Bringing a painting back from the dead

I recently got an assignment to do a personal project for my senior studio class. The only requirement is that I enter it into the Society of Illustrators student competition. I brought a few sketches in to class to pitch my ideas. In addition to the sketches, I also showed a drawing of a painting I started almost a year ago for another class.

The original assignment was to illustrate an oxymoron, I picked civil war and walking dead. Instead of just making my painting about one zombie and one soldier, as always, I got waaaaay to ambitious. I bit off way more than I could chew (that is not a zombie joke). The painting ended up having 18 figures, I did not have the skill or confidence to tackle something like that. Fortunately, that little thing called learning happens to me occasionally.

So fast forward, my instructors picked the old painting over the other ideas I had. So I'm back at it. I'm still a little afraid, but I just try to imagine how the guys in the painting must be feeling to keep things in perspective.

Here is a process shot of where I'm at so far. This is about 20-30 hours into the project. That isn't painting time however. Currently I'm in the process of working through all the values, which has been about 4 hours of painting. Most of the time thus far has been working through the concept, composition, research, and photos. Everything up to the beginning of the painting was completed last year when I initially started the piece.

Hopefully this serves as a teaser and everyone is as excited to see the final piece as I am. When I'm finished I will be writing a detailed post on the process behind this disaster.

Wish me luck, I'm going to need it.

Hello internet! Long time no see. So I'm back at it again. The it i'm referring to is making art and not hating it. I'll be making a post later out learning, struggle, making art, and the state of mind that can easily set it when your life revolves around one thing so heavily. Enough of that! Let us move on to the panting and drawing!

So here is it, a poignant moment from the story of the little mermaid. The moment when she becomes a human woman. It took me some time to actually reach this idea, both with the narrative and the composition. Initially, I had a two figure composition, Ursula in the middle ground and the little mermaid in the foreground facing away from the viewer. I had done the thumbnail this way because I wanted the chance to do a really awesome mermaid witch! However, I was asked to change the point of view so the viewer could see the front of Ariel. I was not as excited to do it that way, I really wanted to focus on the evil character.

I set up a photo shoot for the revised idea, and also worked up an alternative idea. Something I could be more excited about, since the main focus of my initial thumbnail had been changed. Something magical happened!! As I was working up the original idea, I began to fall in love with it despite having reservations about it after having been asked to revise it. I came to class with both a new thumbnail, a tight drawing, and a semi tight version of my new idea. The first image below is the thumbnail for what eventually became the painting. The second is the tight line drawing of the original idea. I can't show the other drawing because i drew over it to make the final drawing for the painting, so it no longer exists.

So after a relatively long discussion, the new idea was actually picked. The idea being that the narrative is better for cover art. Becoming human is not only a specific part of the story, but also a main theme behind the story. After the new idea was picked, I was asked to explore a few new points of view just to exhaust all possible options. Eventually the first point of view was the best, but below are two upward views I sketched.

So back to the camera I went. I set up a new photo shoot to make sure I could get the ascending Ariel just right. The image I worked from is a composite of a few photos I took. When I am making my reference I will often review all the images for slightly different variations and gestures to get the best reference possible. It's important when working with a model to talk them through the idea your working with and get them to move slightly or reposition themselves so you have the most information to work with when you get back to the drawing and painting. I will use this photocomp in both the drawing (which acts as an underpainting) and the final rendering. 

I also collected many images from the internet for landscape reference. Something that is extremely important to remember is to get your idea on paper before using any found reference. Make everything your own and once your have the composition laid out and the basic shapes in place, you can safely use found reference to inform your decision making without inadvertently stealing someones work. I drew up the rocks surrounding the main figure as much as I could before turning to my found reference.

Once I had reference prepared, which I always print and keep next to me, I began to make the final drawing.

With this drawing I attempted to add depth and variation to the landscape, which is something I don't actually think I succeeded with, but that is part of the process. Once my drawing was finished, I scanned it and brought it to photoshop to begin the painting. The digital painting process is a major reason I print my reference, having the whole screen to work with is much more effective. putting your images next to your painting on the computer can end up slowing your down and being restrictive in my opinion.

I go through a few steps digitally before I begin to render a piece digitally. I first delete all the white out of the drawing. I do this because it's easy, quick, and avoids using a multiply layer, which isn't bad, but not having to use one is better. after I have isolated the pencil work, I block in values under my drawing to get a better idea of how the composition will work as a whole.

