experimentations

Playing with messier, looser strokes.

WOLVUHREEN

Been nailing down my look, and settling on the direction I want to take my work. Instead of working on the stuff I SHOULD be working on, this afternoon/evening was spent on this.

I'll do my best to explain what I did in each step, but I kinda just saved at random times so it doesn't make for the most in depth look into my process. Honestly, I barely even have a process, I just slap my tablet with the stylus until something comes out.

Uno) Rough sketch done in Autodesk Sketchbook pro on my tablet PC. I had no idea what I was going to doodle, so I defaulted to my standard "dude standing around" and gradually morphed him into Wolverine.

Ni) Flats. Pretty self explanatory. I tend to pick super ridiculously saturated reds for my base flesh tone, because I usually calm it down as I progress. Or not. I don't even know to be honest. i REALLY like the piece at this stage, in some ways more so than how it finally turned out.

Tres) Using a standard airbrush on a new layer, I glaze in some hue shifts. Some are arbitrary, some are super exaggerated (the face). I like to keep adding shifts in hue to keep things varied, as opposed to having big blocks of the same color.

4) On a multiply layer I paint in the basic shadow patterns.

Go) I paint some orange junk to indicate a strong natural light source.

Six) I strengthen the hell out of that light source, ad I paint in a bit of sub surface scattering. I crank the SSS all the way up for his ears, because I always do that. I think I also paint a bit of ambient occlusion under his chin and in some of the other more recessed parts of his figure. I also start painting a subtle light source on his arm to flesh it out a bit

7) I don't even think there's a difference. What a stupid step.

Hachi) Smoothed his shirt and started defining his jeans.

9) Paint his hand and hair, continue refining things here and there. It's a little hard to narrow down what I did because after step 4, I'm spastic as hell with my approach.

Sixteen) I add minor touch-ups that nobody will notice, and add the claw scratch thingies cuz they're KOOOOOL. Annnnnnd I'm done. No wait, one more thing. Ok now I'm done.

Bed Time doodle

quick speedie of Darkseid before going to sleep.

Clever Blog Title

I keep forgetting I have a blog, but I promise I'll start updating more often for all two of you that follow this. I graduated a couple of months ago, and have remained gloriously unemployed since. As time passes, it gets more and more frustrating because the seeds of doubt keep growing. Doubts about whether or not I have what it takes to make it in any one of the entertainment industries that I want to be in. Lucky for me, my stubborn-ness outweighs my fear because I still keep drawing and applying to different places. I don't have much else to rant about, but there are a couple links that I thought I'd post up that have a wealth of information about concepting and painting.

Color/Light/Painting stuff - http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm

Design Stuff - http://www.autodestruct.com/thumbwar.htm

I have to go surf my friends' blogs now. Here's some art.

Sticking to what I'm bad at

Over the last 7 or 8 weeks I've had an unusually large number of people tell me how much I suck at characters and how much better my background work is. Most of these people suggested that I work on my characters less and focus on my backgrounds more. This advice was both logical and well intentioned. I mean if I'm going to send portfolios out to companies in the hopes of getting hired, then I better send them some beautiful depictions of the things that I'm best at right? So I decided to go ahead and do the exact opposite. While I DO see the logic in strengthening my oh so "well-developed background muscles", I would be doing my happiness a disservice by neglecting to strengthen my ability to design characters. I prefer to tackle my weaknesses and bring them as close as possible to my existing strengths before going back to the things I'm better at. Over the last month and a half or so, I've been consistently sketching characters in my sketchbook and hitting up the life drawing sessions as much as possible in hopes of strengthening my weaknesses, which I think is my responsiblity as an artist. Above are the fruits of my labors. While I'm not even CLOSE to the level I would like to be at in terms of arting awesome characters, I think I've made some significant improvements.

Boooorrrrrredddd at worrrrrkkkk

Incredibly bored at work and a little frustrated that I wasted like 4 days painting an environment from a retarded point of view. Above is the 10 minute lighting study that resulted from my boredom, and the retarded P.O.V environment that caused my irritation. I'm sure you'll figure out which is which. And I'm sure someone will post a comment asking if the lighting study was the environment and vice versa, just to be a smart ass.

f*ck colds

Man, I'm tired of being sick. It starts off with 3 days of regular cold symptoms, then after the cold I'm up for almost 48 hours because post-cold-coughing keeps me awake. Then I buy new pillows to keep my torso a little more elevated at night so that I can hope to get some sleep. I buy new sheets for these pillows. They give my knees and my face an itchy f*cking rash. Why my knees? I dont know, it was weird as shit. More speedpaintings above.