penguin wip

so I wanted to have this done by the VIST show.. that definitely didn't happen, but I like the way it's coming together. did some major composition overhauling (and I'm still not sure it's right) and worked out the city and crevasse.

the penguins are going to get a lot more detail, and I will also work over the 'tundra', probably adding in a few more signs sticking up in perspective. definitely needs some kind of texture too.

anyway I'm very open to comments and suggestions.. this painting seems to be continually evolving.

penguin progress

here's my in-prog image. still have a lot of work ahead of me, but after tomorrow I only have this to work on... woooo. the city and frozen McDonalds guy are just placeholder images, obviously (and the McDonalds guy will probably not end up so McDonalds-y)



this is my first sketch. as you can see, i've changed up the color scheme to warm sunset colors

dinerpocalypse: approach shot color key

NEW AND IMPROVED:

THIS ONE MAKES THEM LOOK LIKE MIDGETS:

didn't have this finished yesterday, but here is a color key for the shot as the characters approach the diner.

dinerpocalypse shaded characters

yay zombies!

concept art in prog

So I somehow ended up with the most obnoxiously idyllic scene ever. Not done, it still needs stuff- for example, an interesting subject. There's also some texture mismatch with the grass, and the mountains need work (did those first, you can tell). But yeah.. I don't hate it, but I don't love it.

I basically photochopped together a bunch of my own photos from various places (Alaska, Switzerland, Colorado) and started with a quick trace/sketch as seen below. Then I painted awayyy. Painting a huge scene kinda stressed me out, because there was so much to worry about. I'm way more comfortable with still lifes and portraits.. need moar landscape practice.

speed painting a lonely house

So I tried to speed paint a scene of a lonely house on a seaside cliff.. I painted from a reference image that I found on flickr. I pretty much don't like the way it turned out- but hey, gotta start somewhere. The cliffs don't feel solid and rugged. The mountain is sort of okay but I've got a long way to go. It was fun to paint very loosely and gesturally though.

self portrait numero dos

here's my final portrait ^^ I was inspired by the dramatic lighting in my reference photo and really tried to emphasize it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

My process was fairly simple- I just blended, and blended, and blended some more with a reduced-opacity brush. I got into the groove with a regular old circular-shaped brush and couldn't really find a reason to switch it up. I worked in sections, completing the purple tank top and jeans first, then the cardigan, then my hands, and finally my face and hair. I'm not in love with the hair, and will probably try to make an extra effort on hair for my next painting.

Below is an in-prog image, showing the colors and basic shading roughed out.

self portrait, illustrative style

^^ Here is my first self portrait image. I started with a sketch and then outlined it, as you can see below. The outline had a nice illustration/cartoon pen and ink quality, so I decided to run with it. I tried to make the shading mimic an ink wash, using the bleedy-watercolory brush that I created for our first assignment. I think the jpeg compression killed the effect a little bit, but the printout looks better.


The image below is my first attempt that I created over the weekend. As you can clearly see, it looks nothing like me. As I was drawing, I was increasingly distressed by the non-resemblance (and I was indeed drawing from a mirror), so I ended up with this picture of a random worried-looking girl. However, I'm somewhat happy with the chalk pastel effect that I got with my homemade brush, so I decided to share it:

brushing up

For this tutorial, I overlaid two photos of my dog and my cat in difference blending mode, cut out an interesting part, duplicated and rotated it a couple times, and ended up with this nice bleedy-watercolorish brush.


For this tutorial, I made a quick painting with india ink, water, and salt. Then I scanned it, cut out a little part, messed with the levels and blending modes, and voila: a chalky little brush.