Once this step is finished, and I'm satisfied with the results. I like to experiment with some coloring tricks to get an idea for a palette. In this piece, 2 gradient mesh layers, a hue saturation layer, and a colorize layer got me to a place I liked. The first image is without the colorize over the figure, the second also includes the background, which is all color picked from colors I had in the foreground elements. In order to colorize the subject I first had to use a layer mask on my gradient mask and hue saturation layers so she was just in grey tones again. This was actually quite easy because the initial block in was on it's own layer so i could select her silhouette with one click.

From this point I began the final rendering. I painted opaquely over the whole thing, only selecting colors you see above. Sometimes I would increase or decrease the value to maintain the palette and the local color of certain objects. Again, here is the final piece. One thing I tried to keep in mind was playing with color temperature as well as value to create the illusion of form. I don't think I was successful, but the decision making involved was enjoyable regardless.

The painting was a great experience, I was able to learn a lot from this piece. I had been experimenting a lot with difference techniques and in this painting I was able to tone some of that back, and bring some of it foreword and synthesize it all into something slightly cohesive. overall the piece is a little plain looking to me. Some of the modeling on the figure falls short, and the landscape is just short of compelling.

Thanks for reading, I hope I could teach you something, and there is definitely things I could learn. Please comment with thoughts, criticism, and anything else on your mind.

New techniques are scaary!

So I have been viciously absorbing digital painting techniques specifically related to workflow. I felt as though the way I was doing things before wasn't allowing me to working according to my strengths as an artist.  This entry is meant to share my celebration with all.... 6 people that actually read my blog.

Well, I have finally done it! I have figured out a way to preserve the spirit of a sketch through the digital painting process. Now I realize this quick monster painting doesn't look all that special, but he is the result of weeks of deciphering tutorials, 2 hours of drawing, and about an hour of painting.

Whats so special you might be wondering? Well, thanks to one of my new favorite artists, Peter Mohrbacher, I figured out how to completely eliminate all the white from a drawing while still preserving a full range of values created by my pencil. Selecting out the white is easy if all your working with is black lines, but this painting was started as a full value pencil drawing. The process is several steps and seems complicated at first but only takes a few seconds once you figure it out. Now I longer have to wrestle with photoshop because of the various drawbacks of a multiply layer.

The second thing that is new is coloring via gradient map on a soft or hard light blending mode. I never thought of it before but it gives a nice start to a palette with limited colors.

Now that the technical limitation of photoshop have been conquered, I can finally make something cool in digital paint.... once i actually learn how to paint.

Style Study

To celebrate my first two followers on twitter I thought I'd give a little sneak peak into something I will be revealing shortly.

This is a quickly character study for a new project I'm working on. With this project I'll be exploring a new style and this portrait was the warm up.

This painting almost kicked my ashcan

Last week my anatomy teacher gave out a one week assignment. We had to create a painting of character he made up during the studio class, the character was nothing special, just a result of the       live model and some costuming and imagination. The catch was that we had to emulate as closely as    possible the ashcan school of painting. Here is my attempt. (sorry about the formatting, not sure what just happened)

Looking at this piece after it's all said and done I have a few criticisms regarding the final execution. Learning to analyze your own work from a critical standpoint can be extremely valuable. Since making any kind of artwork is a series of decisions, understanding what those decisions are and why you are making them will help you be more effective. In this particular painting I should have done a few things differently. The first major flaw, especially since it is supposed to be ashcan, is that the dark's throughout the figure and robe aren't dark enough. I think this is taking away some of the sense of form I was going for. The next thing I should have done differently is carried the darkness under the chair and robe further down the painting, there is a sense of depth that starts to appear just under the hanging robe but it is lost with the lighter tones brushed up against it. The third thing is the forearm got a little too light during the painting process and I also let the modeling get away from me a bit.

Enough about the final piece as a whole, I want to talk about how I got there. Normally in a class painting session I either scumble in or draw a loose sketch on a canvas to paint over. I really don't like this method because I'm not fond of painting on canvas, and I also have a tendency to work too quickly and working over an underpainting with minimal detail doesn't help.

I solved this problem by spending about 20 minutes on a drawing in class.

