Still alive ;)
Working on commissions is very time consuming at the moment, so I'm sorry to say that I'm not doing anything for the art camp right now... :(
I plan to catch up on everything in august, when my deadlines are over. Sadly I cannot show you what I'm working on right now and I won't be able until october, when the stuff will be published at Essen "Spiel" fair.

I just put together some stuff I managed to do for art camp, just to keep you entertained :)
The first piece is my (not finished) full master study. Everybody had to pick a piece they really liked from an old master and reproduce it, without exactly copying it. Meaning that you had to get all the colors right (without just picking them from the reference with the color picker) and the composition plus most of the detail. These guys just new everything about color and light... I chose Thomas Moran, because he was one of the best landscape painters ever. By reproducing his work I learned loads about the influence light has on different colors. And how to paint waterfalls. And rocks. And stormy skies. :D
This piece is not finished, except in the lower left corner. You can easily make out where on the picture I did some more or less rough sketching and where I worked on the detail.

Later there'll be more, promised! ;)

Spring has finally taken over the country and it would be lovely to go out for a walk and enjoy it in it's full beauty, but I'm bound to my workspace...
Well, I just returned from this year's trip to scotland, where I visited my family and enjoyed the beautiful landscape. So I can take it   ;)
I'm working on several commissions at the moment and I'm also attending Noah's Art Camp, a wonderful opportunity to learn from the marvelous Noah Bradley.
It's a 12 week course with weekly assignments and besides the massive amount of work we have to do for it, it's also real good fun :)
I'm going to keep you updated on everything I'm doing for the Art Camp, so here we go with some of the assignments I had to do for the first week:

Right now we are studying from the old masters. Everyone had to pick some old works they like and practice composition and colors on them. On the right side are the originals and on the left you can see my value and composition studies (1st sheet) and my color studies (2nd sheet).
The original assignment says that we have to do 50 3-value compositional master studies, 50 color studies and 3 full-color finished master studies. Since I just came back from scotland and missed the beginning of the course, I cannot do the whole lot. Right now I'm starting with my full study, which should be finished tomorrow. So stay tuned!
Comments and questions are always welcome :)

Hey ho, short post with some sketchy stuff I did a while ago, just to keep you reading this blog ;)
I got loads of work to do at the moment, so I just say "hello" and show you this side out of my sketchbook:

Hope you're well ♥

... no drawings today, but more painting practice and a finished portrait :)

The portrait was a birthday gift for a dear friend of mine and I think it turned out quite well. My goal was to create a mix between realism and a bit of fantasy, so I focused on the colour and texture of her skin and tried to achieve a very realistic look here. Then I doodled around with the hair and she got this tawdry fairy-like look :)

The background matches the colour of her eyes, to make it more flattering ;)


My other project is still not finished, but here I can show you my progress so far. I'm a huge fan of the "The walking dead"- series and of course of Rick Grimes, our tragic beloved hero! So I started a painting practice which is also a fan-art :) I used a photo reference (like in most of my practices at the moment) and didn't use the colour-picker or any other tools which would speed up the process. I played around with brushes and learned lots about skin color and how to paint skin texture and beards... ;)
Here's the WIP:

(edit: of course I used the colour-picker, but not to pick directly from the photo ;)))))
That's it for today, stay tuned for more! :*
♥ Anna

So what I did during this practice was mainly to observe things and learn about their structures and textures. I learned a lot about rocks and mountains and how to render them. I used different brushes and some textures, too. Next thing will be not to reproduce an already existing landscape, but to use the reference pictures as a help and create my own landscape :)

Painting nature is still new to me, most of the time I'm drawing people.Maybe I'll post some of my drawings next :)

Take care!

Phew, done!

Really got into detail now, and I still could go on and on... But I guess it's finished, after all it's just a practice :)
Tomorrow there'll be more, but now it's time for a beer ;)

Hello there!

First post on first blog, pretty exciting!
For all of you who don't know who I am and what the hell I'm doing here:
My name is Anna Wedler and I'm a freelance illustrator. I'm much into fantasy and sci-fi, so most of my clients are part of  the computer- and roleplaying game industry. I'm working both digitally and traditionally.
Since I still have much to learn I created this blog to share my experiences with you.

Yesterday I started a digital landscape/color practice with photo reference. It's the first time I'm doing something like that and I had lots of fun!

This is still a work-in-progress version. I tried to work quite small, because I tend to get lost over detail... Most of the time the canvas wasn't much bigger than this image, which allowed me to focus on colors and composition. I also use this practice to get a feel for my brushes and to create my personal brushsets.

So for now, have a nice weekend!
Love, Anna