Trading Card Illustration preview

Here's a little snippet (I know, enough with the snippets gosh), of another school project, a card illustration for something you probably know, but I can't say what until Friday at which time I'll post the whole thing.

This is still pretty WIP, needs a lot more polish, but I think it's gonna end up being one of my better illustrations.

And I promise I'll stop posting in snippets soon, it's just that we're working on all our finals in TAD now which are huge projects that we've been working on for months, so I don't have as much small-but-finished stuff to post. So *hopefully* I'll have some big and awesome images to post in the coming weeks when they're all finished, and then it will be break, and I will actually get some sleep.

Beauty and Nightmares Preview 3

Yes I know preview 2 was yesterday, but this was all I worked on today shutup!

Anyhoot, this is a teeny snippet of the other side of Carl and I's Beauty & Nightmare diptych. While the other has been all beauty, this one is delving in to the nightmare. Again, this is only like 10% of the piece, so the narrative probably won't be too obvious, but hopefully it is of some interest and isn't going down in your book of, "worst painting teaser snippets of ALL TIME".

Gotta keep workin on these, but they're pretty close to being done, woohoo!

Beauty and Nightmares Preview 2

Today's shenanigans. First image is a larger and repainted version of the previous snippet of Carl Knox and I's Beauty and Nightmares piece. This is still only about 30% of the full image, minus the other side of the diptych, so hopefully it'll be pretty spiffy when it's done! Gotta go back in and work on the faces some more, the guy's gaze and expression isn't really working. On it shall truck!

And the second is my waiting-for-painter-to-save-this-huge-file dragon doodle that turned out kinda nice, hah. Probably the best dragon I've ever done, but that's not saying much since I've only done like five in my life.

Cast Drawing - Finishing Pt. 2

Here's some more work on good ol' mr. cast, the result of today's Castravaganza! Did you know that if your station point is 5 feet away from your setup and you walk between the two an average of 3 times per minute, throughout an 8 hour day of cast drawing you'll have walked 2.7 miles? Well, I certainly got in my exercise for the day.

But anyways, this is more polishing and finishing, starting to work my way downwards. The ribcage and stomach areas have been worked on mostly, as well as making the forms in the pecs more subtle. Now all that's left is to render the legs and booty, the stand, clean up all the tone and this baby's done! Only 20 or so more hours to go, yay! Looking forward to seeing this guy completed.

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Exaggerated Figures - Muscular Cleanup

Here's another update on our final project for figure class, I'm gonna spend some time and clean up all of the character turnarounds to this level, then do some posed gestures and hopefully one nicely polished one per character to show them off as best as possible. Way excited to start posing these things and making a kick-awesome presentation. The end of semester is nigh, work work work!

Side note: Painter's scratchboard tool is nice, this is the first time I've ever enjoyed digital inking.

Dreamtellers Thumbnails Pt. 2

Here's some more fleshing out on the Dreamtellers piece, fixing poses and finding rhythms and getting everything set in stone. I'm gonna push this a little further as a thumbnail, be sure I've got the poses worked out, and then give the final a try in watercolor and see how it turns out. I've never really used watercolor for a finished painting before, so it might end up just being an underpainting on top of which some digital work can be applied, but it should be a worthy experiment.

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Cast Drawing - Finishing Pt. 1

Here's some progress on the last leg of the cast drawing, finishing! Here's where every little transition and change and lump and bump gets defined, with the end goal of complete realism.

Despite being super slow (6 hours to render one pec hah), this is easily the most fun part of the process, just noodling away at it and slowly seeing it come to life. This is where all the hard setup work pays off and it's desert time.

Still needs a lot of work, only the topmost portion has been worked on, and there's a little over-modeling going on that'll need to be subtleified, but I think it's looking good and should be pretty sweet when it's finished.

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Oil Portrait - High vs Low Chroma

Here's a couple quick portraits for head painting class, the goal here was to explore the difference between working high chroma (left) and low chroma (right). Getting a feel for the different effects they both offer.

