I’ve been doing an exercise based on Trent’s recommendation where I take a screen grab from a movie, open up a blank canvas (of the same size), and try to capture as much information as I can in roughly 30 minutes. Color picking allowed! I start to go over the 30 minute mark if the sketch is looking better than expected or I simply like the subject/film.

Today’s 30 minute is from Pandorum:

• Netflix basically acts as my pool at the moment, but films on instant streaming with “good cinematography” (aka “pretty to me”) off the top of my head have already been near-depleted.
• The “color-picking allowed” part sounds cheap until you’ve done a few screens and realize that you subconsciously pick up on saturation and value patterns after awhile. (Weaning myself off of it will still be very scary.)

This was my first attempt on February 7th (from In the Mood for Love) using my 100000 year old Wacom Graphire. Whenever I look at it now I wonder how it took me a full 30 minutes to get so little detail:

Most amount of time spent would probably be Gimli (Feb. 23rd for about an 1-1.25 hours). Trent intervened 2 paintings before this to give me a better brush setup, which helped a ton. I was all super gung-ho about getting the helmet to look like metal at the 1 hour mark, but then I had to sleep. And then I had to go work. And then by the time I got home the next day and opened it up again I decided I didn’t care about the stupid helm anymore:

I prefer to do closeups of faces right now because people like people, and I’m people. Out of 19 exercises, only one of them has been an environment (and only 2 showing more than 1 person).

Top left: 30 min; top right: 1 hour; bottom left: 15 min (and a huge failure – there were at least 10 other figures in this shot that I neglected to address); bottom right: I have no freaking idea. Environments are just weird.

Also started borrowing Trent’s Intuos 3 about a week ago just to try it out. It feels super squishy after having used a cheapo Graphire for 3 weeks. I’m actually not sure I like that part.