Tag: Art

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What’s Next- 30 days of drawing

So I discovered that the focus of having a real imaginary (??!) deadline helped keep me focused even when the epic skies image was wearing me down.  So I made a list of all the things that I know I really need to work on and came up with a list.  Then I organized that list based on  a. how fundamental it is, and b. how much improvement I think i can get froma month’s worth of focused study.

And so it came to be that the next 30 days will be spend doing 1,2 and 5 minute life drawing gestures (using a wonderful Youtube channel called the Croquis Cafe)

Continue reading What’s Next- 30 days of drawing

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Ah that post painting funk

Ok after a little breather It’s time to get back to working on things that are fun.  Finishing a painting is both exhilarating and exhausting and I find myself having to take a couple days and recoup my creative energy or I’ll find the need to go back and fix, and tweak and tweak irrisistable.  But taking a bit of time away lets me just be proud of what I’ve done and let it be.

After a couple days I had a little fun playing with skin rendering and trying to get a sense of translucency. One of the many attempts actually turned out to become this guy, which has a nice tone to it that I like.

sketch-45

 

Followed by a couple silly monsters following my son’s obsession with pokemon all of a sudden.

sketch46

 

And then this thing.. .. this might become a thing.. it’s still rough, but it’s speaking to me.  It started out as a perspective homework.. then became an epic skies homework.. and now it might be something else altogether..

songofthestorm-rough

 

On an art related note, I cracked some oil paints open for the first time in 7 years (it was a disaster then) and … holy cow…I’m loving them..

Something about the transparency and the need to go slow really just works for me.. maybe it’s because I’m getting older and not in as much of a hurry.  Not sure exactly what it is, but I’m doing some test pieces and maybe finishing/reworking the initial disastrous attempt and who knows maybe they’ll be worthy of showing on the inter-tron some day.

 

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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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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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New WIP

The doldrums of summer and start of a new school year is like a parasitic leech that sits on your forehead and drains motivation and inspiration right out of you.

 

But what do you do?  You plow through it.

goldenturtle

thumbnail / color rough for a new painting.

Pretty excited to see where / how this one goes.

 

 

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Lady Gazelle paint.

Ok a couple weeks of quiet, but not unproductive.

So Month 2 of the awesome yet super challenging Magic Box digital painting course unlocked and the next step is to work on brush skills and economy of brush strokes.  So pushing onward, I’ve started rendering out the Lady Gazelle color comp.

And here’s where I’m at.

ladyGazelle

 

 

And here’s the final color comp from month 1, all lasso tool and gradients.

finalComp

And the original Master’s painting

source

Man was this hard.

I mean .. seriously hard.   I’m a scribbler, and forcing myself to think about EVERY SINGLE STROKE, was at times, frustrating and enlightening on a profound level.  But after watching the lesson videos and reading and just examining other peoples work, I’m beginning to ‘get’ it.  I couldn’t have even come close to doing something like this 2 months ago, and I already see so many things regarding edges and just stroke economy that I’d never seen before.