I then scanned my drawing, (i started drawing recently in a toned sketch book and I love it!) blew it up, and made a print on enhanced matt paper. I made the print out as big as my roll allowed which is 16 inches wide (i want to get a 24 inch wide roll cause bigger is better) and I wet mounted this print to a piece of masonite. I love working this way because I enjoy painting on a smooth surface, and I get to save all of my drawings.

During the painting process I just kept making sure to take my time, and make my brush strokes count. My favorite facet of the ashcan school is the bold, meaningful, and expertly placed strokes. I just kept looking at my reference and following my drawing while paying constant attention to the location, shape, size, and value of each stroke. I think I made a pretty decent attempt. I love oil paintings and one day that is all I will do so it was nice to have a chance to get in some practice on both oil and patience.

There is one thing that I think is special about this piece and can serve as a good teachable moment for any aspiring artists reading this. From where I was sitting.... let me back up for a second. Always move around the room when it is time for the model to get into a long pose, getting that perfect angle can make all the difference in the outcome and your confidence. Anyway, so from where I was sitting, the right hand of the model was buried between his knees with only a smidge of hand poking out. Rather than accept my fate, I chose to manipulate reality for the sake of a better piece. After all, that is the best part about a painting and about being an artist.

The image on the left is the knee area from where I was initially sitting, I chose this spot because 90% of everything I wanted was perfect, most notably the head and shoulders. The only problem was that darned hand. I made my drawing, leaving out everything to the right of the left knee, then I moved and finished my drawing. I made sure to get a picture of both so I could refer to sound reference and pull off a successful synthesis of both angles. This kind of staging is important and can take your illustrations and artwork even further. Now I just have to learn to draw and paint hands.

I hope you all enjoyed this, sorry for the length, I like to talk about art.... a lot. Just ask my class mates about our critiques. I'm going to leave you with a 15 minute digital sketch from earlier in the semester that I did during a model session in anatomy class.

Book cover process Part I

Hello everyone! Welcome to my first official blog post. The reason I am calling it the first official post is because this post will be the first that adheres to the intended purpose for which I made this blog in the first place. One of my goals of this semester is to actively update my blog, post links to things I think everyone should see, and to discuss my artwork and the choices I make during the process. So here were go.

 

This is a painting I did in a studio class last semester. It is for a book jacket for a made up book called "The Creatures Inside". Here is the synopsis

"A city college has become the breeding ground of an alien invasion.  Brad and Emily have discovered the source and are racing against the clock to stop the invasion before the aliens outnumber them and control the planet."

Sounds exciting! my favorite thing about illustration as a discipline is encapsulated by this very project. Here is an idea and it's my job to figure out how to visually represent this idea in a compelling way that most people will find intriguing.

I started with a bunch of sketches, very... very rough sketches. My goal with these was to explore interesting points of view and compositions, just blocking in basic shapes and hints at value. Some of them just started as random shapes and weren't even intended to be anything in particular. I sometimes like to work with blobs and shapes that have interesting relationships with each other, and if a composition works well, I'll figure out what those shapes will be later.

I really wanted to have a composition that looked good and felt complete as a whole, but also as just the back cover and just the front cover. I settled on an idea (with some input from my instructor ) and developed a tighter version of what I had.

The drawing I went with suggests the discovery of the aliens and their breeding process. Aliens hanging people impregnated with their spawn is always scary, no matter how many times it's done. The idea here was that if a human incubator is hanging, where should the eggs go? Growing from the feet of course! Without the aid of a beating heart, eggs implanted in the human feet will be able to take advantage of gravity to deliver nutrient rich human fluids to growing alien embryos.

Part of the influence for this idea was that I could take advantage of only suggesting something horrific (hanging dead humans) without showing the whole corpse. There is something ominous about a body hanging from a noose and my idea allowed me to capture that eerie and morbid gesture.

A lot of the sketches are extremely loose, which is always something I struggle with, some days I find myself being more creative with lines, and sometimes with blobs (like a digital sketch that starts with an obscure shape). I don't really consider myself very good at drawing, and see my real strength as modeling with value. Either way, I like to work in as many ways as I can to explore, practice, and learn new ways of doing and thinking. This particular time, I chose a pencil.

Once I had my idea locked in, I was required to create a color comp, which I did in Photoshop. I only referred to my sketch observationally during this process (as opposed to painting over a scan). I did this for two reasons; The first was to save time, and the second was to continue to allow myself to potential explore more solutions without getting caught up with staying in the lines so to speak.

