Overcoming the Digital Artist Toddler stage

[Grand Wanderer]

I quit drawing in high school and only picked it back up a few years ago.  To facilitate my attempt to climb the learning curve I started what the 30 Days Project (drawing one piece on a specific topic every day for 30 days).  I have just completed my most recent 30 Days Series: 30 Days of Characters.  I've included what I thought to be the top 5 pieces below and the rest can be found on my site along with the previous 30 Days Series.  I do think I have improved yet again, but the first image in the series is also in the top 5, and the series as a whole was hit and miss.  I think this shows that I have plateaued some, so my next series (starting in October) will the 30 Days of Lessons using the lessons found in several digital illustration books I've picked up.

I am profoundly proud of the Evil Office Monkey.  I literally laughed out loud while drawing him.

Comments and criticism is what I'm after, so lay it on.

Rar!


Balance


Lord of Trees


Evil Office Monkey


Padre San Justicia

[Grand Wanderer]

My latest project, "30 Days of Lessons" just wrapped up yesterday.  Filtering through the thousands of online tutorials for something reasonably well-written and doable and then wading though it's questionably constructed steps was a singularly frustrating experience.  Good artists don't always make good teachers.  In the end, however, I did learn quite a bit.  Filters, masks, layer effects, brush settings, and custom brushes are no longer foreign concepts.  Still, it was aggravating to get to the "your image should look like this" step at the end of every tutorial and compare my work to that of the semi-pro who produced the tutorial.  The difference was usually about like holding up a tonka truck next to the crisp, tight, refined lines of a sports car.

So now I'm hoping for the kinds of people who write these tutorials to tell me what it is that I'm doing that creates that "tonka truck" look.

Chili


Little White Flowers


Shiny Green Drops


On the Rocks


Moons

[Grand Wanderer]

I've noticed that Illustrator doesn't appear to be an overly popular program around here, but it was one of the programs I wanted to learn so I dropped 30 Days on it.  The results show the single most significant improvement to date, but that's largely due to the fact that I had never used it before.  Regardless, thanks to a combination of textbooks, tutorials, and experimentation I now have a reasonable familiarity with Adobe Illustrator CS4.  Here's what I made:

Arcane Circles


Tree Worlds


Harnessing Motion #4


Clouds


Multi-Function Temporal Compass

[Scomocabaks]

thats great Digital art is so interesting and in the next few years Im sure it will be huge. I worked with all the digital stuff like that but I always come back to the traditional drawing/painting. Im sure youll learn ALOT with that tablet though