Fun with a Cintiq

Fellow IMCer McLean Kendree introduced me to this exercise. You simply take a screen snap of a scene from a DVD, set it to one side, make a blank canvas that's the same size and then start sketching. If you watch the sequence that your image is from a few times before you begin sketching you'll have a sense of the mood, environment, and character(s) that you just won't get when working from a photo alone.
Since I struggle with color, this exercise helps me to learn to see the colors more correctly. I first guess at what they are, then when I finish a section I use the eyedropper tool to sample the colors from the screen snap and check them against my sketch. Wow, were my shadow areas way off! But now I know what I really need to work on. McLean can finish one of these in about 15 minutes, but it's taking me closer to two hours! With time I hope to catch up to him, and finally get all of those shadow areas right the first time around!

Oh, and another tip: try working in three layers when you start one of these (sky, background, foreground). I had to move Orlando to the Southwest halfway through, and if I haden't used layers to begin with that would have really slowed me down.

Catnap

Quick sketch done on my Cintiq 21ux of my Maine Coon Oberon. He looks so comfortable when he snoozes that it's hard not to join him in a mid afternoon nap!