hahaha i love that monk guy 
keep on going! I cant wait to see more of these!
Sketchbook Thread of Zephyri
anandpg
#122
Hey Sam! your painting is coming along beautifully…!!:bounce:eager to see how it turns out!!.. The monk caricature is really cute!
Amerasu
#123
Your work is so inspiring! Thanks so much for sharing it. You have some gorgeous pieces here and your sketches are just wonderful.
I love the couple image you’re working on. It’s very beautiful already and I can’t wait to see it finished. And the little monk guy is so cute! Great likeness too; a really good caricature.
I’ll be back often!
TheFirstAngel
#124
kick ass piece hunny, loving it to its last single pixel. stunningly thrilling composition, calmity and violence in such a sexy, emotional impacting and yet highly esthetical way. pure awesomeness :love:
Zephyri
#125
Glenn: thank you, it’s wonderful when people say I inspire them, and very much so in your case, your work inspires me greatly too. Sounds like a good partnership to me!
NR43:
The hardest part I think is trying not to rush… not wanting to learn too much at once…
ahaha, I honestly don’t think I’ve got the hang of that one yet… i was even trying to animate the other day. Whooole different ball game, but one I’d dearly love to develop my skills in. I think the hardest thing for me was accepting that it was okay if a drawing was bad, or even if I had a whole run of bad drawings. It’s great now to be able to lay them aside and not get frustrated, simply learn what i can from them.
Sirron: hopefully, we’ll both even ourselves out. And good luck with painter!
Kosmaty: Thanks! Don’t think I’ll post all the monks, but maybe one or two of the better ones.
Anandpg: thanks m’dearr. It’s still feeling good!
Amerasu: Like I said to Glenn, it’s wonderfully humbling and exciting when people say my work is inspiring, as I get so much inspiration myself, it’s nice to know I might be doing that for someone else! And thank you for the kind words.
Sacha: thanks hun! Still working on getting my women to your sexy standards… lol! prods now stop staring at my art and go finish your own!
Updates:
Worked extensively on the female’s face now, again looking up images once I felt like I’d gone as far as I could on my own. I either do it that way round, or start with reference, and once the basics are down, go it alone. There’s still alot to do, smoothing things off, and adding the little details here and there like freckles, texture, that kind of thing. This way I don’t slavishly rely on reference too much for the bits that are personal to me, like facial features and expressions, but I can still capture the little things that you inevitably miss if you’re going off memory alone. Also started to add in some rough background elements, to make sure the image is still working as a whole - it can draw you into details so much you lose sight of the overall, so it’s important to keep checking that. I also flipped it and aside from adding some more blood to balance the right hand side, everything looked pretty much okay, which almost never happens!
I’m trying to keep the skin tones slightly different, the female consisting of lightish pink highlights, muddy pink midtones and blueish-green shadows mostly, and the male being more saturated, yellowy highlights, sandy to peachy midtones, and shadows that range from almost sap green to sienna, to dark umber (spot the traditional painter here…), so that when the image is finished, the two figures should still be easily readable against one another, rather than looking like one mass of flesh and limbs. One thing the rembrandy copy I did taught me was that it’s important to define edges. This doesn’t mean drawing dark lines round everything, but shading dark, against light. Even at the parts of the bodies that are close, and similarly lit, the edge of one limb will taper ever so slightly off into a blended shadow. It is this that give roundness to the figure, and it’s important to pay attention to blending it, rather than simply drawing a darker line around something that isn’t standing out.
Another animated gif, so you can see how I flit about the image, changing odds and ends, trying things and removing them in the case of the extra blood and marks, because it was getting too busy, detracting from the couple.:
Rebeccak
#128
Very nice so far, can’t offer many crits at this point since I’m sure all is in flux - but definitely looking forward to seeing further iterations of this, and thank you for the gif! Incidentally, what kind of surface will they be placed on? 
Trunks
#129
Hi Zephyri!
Nice work on this piece … it’s really great! I am sure you will kick this to ultra-hyper-awesome Keep it going
wasker
#130
Sweet man, I dig that you use a gif to show us the steps it’s fun to see how other’s do it and what they decide to change. Really good pick of skin colors aswell.
crits:
-
His right foot is extremly small compared to his left. Same goes for her right foot.
-
What’s up with the background? Is it a floor or are the characters ‘pasted’ to a wall? The bullet holes indicate they’re on a wall unless someone stod directly above them and fired down in a straight angle. Maybe I’m being picky, but consider how bullets travel and how they hit surfaces. They would probably be more elipse or triangular depending on the density of the floor (for example marble gets triangular marks and wood would get more elipse shaped).
Anyway, it’s a great picture and I’m looking forward to see it finished. 
rasmusW
#131
hey sam!
nice sketchbook you’ve got here.
really like your last one. seems you’ve made a really nice “empty” look in their eyes. which actually can be quite hard to do propperly, without looking goofy (-imo).
-r
Cyanid
#132
wow great job!
I love the skintones…the blue hues on the shadowpart are really good, they make the painting interesting.
Really good anatomy…did you use any reference for the guy?
I’d say, finish it and get a frontpageplug 
nelchee
#133
Hi,
I’ve seen some of your work at DA long time ago (I remember the portrait of you with the Devil, and your sister with Death). I love how you do various styles. I love experimenting myself. Keep it up, this whole thread is amazing and so inspiring.
Iridyse
#135
I’ve been a long time lurker in your thread. Just wanted to tell you how beautiful and inspiring your art is. I would have posted earlier, but I’m a little shy around the artists I admire
Zephyri
#137
Work has been inevitably stopping me from getting as much of this done as I would like, but I’ve still managed to steal a couple of hours here and there to work on it.
xvampire: thank you… i think this might be the first piece I’ve done that really has that natural touch to it, I’m quite happy with it!
