The working concept here is "Harvest", as in harvest time on a farm and also organ harvesting. Besides a peach orchard, the farm is home to several dozen rabbits. The farmer, in order to make more money, had allowed an enterprising yet twisted biochemistry student to perform experiments on the rabbits. One of his experiments starved the rabbits in order to find the biochemical markers of cannibalism. The rabbits suffered greatly until one broke out and discovered a holy revelation - a can opener. The rabbits gorge themselves on canned peaches and plot revenge - to harvest and sell their enemies' organs. I started with some shapes I found interesting and hope to keep it simple, elegant, and sinister.

love hearing your thought process. thanks!

I wanted to give this a go! In the roleplaying game I run, there's a creature that I wanted to spend some time designing because it's the crux of the whole campaign- a fractured temporal monster called the void beast. The first image is a character named Grubbus who is collecting the void beasts- but is secretly a flesh suit housing a void beast inside him! That was the jumping off point. So I have two sheets of exploring the idea of the void beast. And then a final bonus sheet with an idea of what the void beasts might look like when they are re-unified into one gargantuan final form.

I think that ideation is one of my weak points, I usually end up drawing my first or second sketch, so I am glad this assignment forced me to work some more on it 🙂 I managed to finish only two pages for now, as I am rather slow with drawing. I will continue to work on it, but I am posting it now in case I will not have enough time in the next few days 😅 I will add some more sheets when I will finish them. Also, maybe someone will have some critique which will help me with my next pages 🤞 While working on these pages I have written a short blurb for the concept: Every year the harvest spirits gather under the full moon to celebrate a harvest festival. But what happens when the family of spirits discovers an old spell letting them possess all living things? Yep, you guessed it! It’s a full-blown pumpkin infestation! 🎃🎃🎃 Hope you like it!

As promised I did some more variations of the Army of Gobbling Apples. I wanted to post it as reply of my first post, but I am not able to find it. I also can't remember if I posted it under assignments or comments. Is there one place where we can see all the comments related to this course? Anyways sorry for double posting, I include the old ones, so everything is together. Also I will continue brainstorming about the Cute Eye Monster until the next lesson. Looking forward to the upcoming episode :D

Hey everyone, here’s my ideation sheet. The character/creature is a mix between Legume(s) and 1920’s Gangster, called The Mean Bean. Any feedback would be appreciated!

Here are several pages of a variation on the Harvest Man Theme - The Blighted Ones - Spud people who are infected by a terrible sickness or combatting it. Apologies for the sloppy handwriting!

This was great! The subject was kinda tricky to me because the, let's say, popular harvest elements, is something I only have seen in movies and games. That season is different in my country, and the word "harvest" evokes something different than pumpkins, scarecrows and cold weather; is more like sweet bread, hard work, family reunions, oranges, tangerines, and the Día de Muertos (the Day of the Dead). So I tried my best to mix and match what I've seen in pop culture and what I've experience.

I’d first like to say I’m a huge fan of your work! I started out with the idea of a rotting food/garbage sort of creature and eventually found myself really liking the idea of chunks of earth being carried around by roots. While I did my initial “note” drawings small I found myself getting carried away with the idea! This has been a really fun creative exercise, and I can see where this concept stage of your workflow can help lead ultimately to a better idea through the process of elimination, or “kit-bashing” in a sense. I’m looking forward to future lessons!

I have two kids and have been juggling all the stuff you mention for years. Here's something I wrote on Facebook for a friend of mine a few months ago. She has a baby and asked if I had any tips on how work drawing and painting around her family and other commitments. Maybe it will be helpful to you as well. ----------------------------------------------------------------- My biggest advice is to set your goals really, really, really small to begin. Like, way smaller than you think is reasonable. Also, you can take advantage of a psychological thing where the hardest part is usually starting something. You can combine these in really effective ways. When Charlie was little he was a really tough baby, and there was very little time or sleep. My goal then was to open up my sketchbook and make one line every day. That's it! Most days I would think "well shit, I've got my sketchbook open already, I might as well draw a little more". But some days I said "nope—my goal is 1 line and I did it, now I'm going to take a nap!". (and of course, some days I would just be too tired to even make that one line). Eventually I was doing that consistently enough to raise the goal to just a face or a hand or something. But if I found myself skipping too much I'd lower the goal back down. On a related note, I'd recommend killing whatever notion you have of how much time is "worth it" for art. I used to think it wasn't worth painting if I couldn't get 2 or 3 hours of uninterrupted time to work. As you well know, 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time is basically nonexistent with a family. So, 5-10 minutes of painting is better than 0 minutes. Find ways to be OK with less. You may need to simplify your subjects along with this, so you can actually finish some smaller pieces. It's not a good time to work on your life's masterpiece. Another piece of advice related to that is to put in a little work optimizing setup and cleanup, with more emphasis on optimizing setup. If you're in a world where you might have 15 minutes tops, you can't afford to have all of that 15 minutes be setup time. Eliminate your excuses and make it as easy to start as possible. Can you leave a small easel out somewhere, with the palette ready to go? Can you leave the sketchbook out and open with a pencil on top? Can you set things up somewhere that you'll see or have to walk past regularly, rather than tucked away in the spot you never go to? Keep all that in mind for cleanup as well—leave it ready to go for next time. Also—are there things you can change or compromise on to make setup/cleanup time faster? If you really want to paint, is there a way you can paint digitally and be happy? Or could you switch to pastels? Or just stick to black and white? Last piece of advice—get creative in finding the "cracks" of time you have and how you can fit art into them. For example, in pre-COVID times I got a lot of art done on my train ride into the city. I also used to be the first one up and could often cram in 5-10 minutes. I also found lots of little skill-building exercises that I could do in the margins of my notebook in meetings at work, or waiting for something to load on my computer. These were mostly little mindless, rote exercises, but at least I could feel like I was progressing on something art related. Anyway, hope this helps! I love talking about this stuff. And if you start doing any of this, I'd be interested in seeing literally anything you work on—even if it's just a single line! I think there's something valuable about having some community for this type of thing. ----------------------------------------------------------------- That last paragraph was written for my friend, but I would also love to see anything you work on as well! I do think it's really important to have some community for stuff like this, and this seems like a good place for that!

I appreciated in Scott's Shapecarving video where he shared his view of communicating with the audience with silhouette - essentially using shape to "tell" as much as possible. I always like great shape and composition in others people's works, but on my own I tend to rely too much on shading so I'm excited to try some new things.

I'd put a bit of reflected light under the jaw and to better define the planes of the cheek which remains in shadow, maybe try to make the texture of the skin and maybe a bit of volume to the hair. Either way it might be fine if you leave it like that, like a sketch.