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Missed a few

Ok missed a few updates like updates 24-32.. they’re there, just not gotten around to posting them

However on sketch 32 this little guy popped out.

sketch-32

and then I decided he needed a chance to get a world to live in. And by 37 it was looking like this:

sketch-38

 

 

 

Then pulled in some rough textures and and blocked things in a bit more.
sketch-39

By update 40 the trees were looking flat and the overall color was beginning to be a bit washed out.
sketch-40

 

 

And that puts us here at update 41, time spent pushing back the stone some and final rendering of the character and more minor details.

Still need to touch up the bear, abird and pants, but we’re 99% there.

 

sketch-41

 

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More Make-a-thing days end of m1

OK so i lost a few days to kids, illness and a mini-vacation to PAX South (which was awesome!)

But none the less, scribbles were made, but i’m having a hard time ‘finishing’ even these things. So I’ve been making myself to more and more thumbnails to just start being able to see the composition before starting on the actual drawing. And i feel that it’s been improving my sense of wholeness of each thing, if that makes any sense.   That and watching The Hair lessons on the Magic Box there was a total ‘ah-ha’ moment, where talking about visual rest and the need to NOT render something felt like it clicked. ( see the goblin girl’s hair below)

sketch-20

But finally I’ve watched a bunch of other artist talks and one struck me as particularly poignant,  essentailly you should be able to describe your painting in 5 values.  Which I did below and a couple of them are fairly successful.  Now I used the full range and the same 5 values across the board instead of selecting high key / low key values specific to each thumbnail which was probably a mistake, but I’m actually pretty happy with the graphic result.

sketch-24

Other misc thing a days, that were more of a mental check out rather than focused on actually learning something.

sketch-23

 

Ok Failing to grasp cloud structure was kinda fun.sketch-17 sketch-18 sketch-19 sketch-19b

Other than the overworked face and broken neck structure.. this was actually much nicer looking 45 min earlier. sketch-21

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Start a new Year with a thing-a-day

 

Start of a new year.

But it’s time to get some practice, so in an attempt to do a ‘thing a day’ here’s the first 8 days worth of things,  Even the ugly stuff, even the unfinished stuff.  Lots of it is just technique practice or late nite scribbles (or both).

sketch-6 sketch-7 sketch-8 sketch-9 sketch-10 sketch-1 sketch-2 sketch-3 sketch-4a sketch-4c sketch-5

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Perspective forever

 

 

Took another pass at this, and made a binch of thums and eventually came up with perspective I liked.

Then I tossed into the perspective view maker https://drakkheim.com/perspective/grid.php?image=2a811acb319a27b462e6185e36aa491d.png&save=2 and saved out some guides.

download

 

Then a little bit of time blocking out some of the shapes and it’s something I’m beginning to think works.

 

perspective-3But now it’s time for some holiday cheer so perhaps things will be a bit slow for a while.

 

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Flying Golden Turtle Final

 

I think this is going to be it!  Gonna sleep on it but I think this is where this journey ends for this piece. At least for tonight. Barring any last changes I’m looking to get this to a printer this week.
turtle-final-5

 

 

 

And here’s some details of some of my favorite parts of the painting.
detail-pathThe little path into the forest

detail-house

The little church and houses on the hill

detail-turtle

The turtle.. shell and belt buckle just make me happy.

detail-water

And my favorite part might just be the little glistens on the water.

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Digging in to the final painting

Okay.. heeere we go.  Picked a color comp.  Scaled everything to final print size. Masked individual components of the piece.

Lets see if it all goes to crap 🙂

First up the background mountains

turtle-final-1-1

 

Ok that wasn’t too bad.  next up. Getting started on the background hillside, forest and lake..

turtle-final-1-2Still not hating it.. so that’s a bonus.

It’s amazing how much easier it is if you do a truckload of prepwork.  It’s all playing with shapes and colors since the big decisions have already been made. awesome!

 

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color roughs…very rough

man these have been kickikng my butt.

I’m leaning towards #1 or 4.. but the challenge of the limited palette of 3 was actually a lot of fun…

let’s just pretend #2 didn’t happen… turns out me and vivid colors aren’t that good friends yet.

turtle-color-1