Day 87: Concept World + Sketchathons

Concept World Sketchathons

I have been an admin on the deviantArt group ConceptWorld for probably over a year now. If you don't know. deviantArt is probably the largest online art community there is mainly because it caters to everybody.  There are professionals posting their work alongside pre pubescent teenagers.  While this is wonderfully inclusive it also means it can be a little random and overwhelming and have a distinctly amateurish flavour in parts, which isn't a bad thing but just the nature of the site. This is where groups come in.

The ConceptWorld group focuses on promoting deviant user's concept artwork. The goal isn't to be exclusive but we do aim at promoting stuff that hits a "decent" level of finish based on some clear criteria. We think of it as a skill based goal for the less experienced newbies to aspire to get into the galleries and judge their own progress by. We showcase art of people who aspire to be professional concept artists one day as well as the work of many who are already pros. For me personally the best thing about the group is being able to provide critique on young or starting artists' work and feel like I'm really doing something concrete to help them along their own journey. Warm fuzzies.

I generally have been winding down on my admin duties to take up this crusade of mine, but one of the great things that I still love to take part in when I can are the weekly hosted Sketchathons. These are run every Sunday using a combination of livestream and google hangouts and are hosted by the group creator and one of my first good internet-only art mates, Gagan, who goes by the online alterego gdsworld. He really deserves to be mentioned because of the awesome effort he goes to, completely unpaid, to host these every week. He's often up for fifteen hours straight making sure things keep ticking.

Anyway these are my sketches from Sunday's session. Each are done between thirty minutes and an hour. Everyone gets to see and comment on each other's work no matter what the skill level and basically good times are had by all. Because of the time difference with NZ I tend to miss most of it, but I only slept three hours last night because this time was a blast! Best thing is, I always feel so productive after one of these.

ConceptWorld Sketchathons

When  : GMT 9am - 10pm or thereabouts

Where: http://www.livestream.com/gdsworld

If you have a sketchy tendency come along and give it a go. 

Yawn..coffee number three needed before getting back to some painting...Day 86 beckons