Later today – maybe even by the time you read this – I’ll be relaunching kimsokol.com as a digital painting portfolio. I’ve already taken down the old front page of the old site. Now, with both my blog and portfolio moving on, this means there’s no place on the internet for my old work, the style I left school with. I don’t regret it – I don’t know how I talked myself into believing that I loved editorial illustration over narrative, and just wasn’t good enough to do the kind of painting I wanted – but at the same time, there’re still a few images I do like. So why not. Archiving them here, just so they’re still out there somewhere.
All of this work is minimum 2 years old. The oldest is, I think, close to 4.
That last one, titled “Perfectionist”, I especially wanted to archive. That’s because it’s taken on a life of its own, and seems to be spreading throughout the internet. If you Google Image Search the word perfectionist, it’s the second result – and not on my site, either. At first it was, and I’d get the occasional email from somebody looking to use it in a powerpoint presentation and the like, but now people’re finding it completely devoid of credit. This has led to it showing up in all kinds of bizarre places. After it was pointed out to me it was on Lifehacker, I got in touch and got a link back. Usually, I don’t bother – it’s on a lot of blogs in other languages, and in one especially silly case, apparently somebody on Uncyclopedia decided the message wasn’t clear enough yet. I think if this were still the style of work I was trying to promote, I’d be a little more miffed about the whole thing, but mostly I just find it interesting. Certainly (as far as I know) nobody’s making money off it. All the same, with my old folio gone, it’s nice to have this here, so if need be, I can still say “Yeah, I did that.”
I’m in the process of getting my new portfolio together, and as part of it, I’ve been tweaking some older images. This one is more than just tweaked – I spent 3 or 4 hours significantly repainting her, enough to justify the repost. (Compare to the old one, seriously. It’s much better now!)
Another CHoW again, finally. This time, the topic was the ritually-blinded young queen of an alien planet… lots of Queen Amidala influence on this one, not gonna lie.
I’m learning more and more what a difference really putting the effort into development can make to the final image. So here, just for fun, is the entire sordid process I went through this week.
Oh, and I keep forgetting to mention, there are two other places you can find my stuff. The first is DeviantArt (where I post far less than I post here, and nothing you won’t find on the blog), and the second is my sketchbook thread on Conceptart (where you’ll find a lot of studies, WIPS, and other such unfinished stuff that I never blog). If you like seeing this sort of process junk, be sure to check out the sketchbook thread.
Back at CHoW again, for the first time in several weeks. The theme was Alice, returning to Wonderland to find a world at war – check out some of the other entries, there’s some really good stuff for this one. I’m insanely happy with this, and I went through a lot to get to it – I did a completely different illustration for a couple of days before scrapping it and doing this one instead – but it was totally worth it. I feel like this is a real breakthrough piece. Kim is a happy illustrator. (And a very tired one. Have not slept much while working on this.)
Ref and ref source.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the artists whose styles have the most impact on me – Keiran Yanner, Massimo Carnevale, even going back to Drew Struzan and far back to Leyendecker – have a strong sense of sharp edges and facial planes. My own work lacks that sharpness, and so I’m trying to get a better sense of lines and planes in my work. Here’s one study in that direction – one hour, the length of a Ninja Mountain episode.
Full view this one; the full size is quite big.
Already posted this everywhere else, but not here for some reason. This is the party and a selection of NPCs from our big D&D campaign last summer, DM’d by Vince! I was the big blue guy (who you’ve seen before on this blog). I’ve been working on this on and off for nearly a year now, largely because, with no deadline, I just… couldn’t let go. Every time I opened it, I ended up fixing things I’d done before instead of moving on to new areas. It looks a bit piecemeal, now, and I wish I’d planned out the colours and composition a little more thoroughly. On the other hand, it was such a massive learning experience in so many ways, I can’t really get upset about any mistakes. Learning is good!
A quick warmup doodle to get back into art mode before I start chipping away at this enormous to do list. Jade from Homestuck. This is looking uncharacteristically anime, but Jade is so adorable, I don’t even care.
Went lifedrawing again! I’ve been in a pen sort of mood, so this session was INK-ONLY, which explains some of the goofy mistakes I couldn’t fix. Great model though, interesting poses and he held them well.
Another CHoW, this one for the topic “Royal Wedding”. (Gee, I wonder why.) Playing with the idea of civilization and the wilds, possibly because I was reading Midnight Tides at the time? I don’t know.
There’re so many problems with this, I don’t even. I’m not happy with how stiff my paintings have been looking; I liked the energy and expression of the initial sketch way better:
Eh. Learning.
God, this is boring.
I’ve been really drilling facial proportions and anatomy the past few days, after realizing how poor a grasp I actually had on, you know, that stuff. This is in theory an attempt at applying my learnings, but then I went around intentionally distorting stuff (oh, those eyes) and there wasn’t much to it to begin with so now it’s… yeah, I’m gonna stick with “boring”. Only posting because my desktop is littered with unfinished stuff and for all its flaws, this is done.
