There's no road, but the hard road.

Ain't that true Sam(Hard Road - Sam Roberts). So a few days ago I went to my friend's house to get out of my slump of not drawing at all. It went surprisingly efficiently. I got back into the groove of things by warming up with drawing lines and circles and drew a quick car and coloured it with some markers.

After that I thought I'll give myself a challenge and set up a glass cup with a silver spoon and fork inside. At school we usually take about 4-5 hours for a drawing, but this time I only gave myself 2 hours, because I wanted to draw other things. Since I haven't drawn anything in a long time, trying to draw something transparent right away was a little daunting, but I just put pencil to paper and hoped my muscles remembered what to do more than my mind. Two hours later I was happy with what I ended up with for the amount of time I gave myself. I'm not going to post it, because it's horrid, but it was a nice way to ease myself into things again.

Putting my sketch book aside, I decided to start my visual narrative or whatever you call it. The story I have in my head is a bored, possibly disgruntled individual on a small planet looking for excitement. I scanned it and took it home. I bought a few "How to ..." books on digital painting, because I thought this would help me with my Photoshop renderings of my car sketches and it'll be fun. A lot of the tutorials in the book and online has the artist start by blocking in shapes. I mean the 5 - 10 minute YouTube videos seems simple enough. How hard could it be? Well pretty damn hard I think. I think I got the hang of blocking in shapes in gray-scale, because it's kind of like drawing with a pen or pencil. When I try to colour the drawing is where it all goes wrong. Having not really worked with colour and there being a million ways to colour a sketch, I bounced around from one tutorial to another trying out different techniques to see one suits me.

They're still works in progress, but here's where I'm at right now.

The drawing on top is a man on a foreign planet looking out into space and I guess reaching into the distance. I can seem to get depth in the drawing. I know as further objects are the colours become desaturated, because of the atmosphere. I tried putting craters or rocks between the foreground and the mountains in the background, but I can't get it to look nice. If anyone has any tips it'll be much appreciated!

The drawing on the bottom is supposed to be a man in a space-suit mining. I'm having a hard time adding colour. I'ved tried painting directly on to the sketch, painting on a new layer, creating a new layer and setting it on colour mode and then putting my base colours down and then creating another new layer and painting directly on the sketch, but nothing is really working for me. If yo have any pointers, it would be much appreciated.

I'm trying to figure out how digital artists get those nice shapes and lines. I'm working with a mouse which doesn't help, but I know that's not the main problem. More detail? Different brushes? I have no idea.

I'll try the best I can and put up the final images as soon as possible.