Anne of Green Gables

This week's render doodle is a little fan art of Anne of Green Gables for an old coworker of mine who's Mum was involved in a pretty serious car accident. She's going to make a full recovery but it's a long road ahead so he put out a request to fellow artists to make some Anne of Green Gables fan art to decorate her hospital room with.

Render-wait Paintings

I'm starting to do painting studies while I'm waiting for Maya to render so here's my most recent study from this gorgeous picture of the highlands of Scotland.

I wasn't going for complete accuracy this time around, it was more of an exploration of the colours in the image, combined with textures.

Storyboard Project - Concept Art

Working on my storyboard project as a break from all the 3D computer work I did a little concept painting with my characters from my upcoming project.

It was really nice just to paint again!  (First time since this summer really.)

Semester 4 Layouts - Tonal Studies

It's almost the end of the semester so here's another little update while I procrastinate.

Here is my big project for Layout this semester.  We were to create two environments of what ever we'd like then using dramatic lighting create a tonal study for mood and story using only the lighting.  

These are more conceptual lighting studies as opposed to plotted light sources, focusing on that mood.  For mine I wanted one to be a bit more technical with some architectural elements and the other to be predominately organic because I love drawing organic layouts.   

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.

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.

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)

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.

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))

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.

Speed Painting Practice

So here's a quick painting (about 40 minutes) I did while my Digital Professor was showing us his online video for caricature painting in photoshop.

I'm going to love this next project, it's so nice to just paint and lose the line work.

"Barbershop" Digital Paint

((Slight edit in colours from last night after last minute critique)) 

Here's my first layout back in the swing of things at school, this wasn't my best layout still being a bit rusty from the winter break so the line art is pretty bad which in turn made this very difficult to try and paint properly without the image looking terrible.

I think it turned out decent for the amount of time I had to work on it, on top of all my other courses.  There's lots of areas that I'd like to clean up more but I'm fairly satisfied with how it turned out.  Before this course it had been a long time since I've been colouring in Photoshop so it's taken me a bit to get back in the swing of things.

Here's hoping out next assignment doesn't have line art!