The blue lines indicate where the spine and flaps will be. This color comp, which are meant to be used as tools, is extremely rough but serves its purpose just fine. Something that I know I will need to improve however, is representing preliminary ideas more precisely.

The color palette I had in mind was a sort of slickly skin tone, warm light, and some sort of olive green. I think olive is just the best color in the whole world almost. At this point, I was starting to plan my final approach. I had to start considering props and photo reference, and possibly some inspirational reference also. Looking at a painting that has a feeling or aesthetic you admire can help greatly.

Above is a little comp I made to display the reference I took for this piece. It doesn't show all the images I took, but you get the idea. While I was planning the photoshoot, I was trying to figure out a setting, at first I was thinking garage, and something to use for the egg sack. I chose this wall, which is in a studio here at school, because it looks like it could belong to an academic institution. It also has the feeling of a storage room or a closet, which seems like a good place to hind impregnated dead people.

The egg sack was made from a water balloon, a plastic bag, and silly puddy. I shot everything I thought I would need. Using one egg and several photos of feet in the same position, I composted everything together to make an image (lower left of the above image) that contained everything I needed for the image, and also served as another preliminary version of my idea.

Next I created a drawing based on my photo comp. During the process of creating the first tight drawing of the idea I put a lot of thought into the position of the eggs, this problem got constant attention throughout the entire process and was continually refined. A major consideration I had was to keep them tightly positioned, but not allow the image to stagnate by allowing stale relationships to happen. This can occur particularly when objects that draw attention to themselves are directly horizontal or vertical from each other. Below is both the drawing and a version highlighting the relationships between the eggs.

The red lines indicate the relationships between the main egg stacks, which are going to be the ones that draw the most attention based on their illumination and placement. I have been obsessed with triangles as a basis for creating compositions lately. you'll notice that there are minimal horizontal or vertical lines (in blue) connecting any of the egg sacks, with the exception of ones that are only have visible, or all the way across the image.

I stare at this painting by Donato Giancola intently for inspiration all the time. There are endless teachable moments obviously, but the ones I want to dwell on are the triangular relationships created by important elements of the painting. I referred to this painting several times for decision making inspiration for both this piece and another I was working on at the same time.

So back to the point. I created this drawing from my photocomp. I drew it in pencil with the intention of scanning it and painting over it in photoshop. I did the first tight version (underpainting) so to speak in pencil to mimic the way I like to work in oils (wet mounting a drawing on masonite).

I left the majority of the drawing in lines only because the larger areas would be quicker to block in with value on the computer.

I am currently running out of time to keep working on this, so I'll just come back to it and make a part 2 which will show all of the digital work leading up to the final. Stay tuned.

The battle of the blog.

I'm getting ready to put together a comprehensive post on a book cover I did for a studio class last semester. the post will be relatively long and include several images. So I thought I'd try my hand at a quick warm up post. I haven't posted any images yet, and based on my lack of entries, I'm sure you can all assume I am unfamiliar with how to work with my blog effectively.

The warm up.

This image is of a monster I created for a contest at school called the Monster Battle. I won last year and I wanted to create something even more evil and dangerous than before.

The contest is not actually an art contest, but a hypothetical death match. The entries are divided up into pairs and set up in a single elimination tournament. The judges decide who wins by determining which monster in each pair would beat the other in a fight to the death. The decision is supposed to be made based on which monster looks like it could kill the other. Contestants are required to represent their monsters powers visually.

This particular little guy was a just a vision in my mind since last year. I opted to go with something else at the time (Pictured below. I'm glad I did, because I ended up winning). So I saved the idea in my mental filing cabinet for later.

My monster this year was about 1-2 hours worth of work. I started with a pencil sketch and worked over it in Photoshop (last year I didn't know how to use photoshop. I used a good old micron, which at the time was about the only medium I could use). I didn't use any reference, which is pretty obvious. While I was working I just tried to let the mark making spontaneously determine most of the forms. Towards the end I added the light tones and highlights vaguely based on a lightsource and threw in some internal nuclear glow and there ya have it.

A Fat, evil, cleaving, muscle bound beast with a nuclear powered laser cannon and a machine gun....that lost in the second round to a creature I nick named "stabby mcstabstab." I was sad, but congrats to Charlie for the win and the cool drawing, and thanks for vengence (Charlies monster destroyed Stabby McStabStab in the championship round).

(the images above are a test to see how the whole imaging posting thing works, so i apologize for any size/quality issues)