Anandpg: thank you!
Rebecca: thank you, and by all means, should you see something you think looks off, feel free to say. And as for surface, not quite decided yet. Originally I’d thought glass, more for its symbolic connotations, but steel would work nicely too, as it’s literally pertinent to the storyline, and to have them lying on shattered steel would mean their impact had to be huge. I’ll probably paint and see what it ends up looking like.
Trunks: thanks! And I’m aiming for a sort of painterly ish feel for it, so no hyper realism, but still a good deal!
Wasker: Good call on the foot, I think his lower foot needs to be bigger. Though both of their smaller feet are actually tucked up behind his other leg… like this: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/28998417 - which is one of the refs I’m using for the male, which is probably why they look small. Hopefully more rendering will sort that out.
As for the crit on the bullets, I know a bit about weapons ballistics from having read up on it as research for the novel these two come from, and as it stands, the bullet holes aren’t realistically placed, unless, as you say, they were hung on a wall! However, the piece is meant to be symbolic of the two characters and their relationship and the hardships they’ve both endured. So everything is chosen for its symbolic nature, rather than how realistic is it. I’m also going for a more graphic feel over all, with the shape of the blood pool, the bullets, guns and holes, so they’re head on simply cause they’re more graphic that way. But had it been realism, you’d have been absolutey right.
abyss103: Thank you! That look kinda happened in the early stages of painting by accident, I’d planned more emotion than that, but when it happened, I stuck with it! Happy accidents, as the wonderful Bob Ross would say.
Cyanid: thanks! And yes, the model I used is actually Ben, who offers his services here, one of the images is in my reply to wasker. And I’m using lockstock’s images and a couple of my own shots as ref for the female. Faces are pretty much made up though. And ahahah as sad as it is, I made that my goal when I joined this site,so awesome was the work that graced it… not sure whether this is, but if not this one, I’ll keep working!
Nelchee: hey! Nice to have da fans here too, yeah that portrait with my sister remains my most popular. Pretty girls and gruesome beasties always popular! And thanks, always a joy to hear I inspire.
Roja: grins thanks! And as my main good guy, he couldn’t be anything else… though the lead bad guy gives him a solid run for his money, I have to say… I love my creations…
Shreya: aw, no need to be shy, especially as your work has been a real inspiration to me too, the piece you got into Exotique 2 has always amazed me since i came across it in the wip thread, and I’ve been trying for that liquid skin tone you achieved there ever since! Not sure I’m there though… 
Tascha: Thank you! That’s a very big compliment coming from you. And I have to say thanks… when you left that reply about shadows on my dA page… something just slotted into place… it was very strange, and thats what I’ve been experimenting with here. So you’re kinda responsible!
Aaand here’s the update and gif:
This is mainly a continuation of the refining process with the brush work, and trying to get the light to be read uniformally across the whole thing, so that areas close together share similar ambient light, that shadows have similar colouring etc etc. A couple of changes made to anatomy, mainly in the woman’s hand/arm which was a bit on the long side, and the guy’s bottom leg, which was a bit short in comparison to his other. Also made his foot a little larger as per Wasker’s suggestion. I realised that the reference I was using for the woman wasn’t matching up too well to the way I’d been painting, mainly due to the fact I’d made her face deliberately lighter than the reference pointed to it being. (the main reference I’m using for the woman is the top middle shot of this pack: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/27256310/ by Lockstock). The image wasn’t great at revealing detail in the shoulder area I needed to lighten up, and rather than guess I took my own shots using a tripod. Some of the lighting I’m guessing at, though, even with my own reference. It’s a question of finding the balance between accuracy and what looks good with the image.
Also hunted down some reference of Sig Sauer handguns, and painted those in loosely, taking care to make sure the highlights in the silver metal, and even in the matt black reflected the surroundings. For example, the highlight on the spent gun in the bottom left is sampled from the very bottom corner of the painting and brushed on lightly.
And something I discovered while painting in the earrings was that metal is much much easier to paint if you leave the bright highlights til absolute last. Work in subtle changes of darker, less saturated hues for the body of the metal item, add in a couple of streaks of more saturated mid-lights and then a dot or two of very bright highlights on top of the saturated mid-lights, usually with a tint of the ambient light colour in them. Probably very obvious to those who already do it that way, but i used to go from mid tone and do shadows and highlights at the same time, which didn’t work as well. dur
Zephyri
#138
And here are two other quicker works done in between. I found a fellow deviant with a love of the silver foxes, who had this awesome original character, called Alex the One Eyed. About 3 hours from start to finish, photoshop colouring over a pencil sketch, and photo-manipped background.
Affectionately titled: I’ll show you old, kiddo…"
And another sketch for Michael A. Laflamme’s novel, Blacksent. This time the assassin, Vrus. Who is not all he seems to be.
Used the blocking in the silhouette method for both these pieces, as I used a photo ref for both and expanded on it, and am really surprised with how well the method works, especially as it seems to make it much cleaer when proportions are off.
Trunks
#139
Hi Zephyri!
I like the assasin piece a lot Very nice style and it’s cool you draw a background for him. Maybe next time detail the background a little less but do some more lines to show more of the background (like some buildings). This way the spring does not seem to be directly besides the character.
Nice drapery by the way
Keep it going
Samanthie
#140
Hi Sam, One eyed is also quite a character, worthy of his name. I’m looking forward to seeing assasin develop. I noticed you do excellent clothing sketches. Do you do all of them from your imagination?