What did i do over summer?

The main thing that i did over summer that helped me was to set up an office space where i could get down to actual work and feel like i was in a professional environment. I did up the room and bought all the essentials i thought i needed -

• 22 inch monitor
• a nice big desk :)
• cables to link my mac to my monitor
• a bookcase which i filled with new books and magazines to help me along my way

Another thing i did was rent as many books on drawing as i possibly could from the library. I found a blog post by this guy who talked ALOT about drawing and he listed LOADS of books that could help and gave great advice. He posted pictures up of his drawings before he started practising and then he posted them up a year after he had drawn and practised everyday for a year. You could completely see the difference, so it gave me inspiration to get better at drawing. Here's some of the books i used over the summer to practise my drawings. 

The best one for me was the right hand side of the brain book, it teaches you step by step on how to view things differently and just completely changes the way you draw, i'm still currently learning from this but already my drawing has got better, here's some pic's to show this.

I also worked my ass off on photoshop over the holidays knowing that i wasn't very strong at drawing so i'm not very strong at photoshop either, i looked at sooooo many tutorials online it was unreal, but i found some great ones that really helped and i set up a youtube account and subscribed to some peoples drawing tutorials, i found some really nice people who gave me tips and sent me how to pdf's they were really nice people :)

The main thing i find hard to do is shading, so i focused on that and got a little better but still not good enough to where i wanna be for the moment. So i've read a lot of digital painting tips and tried them out, here's so pic's to show the progress i've made so far but i still have a longggggg way to go!

Lastly i bought a PS3 so i could research more games and not limit myself to just xbox games which was a great move as my friend let me use his playstation network account and he has LOADS of games i could download onto my PS3 for free :D yay! So here's some of the games i played over the summer, i'm so glad i bought the PS3, i love xbox for multiplayer purposes but the PS3 is just a fantastic media system for netflix etc and the quality of the picture and sound is just brilliant, i wish i would have bought one years ago.