Here's this mornings sketch (trying to do at least one decent drawing a day) the head of a Copperhead. Still a bit of a work in progress, needs just a little more doing to it, and I might attempt colour at some point too but that'll have to wait as I now for some reason want to draw a snake in mid bite with its jaws wide open....

nice one dango.....the left part of the mouth looks a little off?

cheers bullet

Cheers bullet, bizarrely no, thats how it looks in the photo I used as reference!
Maybe just a snake with a bent mouth?....lol

I might actually try modelling a Copperhead, it would be good for detailing in Zbrush for sure!

*edit* Actually bullet, after looking at the reference again it is a little off, but not so much that I can be bothered to alter it...haha, well spotted!

LOL its still a good sketch mate...I was going to say maybe the mout was off in the ref...you know when they eat they dislocate the jaw and it does some wierd stuff...

cheers bullet

Its actually not the left hand side thats out, I have his jaw a little lower than the ref so maybe thats thrown it a little. Never mind, I've moved on to a baby turtle now, couldn't find a decent snake in bite mode....

try this mate

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sn...w=1419&bih=731

Cool, I had done several searches but not found the right angle I wanted yet, or they aren't large enough so as to include enough detail. But there is a couple of decent ones there that might do the trick... cheers for the assist!

Still very much a work in progress, but here's the baby turtle so far, will finish him/her off tonight when I get in.

He looks adorable!

LOL how cool mate...I like that one

Nice sketches dango. Makes me want to post some of my Airbrush/Acrylic work that I have done on illustration board. Only problem is that I don't have a scanner big enough to scan the work. Although I could just take a picture of it, but you wouldn't see be able any of detail work.

Thanks Silver, Bullet and THX, glad you like him!
Not managed to quite finish it yet, will probably tonight if I get time. Am eager to get onto something new, have too many ideas at the moment, my head just might explode soon.....lol

THX: Would be great to see some of your airbrush stuff, if it's anything like your pencil work it'll be a sight to behold I'm sure!

the baby turtle looks just like the baby turtle i saw a picture of when i was looking for turtles.

the turtle is poking its head - excellent. :)

seriously though, good job dude, be nice to see a zbrush version

Jay

Go with what you find the coolest thing to draw.
I usually draw stuff from my dreams or sometimes when I need to visualize something for a story.

This is an old 2D pic I've made, but it was made by cutting different shapes from colors instead of painting them (failed on top corner left). Kind of like photoshopping. I wanted it to portray a dream I had about a pool in the sky where birds flew under it and the sun shone above the pool, but under the pool there was a grassy plain (which I couldn't add from that view though).

Cheers Dango, I will see what I can do.

Chirone: I was browsing google images for something to draw and came across the baby turtle in question so you probably saw the same pic.

Jay: Lol, cheers mate, I was thinking of doing something scaly in Zbrush soon, so maybe this little fella will be the one!

Silver: I just go for whatever Im in the mood to draw, at the moment its scaly things, or things with lots of cracks/broken surfaces, as they are interesting to look at and fun to shade. Liking that last picture, it is very dream like, tranquil.

THX: Nice one, I'll look forward to it!

I mostly used to sketch cars (with excess of vinyls usually) and stuff from dreams. But I never was good at shading, I prefer to do sketches and then put them on 3D but color them just to get an idea of what it should look like after texturing.
I might get back to sketching cars though since I'll have to model a few for that movie my friends and I are working on. The hard part will be to create stuff that doesn't exist in real life so I'll at most be able to use real-world cars as a general idea of car parts.

Finished shading Toby (my girlfriend named him...) this morning, am going to take a break from random sketches for today and try to get some writing and concept work done for my graphic novel, more random practice sketching to follow soon...

The shell looks great now. Looks almost like my pet turtle's shell X)) though she doesn't have flippers but webbed feet.

Cheers Silver,
I do like doing that kind of texture, shells, rocks, etc.

Here's todays efforts, the start of an abandoned cabin, will probably finish it tomorrow now as it's getting a little late.

Awesome O.o
What did you draw it on/in? Paper or computer? And if on computer, with pen or mouse?

