesture-lines, how the eye is lead through the artwork, the anatomy, the expression and much more.

So here are some of the studies I did.

Just a bunch of studies, I have done digitally to get better at all kinds of things :)

I did another Berkey-Study, trying to improve brush-work, shapes and clear values.

After 45 min, I did an original sketch, trying to incorporate, what I had learned.

One of the illustrations I did, over the last month. It took a while to get it correct, but I learned a lot about anatomy with this one.