The way forward

I kind of touched on this in the last post... But who read it anyway?

As I said I'm going to be cutting back on my personal projects and even my Illustration Friday submissions for a while.  I feel like all the images I have been making have definitely helped me progress a lot more then I anticipated but with other commitments and interests coming into play I need to start balancing things a little differently.

Currently I have 3 projects on the go.  One is a pinup commission that won't go away, but it is looking good.  The other two are illustrations for a book my dad is writing.  I'm going to try a different approach on the last two illustrations.  They will be developed with the intention to be used purely as black and white images.  If colour works with them then that's great but I want these images to be able to stand on their own in black and white.  I will also be approaching them in a fairly planned manner, coming up with rough comps digitally, then pencilling from those comps and then inking (traditionally).  I really want to get more traditional mediums into my work and if I can bring more pencil, pen and ink into my work to start with, then great.

It seems like some paying illustration jobs will also be coming in which is fantastic.  I'm hoping that more actual "jobs" will speed up my development by challenging me in new ways.  I think a combination of tight deadlines, working with a brief and drawing point of views that I wouldn't normally should do the trick.

Although I won't be doing as many personal pieces or Illustration Friday submissions for a while, I do want to use some of the time it frees up to work in my sketchbook.  I feel like my faces are good but the rest of my anatomy isn't up to scratch.  Drawing dynamic figures is killing me and  hands are also an issue.  So I'll be pulling out the anatomy books (Burne Hogarth, Andrew Loomis etc) and getting to work on those in my sketch book.  I'll be working mainly with pencils but do want to end up working in my sketch books with ink only for a while.

Going through my portfolio, I have noticed that there are two or three "styles" that seem to recur over a few different pieces.  I'd like to refine those a bit and get them to a higher level of finish.

Well, that's basically where I'm trying to go over the next few months... Let's hope it works out!