Thanks Nick, for reminding me not to neglect this sketch journal. At least I know somebody is interested.

I made the mistake today of installing the Painter 8 trial to dabble with and viewing the quicktime videos that accompany the character design and digital painting book I'm reading. Actually my mistake was letting my expectations get incredibly inflated by the videos, which show artist Don Seegmiller creating excellent digital paintings stroke by stroke. Of course the videos are compressed in time so the results appear to arrive very quickly, which didn't help. While Painter certainly seems to have some nice digital painting features, it's not something I can use to immediately produce quality digital art. This could have more to do with my lack of (traditional, or digital for that matter) painting experience than any software.

Instead of focusing on learning digital painting techniques (I'm not even at that stage of the book yet, let alone ready for it) I thought I'd try posing framework for a character. This action pose is the first thing that leapt to mind. As an exercise, it was good to break down the body into simple forms while trying to maintain their relationships and give the pose flow while keeping it balanced. Fortunately much of that came pretty naturally to me, drawing the pose the way I had envisioned it. I hope I can do that in the future too. The pose is also fairly readable as a silhouette, which is an important consideration, especially when the final figure is to be shown against an environment as it should be.

Perhaps later I'll try coloring it, or even painting over it (though I'm not sure if the evaluation version of Painter will let me open the file).