All those teeth in the clouds!

After a small accident where I managed to bruise & sprain both wrists recently, I had a bit of a forced vacation from sculpting. I decided to have a look at learning some digital drawing to keep me from going any more nutty than usual.

It needs to be said that I'm even less of a 2D artist than I am a 3D one. I admire those who can work up a good creature concept on paper before they ever dive into clay and took this as an opportunity to at least learn a few techniques.

The first idea I'm trying comes from Aaron Sims' Gnomon Workshop video, 'Creature Design in Adobe Photoshop'. I managed to borrow this one from a friend & it's filled my skull with more than a few ideas! Now I'll be buying it to remember all the bits I've already forgotten, but one idea really sticks with me... finding inspiration in clouds. Just like we all did as kids, he shows a technique for the imaginatively-stumped (That's me) to look for designs in photos of clouds, smoke, flames, etc.

I'm using the cloud example from his dvd. Having spotted something interesting in there, I fired up my trusty but ancient Photoshop to mirror the picture as a starting point for the drawing. I won't even attempt to try to provide a tutorial, but I'll show you both my cloud 'base' & the work in progress so far. I'm having a lot of fun with this idea & I'll keep trying these as a weekly excercise I think.