man these have been kickikng my butt.
I’m leaning towards #1 or 4.. but the challenge of the limited palette of 3 was actually a lot of fun…
let’s just pretend #2 didn’t happen… turns out me and vivid colors aren’t that good friends yet.
Got my new Yinova tablet and am coming to grips with it. Also finally settled on a good composition for the scene and am pretty happy with the turtle.
The doldrums of summer and start of a new school year is like a parasitic leech that sits on your forehead and drains motivation and inspiration right out of you.
But what do you do? You plow through it.
thumbnail / color rough for a new painting.
Pretty excited to see where / how this one goes.
okokok.. end of summer and life gets a litte crazy so it’s taken a long time to get this far.
I know I overdid it, but there’s not a whole lot of structure to work off of in the original.
So I had to pull in a bunch of other references to get something resembling a Victorian dress out of it.
Time’s been a bit tighter than anticipated.
But all sorts of fun plans are being made.
Ok unfinished and overworked!
But it was fun to do at least.
Just doodling some silhouettes
Didn’t get time to try and dig into them for texture and shapes. But the ones in color are the ones I think might have potential..
Maybe this weekend I’ll get a couple hours to play with them some more.
So Month 3 of the Oatley Academy’s Magic Box course dropped and I’ve been devouring the videos. Despite them being repeatedly saying how dull Photoshop masking is, I’m having one heck of a time with the assignment. (Maybe I’m a overcompensating for working on the lady gazelle for 2 months a bit)
Basically, stage 1, make a scribble with a lasso and make it into a mask and scribble some more with the lasso tool until an interesting silhouette appears and then lasso some more to add patterns and texture and see if interesting interior shapes appear and then turn it into something interesting.
Anyway after some head bashing failures.
I managed to come up with 2 critters I like.
I call him Mr. Maggenpye, he’s some sort of scavenger/used junk dealer who travels the land digging around for easy profit.
and
Dewdrop, some sort of miniature plant horse that roots about your vegetable garden, a favorite steed for the elfin folk.
Total time ~2hrs.
Just a random Scribble worked on until it turned into something. about 95% lasso and gradient tool.
Ok a couple weeks of quiet, but not unproductive.
So Month 2 of the awesome yet super challenging Magic Box digital painting course unlocked and the next step is to work on brush skills and economy of brush strokes. So pushing onward, I’ve started rendering out the Lady Gazelle color comp.
And here’s where I’m at.
And here’s the final color comp from month 1, all lasso tool and gradients.
And the original Master’s painting
Man was this hard.
I mean .. seriously hard. I’m a scribbler, and forcing myself to think about EVERY SINGLE STROKE, was at times, frustrating and enlightening on a profound level. But after watching the lesson videos and reading and just examining other peoples work, I’m beginning to ‘get’ it. I couldn’t have even come close to doing something like this 2 months ago, and I already see so many things regarding edges and just stroke economy that I’d never seen before.
More progress on moving along to the color comps portion of the month 1 homework. Next week is looking like not much painting time so I’m going to crunch the rest of this week and see if I can get these guys done.
Turns out… painting is hard.
Needed some quick reference studies on gazelle hooves… Man it’s so hard to find more than 1 picture of the same species, gender and general age.
There’s a saying “If all you eat every day is cheeseburgers, even if you LOVE cheeseburgers, at some point you’re going to desperatly want to do something other than eat another cheeseburger.”
Now replace that cheeseburger with code.
I’ve been eating cheeseburgers all day every day, then on weekends for freelance and then in the few remaining moments of the day there was a great big helping of gamedev cheeseburgers just waiting for me.
So time for a bit of a programming break.
So I signed up for a digital painting course I’ve had my eye on for a few months.
http://chrisoatley.com/digital-painting-in-photoshop/
And here’s some scribblings from the first month’s homework.
And some scribbles from the kitchen without reference.
