Summer Hollidays

Over the course of the summer holidays my main focus has gone towards improving my skills on Photoshop. I've been doing this in a number of ways, reading digital art magazines, books, watching online tutorials, talking to other concept artists and just in general developing my own ways of creating art that are more unique to me. Not to mention some other big changes in my personal life, a big one being moving into my own flat over in the iQ student accommodation. Although I miss the comforts of home sometimes being given the freedom of being able to be stay up to stupid o' clock in the hours of the morning on my art all the while playing music has proven to be really useful to me as I don't feel like I'm limiting times that I'm usually at my most creative.

However it hasnt been easy finding good tutorials to use as foundations for improving my art as its become quite easy to see that a vast majority of professional concept artists keep their methods of how they do their art secret and seem very reluctant to really want to give anything major away, mainly in the topics of brushes, textures and blending methods.
That said, after a good week of flat out concept art research I found one website which proved incredibly useful to me made by a retired games concept artist nicknamed "IDrawGirls."

IDrawGirls has done hundreds of different styles of concept art, ranging from environment, mech, weapons, games, humans and beasts. Each of his videos has their own tutorials, (some free others not) that give detailed explanations of how he gets to his end result.
The reason behind why I love his website so much is that the tutorials are relatively cheap and some are over 3 hours long each with a step by step run through of what brushes, opacity, textures and exercises to use when creating the art.

Along side concentrating on developing my concept art I've also been doing some refresher work in Maya, designing environment assets and generally making sure my 3D modelling skills don't get too rusty. I have also finished my preparations for this years Leeds Thought Bubble event where I will be attending the event as Batman villain Harley Quinn. I will be making sure to make a solid portfolio for this event so that any work I can bring along with me can be critiqued and given opinions from the professionals and hopefully make new connections.