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!