It was a lot of fun to do, the biggest issue is that my high chroma side became too contrasty and ended up looking uncomfortably colorful, it would've worked much better if the values were kept closer together and form was turned with temperature, so I'm definitely gonna need to give it another try some time.

The low chroma turned out pretty good I think, except some of the light areas are merging together a bit, it needs some darker stuff, but overall I think it works well. The drawing on both is a little off, but they were only an hour each and the focus was on color more than drawing, so learns were had. Fun stuff!

Beauty and Nightmares Preview

Spent all weekend working on stuff I can't post yet, haha. So here's a quick preview of an upcoming piece, a very small portion of the entry Carl Knox and I are doing for the Beauty and Nightmares contest going on over at CA. Pretty excited to finish this one up, should be pretty awesome!

Figure Drawings - 5-20-11

Here's some more figure stuff for fun and learning. The first page of torsos and arms is imagined except for flexing biceps guy in the middle, I was trying to work out how to interlock all the muscles of the armpit and outer side of the arm. I think the drawing in the upper right is coming pretty close. The other page is just 2 minute gesture drawings from photos of people jumping, which we spent an hour on in figure class this week, it was pretty fun, hah. Plus two random comp studies of Frank Brangwynn.

Ideal Figures

Here's the last set of sheets for our final figure assignment, the ideal or typical couple. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, they'll still need some tweaking and cleaning up, but some gestures for them are gonna come first.

Exaggerated Figures - Muscular

Here's the rest of the views for my muscular couple, so now all that's left for this final assignment is to add muscles to the average figures, then do posed drawings of all of them and clean this all up so it's presentable. Funtimes!

Figure Drawings - 5-17-11

Here's some figure work from today, some gestures and a refined-ish figure, all from observation. I'm feeling pretty good about these for the most part, the fleshed figure was the first drawing I've done where I really felt like I understood what was going on, notably in the arms and legs.

We had our last day studying muscles in Figure class today, and it seems like everything's starting to click. We're gonna be studying motion next, so hopefully these figures'll start to take on some life! And then this semester will be over, which is horrifying cause I'm pretty sure it just started yesterday, hah.

Oil Portrait - Dark Skin

Here's another oil portrait, this assignment was to learn to paint darker skin tones, as they reflect light differently and will end up having different color variations than lighter skins.

Unfortunately due to all our other homework I didn't have a lot of time to invest in this, it's about 3 or 4 hours of work total, only 2 of which was painting. I experimented a bit with letting the shadow side of the face merge with the background, but didn't quite pull it off, it'll need some more experimenting, and the value will probably have to be lighter to pull it off realistically. Lots of fun overall though, gotta love dem oils!

Dreamtellers Thumbnails

Here's a few thumbnails for our final assignment in Composition class. The theme is Dreamtellers, and beyond that we're pretty much are free to do whatever. Though despite that it's actually pretty hard to come up with a suitable idea as it's hard to really convey dreams without having a sleeping person in there. Not sure if any of these will make it to final or not, but they're a start.

Next update ->

Exaggerated Figures - Muscular WIP

Here's the next installment for thems exaggerated figures. In contrast to the short and dumpy couple, here's the tall and disgustingly ripped couple. I might still tweak the proportions on them, but I think they'll be pretty fun to pose when I get to the gesture part of the assignment.

Little Nemo Sketches

Here's a couple sketches for our final Visual Narrative project, which is a 4-page comic based off of Winsor McKay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.

I've got my story all written out so it's time to get working on all the character designs and start on the final pages. Should be a lot of fun!

Cast Drawing - Value Placement

The latest update on mr. cast drawing! This step was about establishing the major value shapes to be sure everything is in the right spot before moving on to the finishing. We had to simplify the image down to 5 basic values and get it looking as close to reality as possible, which proved to be quite challenging due to such subtle changes as well as the limitations with charcoal.

