Background Concept

More digital painting!

This one was our background painting, staring from intial concept to final render.  I had a lot of fun with this one because I love exteriors.  Next time though I wanna try something that's a little more graphic, and stylistic than so realistically rendered.

I wanted too with a more "painted" painting focusing my detail and attention on the temple.  The first large image was the file I handed in for class but then after I messed around with the lighting more and got my second version.

The work-in-progress is much the same as my last paintings.  Stared this concept out as a really rough little thumbnail then enlarged it to the size we'd be working for the final.

Character Design - Beatrice "Trixie" Jackson MODEL PACK

Here's the final model pack for Beatrice "Trixie" Jackson, my klutzy showgirl.  Next stage is the maquette!

Life Drawing Dump, no.2

 I'm trying some new things with Life Drwaing this semester. Ultimate goal is to be more expressive but keep good structure.  It's fun, but really hard. I'm not where I want to be yet but I'm getting there.

Car Assignment

New digital assignment this week was to draw and paint some sort of car.  For me cars are about the least exciting thing to paint ever.  I love the look of them but to me I have no intrest in them at all.

However when we were able to create something of our own then I had a bit more fun.  I decided to make something that would never be able to work in the theme of the Jestsons.  This is my version of a what people thought cars would be like back in the 1960's.  Back when apparently all traffic problems were to be eliminated by 2005 and we'd all be driving magic carpet hover cars. 

Here's the step-by-step and final image.  

Creature Design

Digital painting class once more! This time we had to design a creature, so I combined a gecko, squirrel, dragon and cat together to get my little dragon squirrel.

It's adorable in my eyes.

Anyways, in the world these things exist I imagine that they're nothing but pests and are around the size of a small cat. They look vicious but aren't really, and can only singe things (not fully ignite anything).

This took far too long to paint, but it was nice to move away from the gray scale work and paint with colour again.

Character Design - Beatrice "Trixie" Jackson

Here's the finalized design for my klutzy showgirl, Trixie Jackson.   We'll be taking these characters eventually to a 3d maquette stage, but for now it's all about creating a solid design package.  This is an example as to what all poses, and finished designs will look like in the end.

Head and Hands - Lady Macbeth

Here's my third digital assignment and a much more enjoyable one I found at least.  We had to create a painting with a figure involving an emotion and featuring the face and hands.  We were encouraged to use as few references as possible to try and challenge ourselves. 

I tired a new technique this time around where I painted the entire image completely in gray scale then I stared using overlays and colour value edits to transform the image to colour.  It was defiantly an interesting approach but I'm not sure if I'll use it all the time.  There's just something about painting straight to colour that seems a little more challenging and engaging. 

Never the less, I did enjoy this assingment and I tried to get it as clean/smooth as possible with my time restraints (and wisdom teeth removal the same weekend).

My theme was of Lady Macbeth and this is one of the first times she's hallucinating blood on her hands, before she goes into complete and total insanity.  

Here's the step-by-step:

 

Breakdown:

1. Intital Sketch

2.Painting out the lines

3. 40% Complete to show in class for critique

4.Refining

5. Flipped the canvas to refine some more

6. Skin and clothes almost there

7. Details added

8. Colours applied

Here's the final image (I may tweak it again before class tomorrow , but we'll see)

Life Drawing Dump - September

The first month of school has come and gone.  It's a crazy semester this September (a huge difference from last year) but there's also a huge difference in my art!

I'm finally seeing some improvements in my life drawing class.  I'm also excited that we're working on faces and portraits now in class, and I just love drawing faces.  SO here's a min-dump of some pieces from class and extra-life sessions that I like.

 1 minute

 5 minutes

 5 minutes

 7 minutes (With instructor notes)

7 minutes

The Foosh

It's back to the drawing board once more and the first assignment of the semester is done.  We were told to paint a fish, any ol' fish as long as it was in grey-scale.  Since this was the first project of the semester, I wanted to start of  not biting off more than I could chew, taking a more simple approach to warm up to digital painting.  I did a little bit of painting over the summer but not as much as I had hoped.

So I picked a simple little goldfish and kept the view fairly simple as well.  By choosing a side-on view I had a chance to have a lot of fun with his scales.  I started off with a sketch in photoshop then separated his eye, fin, tail and body onto all separate layers.  After my base tones were laid out then I started with the details of the eyes, scales and fins.  I realized that I didn't like the dorsal fin in my sketch so I looked to more goldfish reference on the internet to get a better feeling as to how frilly it should be.  I got some tips from my Professor, about half way through which helped me get to his final stage.

Simple background, simple fishy but a lot of fun painting.  I really missed it.

Yearbook Pages

Yep, jumping on the bandwagon.  

I'm not a huge fan of my pages, I would have loved to have been more creative with them but I just couldn't think of anything with the time constraints. 

Demo Reel 2011

Here's a quick little Demo Reel we had to do to finish up our digital class this semester.  It features mostly what's already on the blog plus some of my animation assingments.

Demo Reel 2010-2011 from Meg Simmons on Vimeo.

Jekyll to Hyde

Final character assignment for the semester, Jekyll to Hyde.

Story was, we had to create a character in which some form of dire circumstances had brought them to the point of using an experimental drug on themselves.  At first it seems alright then all hell breaks loose.

I'm pretty satisfied with out this turned out but I'd like to revisit it this summer, add a few more poses and maybe shift a few poses around. 

I'll fill in my characters story later, here's the art for now!

Historic Pan and Digital Painting

For my Layout class we were instructed to design a pan of at least a Twelve and a half field in length and it had to be based off of something historic.  I chose the Urnes Stave Church in Norway and did a little grassy field. 

 

Then for Digital Tools we had to take a part of that original drawing and do a complete painting of it without keeping the line work.  I wanted to keep my tree so from my original I just shifted it over into the foreground more. This painting took me for ever to complete and I probably put far too much time into it.

Oh well, onto the next assignments!

Character Design/Skeleton Assignment

This took forever. We had to design a creature/character and render it as beautifully as possible.

It's done, thank goodness.
((Re-post with fixes after critiques))

Life Drawing Dump (Jan 2011-Feb 2011).

It's reading week so I figured now's a good time to dump of more my more recent Life Drawing from second semester:

 Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 6

Still lots of room for improvement but I feel like I'm starting to get a better understanding of what I'm seeing with the model in terms of anatomy, what exactly I'm looking at, the muscles and the landmarks as opposed to just a figure in a pose.

Kim Possible Time!

For our character design class we got to create and design a character in the style of Stephen Silver's Kim Possible.

My character is actually based off a good friend of mine and classmate, Charles D. Jones so it was really fun to do a caricature and a colour design at the same time.

This was a really fun assignment and I wish we could do more of these, it really helped me loosen up a  bit.  I still have a way to go before I'm beginning to feel confident in character design but I'm getting there!

Caricature time, digital style!

So, our project due tomorrow is a celebrity caricature but this time we actually got to paint and not colour so I had a lot of fun with this one.  I wanna try different approaches each painting so where this one I blended more, our self portrait (which is next) I'd like to try something different, we'll see how that goes.

This is my result after I had fun warping Ms. Helena Bonham-Carter, aka. Ms. Tim Burton, aka. Belatrix, aka. Mrs. Lovett, you get the picture.