Thanks Silver, it's just pencil and paper. But when I do any drawing or colouring on computer I do use a pen and tablet too.
Trying to get the cabin scene finished today but I have a jam packed day, if I dont manage to I'll probably finish it in the wee small hours of tonight....lol

That's some cool pencil. Mine just makes the paper look too shiny. I don't even have a scanner so I have to rely on a phone to import -_- In which case I must draw with a black pen over it if I want to use the flash. Else it doubles the work in Corel to find edges.
Maybe I should get a pen and tablet and just draw on the pc directly.

Something I'm currently working on. Looks crappy at the moment. An alien shark species (Zrigan) from the story I am currently writing on my deviant art.
Got to figure out how to do the lighting/shading paint so that it looks nearly realistic.
What makes it even harder to color it is that it has to be totally different than a real shark's skin color, a yellowish-brown is what I'm trying to get.

here are some images for you mate....in general the real deal is an off white colour underneath....anyway some images for you to get an idea of the colour scheme

cheers bullet

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=br...w=1440&bih=739

Thanks, but I am not trying to make it look like a real shark's colour. I'm trying to make them as I've described the aliens: with a yellowish-brown skin. Something more reptile-like. Also, need to make the eyes have a cold stare, maybe with some lighting on them.
Closest match I can find, but it doesn't have a yellow abdomen: http://www.google.com.au/imgres?q=le...:429,r:2,s:213

Current progress... I don't know what else to do to it.

Only changed contrast now. Looks a bit better.
For some odd reason, uploading PNGs here loses color and gets reduced to something like 256 colors. O_o

Rather use printscreen to show true color.

EDIT: My pc was on 16-bit color for some odd reason.

Looks great SilverFeather! Stay with it and your 2D stuff will get better and better!.

Well, I still like 3D more, but it seems I will need to improve on 2D when I might reach the texturing part. I've heard that there's a way to export the shapes so that they can be painted in a program outside Maya.

Yes, you have to export the shapes via UV texture editor. Yo have to make a snapshot of your UV's. Then export them to photoshot or what ever else you have to paint texture on them.

You can import the 3D to PS THX from memory and paint it in there, I did try it out but it was cumbersome and didnt seem as effective as UV maps. Though I am not experienced in doing it that way...I could be wrong?

cheers bullet

Wow, I didn't know you could do that from memory. Is that a newer feature in maya? I'm using a much older Maya 6.5.

Yeah, i've heard of that method... but i wonder if this works with Corel. I just hate the way photoshop is set up. It seems Corel beats it in terms of comfort in the workspace, but photoshop has a few things that I probably haven't discovered yet. So far I can't really find what PS can do that Corel can't except maybe open some other kinds of files.

And memory painting... I never tried that. No idea how it works.

As far as I know you can use any paint program you want to paint your textures with. You can export your UV's as a tiff, jpg, targa ect... Corel should be able work with any of those formats.

Yeah, maybe PNG will do since it has transparency too.
Then i can paint and update textures in real-time while having Maya on. (at least that's what I did with the planets).

And now I wonder what to work on next... I have 3 choices:
1 - draw the female counterpart of this alien in 2D (since it will be way different)
2 - continue designing the human character I was working on in Maya.
3 - just render next 300 frames of the Solar System animation. I gave up on space dust there since it both makes the scene render too slow and doesn't receive illumination anyway. Will just replace it with a massive cloud of stars instead and might re-render the first 600 frames again since it will only take 2 hours.

You can import OBJ, U3D, KMZ, DAE, and 3DS formats straight into CS3 and above. Again they are not too good as yet...I dont have CS5, that may have improved heaps.

THX bahahahha from memory....I meant my memory lol.

only 3ds? Hmm, let me test this, since i still have some of my models of 3ds max stuff left.
Uh... that didn't work.

Its a pain to do mate...I wouldnt nother...I dont have CS5 but CS3 just takes too long...its not ready yet...or my laptop just doesnt have the grunt. As THX said...quicker to UV map in Maya, export that to PS and paint it that way....

cheers bullet

So if CS5 is supposed to open 3ds files, why doesn't it open them though? This isn't a texture but an object in a scene. It doesn't want to open the scene.