MW Design | Tips and tricks from a hat

Hi gang!

Well I guess most of us are having some sort of holidays and so am I, even if they are very humble. But in this special time I would love for all you to abandon all sadness and stress, enjoy yourselves and spend the time with the ones you love. Even if it's awkward or hard be positive!

Wish you all a cheerful time, big presents and a mouth full of cake!

NEWS: Yes I still live! I'm just very busy with work stuff and "family" related stuff it's not easy but I manage to go by. I did not forget about you guys and I still have you around my thoughts in spare moments when my brain turns off to escape from stress.

Page UPDATE! - http://mwdesign.bocian.im

I waited for this for a long time but finally I got the clearance to post stuff from my work. I'm doing stuff for this one company and it's my first serious project to create a series of illustrations for their clients coloring books.

(Plus some additional projects.)

Hi people!

Today I wanna present you with a interesting find from the deeps of internet. A page with useful and free copyright textures. If you are a concept artist or a beginner who doesn't like to bury himself in low quality textures that they find on Google images, this page is the perfect solution.

http://mayang.com/textures/

The textures are crisp and in high resolution, definitively will come in handy! If you want all of them you might support the page and purchase whole bundles, that are reasonably priced.

Although playing with textures is fun and they make a lot of concepts pop out... yet remember to not over use them. Avoid the texture monster!

Hope this will come in handy for you!

Remember to smile! Bocian

Just a example of how many types of variations you can pick from!

From zero to hero: Day 5

Time to switch it up and take some new animals on my target. So why not felines? Their build is pretty similar to canines with just a few other proportions changed which makes em the perfect target to focus on.

From zero to hero: Day 4

From zero to hero: Day 3

From zero to hero: Day 2

Time to step things up with some proper anatomy. As a artist who started drawing toons I would never think of doing such in depth studies. Remember if you wanna progress you need to practice new things.

From zero to hero: Day 1 Hi people!

This time I uploading something a little bit different. A small progress track for myself that I playfully called "From zero to hero". The basic idea is make a couple of sketch pages when possible and post them for you to see and to keep track of my progress! 

Just a small foreword about these sketches.

On the first page I just did the basic training, drawing from references to pick up some basics like keeping proportions and visualize the space. Pretty much the same goes for page 2 with a small try at how a dogs leg works, still it's all loose. Page 3 is just letting go of everything to create some fun designs.

Hope you liked it!

Tips: How to make a quick collage Hi gang!

Today's topic is about creating a collage. Why you ask? The answer is simple so let me explain. 

Every artist works with references. From the beginners to the great masters, sometimes you might work with one picture or a bunch of them and here comes the part when it's rather annoying to work with 5-10 pictures. It's hard to make place em all on your screen and it clogs your Photoshop or other graphic program. 

This little tip will help you make a quick and clean collage of all the pictures you want to use. Is it just for reference or for color sampling with your painting.

1. First you need a program called Picasa it's a free program. (Just click the name to be forwarded to the download page.)

2. After opening Picasa you want to sync your image folders, you can pick which ones you want instead of synchronizing all of them.

3. Click a folder like in picture 1, then on the top press "Create" and "Picture Collage"

Drawing: Inspiration! - part 2

Second part of the inspiration post but due to the limitation of pics I had to split it. In this part I present you artbooks from games: World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria and Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

Also don't forget to look at art galleries like Deviantart or other blog sources like blogspot and tumblr! Many amazing artists post their sketches and work that might influence you and make your hand draw and create amazing things!

Drawing: Inspiration!

After some pointers about what is worth reading and where to seek helpful information. It's time to put it all together to good use yet we are missing one more ingredient. For me it's inspiration!

Everyone can have their own source or ways of finding it. One can go out to a local park or zoo, another might find inspiration from books or movies. For me my greatest inspiration comes from my friends and artbooks.

Welcome again!

Going with my idea of helping freshly baked artists, I present you another entry that might be useful. Today's topics are links. Note, just to be fair those are links that I personally use and found helpful they aren't in any way sponsored advertisements.

To start of I will present you a few tools that might help you with the general idea of gesture and figure drawing. Pages like Posemaniacs are great help since they have a ton of different poses that you can practice on. A interesting feature is the ability to make it a bit more challenging and set every picture to cycle every 30 seconds. This will make you draw faster and think faster about how to compose your characters. Something similar but with animals can be found on Artists.pixelovely.

Next stop will be these two pages that can provide you with some extra materials and inspirations. Living Lines Library is a great page that gathers plenty of model sheets from your beloved cartoons and movies. Some are very basic, others include concept art and highly detailed character models, check out the Balto ones! Academy of Art Character and Creature Design Notes a blog page that might inspire you with great artwork and give a little in depth of what the artists are thinking while drawing their master pieces. All in all worth checking out.

Hello! My name is Michael but most people know me as Bocian. Being a beginner artist isn't easy, especially if you are surrounded with other artists and people you admire. I myself was shy about asking for help, always considering I'm good on my own. Soon enough I realized that I'm not...

Having another person with a fresh eye and some tricks up his sleeve is one of the best things you can experience. I don't want to name all the amazing artists that boosted my inspiration and helped me progress with art, designs and ideas. So I will simply say thank you!

A few times I was asked „What did you do to start?” or „What books you recommend?”Now I want to repay that kindness to all the fresh artist and those who are curious.

(To help the curious ones I made links so you don't have to search.)

  First books I would highly recommend for those who want to begin their adventure with drawing is the Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair. This is one of the most important books that will teach you construction basics, composition and some animation. For those who want to expand their knowledge with animation they can get Character Animation Crash Course! by Eric Goldberg. A very easy to read and understand book that will teach you some a bit more about how to create a nice scene and make your character pop to life. If you prefer something more technical you can try out The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams.

Taking a step forward for better knowledge of how the characters should work and be constructed you can purchase these amazing books, Creating Characters with personality and Character Mentor both by Tom Bancroft. The first one shows you how to create interesting designs for your characters as the second one show you how to make a character more life like. But in a still drawing sense not for animation.

Last but not least... definitively a the biggest of all books Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. This is a big compendium of Disney's finest art, describing the processes and thoughts on creating one of the most memorable scenes and animations.

But DON'T FORGET, these are only books. They will give you some ideas about certain things but nothing will replace practice. Draw everyday, do it a lot and put your acquired knowledge into beautiful work. Don't be discouraged and keep on doing what you love!

(Obviously this is only my opinion you don't have to agree with it.)