Personal Piece - Pt. 1 Thumbnail

Here's the beginnings of a personal piece I'm gonna do. It's probably one of the first personal pieces I've done that's actually personal in a deeper sense than, "Oh I have some free time let's paint something." and I'm really looking forward to working on it.

It came as sort of a divine inspiration sorta thing, In about 10 minutes I was just thinking about it and knew exactly what I wanted it to be and can see the final really clearly.

I'm gonna do my best to not let this one fall by the wayside and do as good a job as I can on it; even if it means working on it half an hour every couple days for a few months, I feel like this'll be a winner. We shall see. :)

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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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 ->

Composition Studies - Booth

Here's another composition study, this one's a lot more general than a lot of my previous ones, which was nice cause it allowed for more focus on the big overall shapes. The others are good for picking up the subtle nuances, so it's good to do both.

Composition Studies - Wang

Here's another comp study of a piece by the ever-awesome Wei Wang. I really liked the abstract design of this piece when I first saw it, and the more I worked and dug in to it the more awesome subtlety I saw him putting in to it; there's soooo much care and thought in his shape design, it was really cool to explore. Obviously this is pretty detailed for just a comp study, but I was having a lot of fun with it and did learn some stuff about subtlety that I wouldn't have gotten if I only took it to the big-shapes stage.

Composition Studies - Tangled

Here's a quick study from one of the concepts for Tangled, which I saw today and loved, probably some of my favorite visuals in quite some time, especially this scene and how it repeats itself throughout the film with different lighting and totally different moods, half light and half dark in the beginning, dark in the middle, and light in the end.

Animated films are so good to look at for sequential art, seeing how compositions and colors change and are exaggerated to create mood. Love it love it.

Composition Studies - Wyeth

Here's another composition study done a while back, I didn't do any post-worthy drawing today, just some analysis things and a WIP comic which might get posted in the future when it's finished.

So, in the meantime enjoy the delicious colors and glorious abstract patterns of the ever-awesome N.C. Wyeth, and hopefully my somewhat intelligent observations of them.

Composition Studies - Reverse Engineering 2

Here's another reverse engineering composition study. The original Sargent was blurred, flipped and inverted, which threw me for a trip when I finally looked at the original image, haha. I'm pretty happy with where the composition study went though, seeing the dark blobs as a mass of figures rather than trying to find identifiable shapes in it was a good step forwards I think.

Composition Studies - Reverse Engineering

Here's today's nonsense, a new variety of composition study! Reverse engineering, which is taking a well composed piece, reducing it to just abstract shapes, and then finding your own subject matter out of the abstraction. It's great practice cause it trains you to go from abstract thumbnails to final work, which is essential to composing.

I took it to the extreme as far as abstraction goes on this one, me and my homedog Carl set up a deal where he abstracted 10 pieces and sent them to me, and I abstracted 10 and sent them to him, so I had no idea what this piece originally was when I was working on it, haha. Was quite surprised to find that my weird surreal doorway to oblivion was in reality a classy man in a business suit. More of these are definitely on the way, haha.

Composition Studies - Brangwyn

Here's another composition study, this one of the rather awesometacular Frank Brangwyn who happened to be one of Dean Cornwell's teachers. He had some pretty mad compositional skills, with really clear and powerful abstract shapes. Reminds me a bit of Doré in a way. Definitely worth studying!

Movie Still Studies

More composition exercises, taking movie stills and doing quick thumbnail studies of them. Very good exercise to learn a bunch of different ways to crop or place your viewpoint, as well as see how one shot will progress to the next one.

These are all about 1.5"x4", 10-20 minutes each, and all but the top left are done with a dip pen, brush, sumi ink, and FW acrylic white ink. Very fun combination for doing quick studies!

Composition Studies - Wang

Another composition study, this one of the piece Orient Wizard by one of my personal heroes Wei Wang. His handling of color as well as composition is really breathtaking, not to mention he does totally kick-ass fantasy and Warcraft art. If you haven't seen his work, definitely check it out: [Link]

This one was a lot of fun to do, and I got really involved noodling out all the subtle color which is what really gets me going in his work, apart from the cool subject matter and accomplished draftsmanship.

You can probably see the influence from this piece in yesterday's little paintsketch, though mine most certainly can't compare, haha.

Got something fun planned to post for tomorrow too! Something that needs a little... compressing? *crappy hint*

But yeah, it should be fun. In the mean time, go drool over Wei Wang's awesome art.

Paintsketching and Comp Studying

Here's a paintsketch I did today; something of an experiment for me, trying to find a fun way to just quickly doodle out an image and get a fairly interesting final result. This is only about 1.5 hours of work, which is obvious by how crap the drawing is, but I think it's a fun way to get out ideas and once I start getting some unconscious competence with draftsmanship skills they might actually look somewhat good. Funtimes!

Also, here's a composition study to bring the average quality of this post from D- to C, haha.

Will continue on mr. constructive figure drawing guy dude man soon, just needed to get out some just-for-fun art after a failed portrait this afternoon.

Have a good one, homebros. Don't get too drunk if you're Miami-ing it up.

Composition Studies - Wyeth

More composition studies, this one of the ever-awesome N.C. Wyeth. These are so good to do, it really helps understand how masters arrange their lights and darks to make interesting shapes and patterns, what tricks they use to add or remove depth, how they handle their color for mood, and a whole host of other things.

If you've only got an hour a day to work on art, it would be wise to spend half of it doing these, as everything in art will ultimately fall second to composition. A well drawn piece with perfect perspective and anatomically correct figures and a great story behind it will never be able to compete with a well composed piece, no matter how technically well done it is.

Enjoy your weekend, and spring break for those of you who are participating in spring break this week!

Composition Studies - Sweet

Here's another study from one of the best artists of our time, and one of my personal favorites, Justin Sweet!

Justin has stunning compositional skills, and he executes his pieces with great simplicity and strength. Definitely worthy of studying! This one has some of the best movement and balance (or lack thereof) that I've seen, you could devote quite some time to just studying the angles in this and seeing how they all relate and strengthen each other.

Composition Studies - Leighton

The only downside to posting every day is I don't always have something hugely interesting to post, but nevertheless here's a composition study I did today of a piece by Edmund Blair Leighton. I'm trying to do one of these every day, and have been sorta failing at that but am getting better. I'm gonna make a list of art push-ups to do every day and try to reserve an hour or so for them.

As for all the written jargon on the right, it's really just an analysis for my purposes. In Composition 2 we're learning to abstract artwork and use just the light & dark shapes to create the right feeling for the piece. One really helpful technique we've learned is metaphor, it's kinda tough to decide how to draw a bunch of soldiers, but if you can decide you want those soldiers to feel like shattered glass you have a much clearer idea as to the shapes and arrangement that can be used to get your point across. Sounds kinda crazy first, but it's actually tremendously helpful for composing. And don't worry, it's not pretentious art school crap, this is nothing more than a tool to help the artist compose, it's not some secret hidden message that the audience is supposed to extract.