The next step will be the last, and longest, leg of the race: finishing. Getting in to the nitty gritty and making every gradation, transition, value, and piece of tone as smooth and perfect and close to reality as is humanly possible, at which point it shall be called done! So far it's about a 30 hour drawing, and it'll probably need another 30-40 to get to the highest level of finish, and I've got five and a half weeks left to finish it. Better get crackin!

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40Min Figure Drawing

Here's a pastel figure drawing I did today just to relax and have some fun. It's been a while since I did a figure drawing just for the sake of making a pretty drawing and not trying to learn form and color and lighting and anatomy and all that business, but all that learning has definitely helped my observational drawing, cause I think this is a lot more successful than any of the drawings I did in this technique last semester. I was also messing around with color for the heck of it, seeing if I could get the figure to feel fleshy with the colors I have.

Katy Perry E.T. - Speedpainting

I skipped updating yesterday in order for a double whammy today. Sooo here's a speedpainting / paintsketch thingy done yesterday based on Katy Perry's music video from E.T.

I'm not a big fan of hers, but there were some really badass visuals in this particular video, there's some really great compositions and color palettes going on that I thought would be fun to explore.

As for the double whammy, here's a recording of the painting in process! In case you feel like watching.

3hr Figure Painting

Here's a figure painting done from life, a 3 hour session. I tried to focus mostly on getting the color variation logically placed; making the up-facing shadows blue from the flourescent lighting, the down-facing shadows green from the imagined foliage, the areas of reflected light from the body more orange and saturated from radiosity, and the warm yellow-orange of the key light. I think I learned a lot in that area and am getting better at seeing it, just gotta keep working on getting the drawing side up to that same level.

Figure Studies - Blocky Forms

Here's a figure study from imagination, done to help understand the construction and form of the figure. I did this one a little differently than normal by starting out with a mannequin rather than a skeleton, I think it turned out pretty well.

Need to keep working on this, then start working on making fleshier, more gestural figures, and clash the two together to create deliciously alive but still anatomically credible figures. That's the plan at least.

Watercolor Sketches

Here's some sketching done today for school and fun. The abstract thumbnails on the left are just trying to get some compositional ideas for our final project in composition class, which will be a final piece based on the theme "dreamtellers".

The figure drawing is just cause I was having fun with the watercolor and felt like painting something quick, I think it's one of my better attempts with watercolor, which I want to experiment with more, especially after looking at some of Edmund Dulac's work today.

Thanks again to watchstock on dA for the reference.

Oil Portrait - He Kongde

Here's a copy of a piece by He Kongde. The goal for this one was to apply the tiling method, which is building spaces of paint that are the correct value and color and leaving them, doing as little blending as possible.

This isn't quite as polished as I'd like it to be, everything kinda piled up over the weekend and I wasn't able to get to it until today, so it ended up being 3.5ish hour painting. But I think it's my most successful color mixing to date.

Self Portrait - 5-2-11

Here's a quick 1.5ish hour self portrait I did today for fun and for avatar usage.

The likeness isn't quite there, but it's pretty close, and I'm pleased with how some of the brushwork turned out.

Character Commission - Freetrick

Here's an ink character commission for Daniel Bensen over on dA, of his necromancer character Freetrick. This is gonna be taken one step further to add in some digital color washes, but personally I enjoy the look of the straight ink, mushy water media shapes are so cool to look at. I think my favorite area is the black magic in the lower left, lots of cool semi-accidental markmaking going on.

1Hr Figure Painting

Here's a quick figure study done today for fun. Needed to do something fairly mindless that I could just observe and paint, and figure drawings are always a good option for that.

This one in particular is fun because I attempted to paint this same photo just before starting at TAD. If you're up for a laugh, check it out: [Link]

Needless to say, I think I've improved, haha. I thought I was a pretty good painter back then, but good gravy some of those forms and values are just abysmal. Not to mention the wonkytastic proportions. Plus it took me 3x as long as this one did, hah.

Thanks to justmeina on dA for the reference!