Okay I no longer have the time to finish this. It's fan art for a League of Legends character named Annie. This is a steampunk skin of the character. I have to move on to other things but I did some quick coloring and tweaking to finish it.

The past 3 months or so I've been practicing speed painting. The reason for doing this is that well everybody is doing it it seems. Also it's a great way to make art. I've spent quite a bit of time developing my drawing skills with Photoshop, and i can say I've come a long way despite how bad human interface devices are with PC's. I still think there is a ways to go before virtual illustrating will be as good if not better than using a pencil, or brush to make art. I can also say, necessity is the mother of invention and that the limitations of a tablet and small screen has forced artist to work in a way that's good. Tablet illustration techniques have proven it's self over time to be a great way to make art. Feeling that my art lacks the powerful and wonderful compositions that have become so common place with digital painting I've ventured into this world, embracing it's basics. Not to say speed paintings techniques where born from digital art, but it's limitation force artist to work in a way that's coincidentally taught by old masters who also speed paint. I will say the interface, the tablet, really takes some the basics of painting and forces artists to approach art in the way that oil painters have been, or are taught to paint. For one oil paint brushes have long handles. Artist are taught to stand back as far as possible from as painting when painting. This is to allow the artist to see the relationships of the entire painting, it's colors and values, and compare against each other allowing for artist discrimination's to be made in an effective way. A tablet attached to a laptop forces a digital artist to painting with art zoomed out to fill the small screen, like standing at a distance from a painting, forcing people to work in the best possible way for putting together and compositions. This is good practice. Practice that I've taken up, now that I'm no longer pursuing comics.

Here's a study. I'll post more when I get a good ones. I'm happy to say I finally got the hang of painting, the visual cues from drawing are different than painting and it made painting hard for me. Well painting is not completely different. I just needed to sort out how paint a shape in way that gave me the cues I needed to see my next move.

A combination of new photoshop tools, new wacom drivers and some practice getting used to the new settings and tools and I can actually draw in photoshop. I mean no rough sketches and then redrawing em, the old build up technique I was always forced to do in PS cuz drawing in the program has always sucked, I mean just one layer one pencil tool, and a eraser and finish as I go approach. I love it. I can die now.. achievement unlocked. the pic below shows my reference, my wacom driver settings and my drawing, which I did in about ~40mins. 

some cartoony characters

And now for something different. Cartoony stuff.  Well maybe this isn't so different, I'm simplifying stuff, over exaggerating stuff, and streamlining contours, yet keeping a sense of realism. It's funny to me but cartoons characters all seem to have some sort of connection with Somatosensory cortex. The body proportions that are over and under emphasized seem to reflect the minds relationship of sensory input in proportion to the brains allocation of brain mass to the particular senses, Image of Somatosensory cortex, bottom rights shows a humanoid illustrated in relation to sensory brain mass. I like to think there's a connection here, peoples physical experiences create story lines that develop based on human relationships to the significance of importance to human sensory attributes. So how the Somatosensory cortex relates to images may explain why people like cartoon characters. How this might be important is still beyond me.

 (to side note: For me learning how to draw or paint isn't just a matter of memorizing how things look, though there is a visual vocabulary that develops over time, but conditioning the minds reflexes through practice or exercise to sense and exploit visual relationships. In other words it's more like personally learning how the mind works and relates to things and using it to an advantage as a way of improving how to draw or paint or develop ideas).

enough of the left brain back to the art, the right brain.

update,

Quick drawing that turned into a hipster monster.

Work in progress here. Seems I've got "tricks up my sleeve", enough of em to start making work like this. To proudly add it's not to hard now that I've got enough painting techniques sorted out. Lack of modesty aside I'm really looking forward to the final product.