Roller Derby Girls

Last night Jake Spicer's Draw group hosted another event at The Old Market. Emma Sandham-King was the host model this time and she presented us with her Roller Derby team kitted out in their tough
looking sports gear. Considering the fact that none of them, apart from Emma had modelled before, they were amazing and great fun to draw. I was working on my iPad for a change as I'd already had a private session with the wonderful Jasmine that afternoon using pencil and watercolour (I'll post these up later) so I fancied a change of technique. I was using my favourite art app for the iPad- Artrage and discovered a trap to avoid when using a digital app for drawing. If you zoom in to the image to draw a more detailed head after already drawing the body it's very easy to get the scale wrong as you can see fro the middle right image where the girls have enormous heads. I didn't have time to go back and do the heads again but I'll watch out for that in future. Still learning!

Digital dabblings

Having been getting into producing digital paintings in Photoshop for a few months now, I thought I'd try expanding the possibilities with a new drawing programme called Artrage. I downloaded Artrage 3 from the internet having read a bit about it in Imagine FX magazine. It takes a little while to get used to a new programme's interface but luckily for my pea brain this one was quite easy to pick up and soon I was experimenting. The two things I like most about it are the way you can get brush strokes in the oil paint brush setting that look really real and also you can get a nice smooth line with the pen a setting which I haven't been able to get since the programme I used to use -Streamline went
kaput! I'm informed by cartoon buddy Geo Parkin that Illustrator can do this but I don't have Illustrator.

Anyway, here are my first stumbling attempts at starting a painting in Artrage and then tickling it up in the more familiar (to me) Photoshop. I'm having great fun with this and hope that one shining day I'll be paid to work in this style.