I’m not even sure what occupied my July, but productivity has been low. I started a rewatch of BSG and forced myself to do screencap exercises of that along with any other pretty movie I happen to load up just to maintain some momentum, so here’s a summary:

There are still a grip of screens from the movies at the bottom that I haven’t gotten to yet.

I finally tried my hand at a piece that doesn’t use direct reference and this is the spawn of that (can I again reiterate how “first” this painting is?):

Trent helped me out a lot with a paintover on this one 2/3 of the way through to point out oddities and give suggestions/tips. I had gone down the road of oversaturation about 1/3 of the way through, had no idea how to handle the hair, and the lighting on the face was a bit off around the eyes, so I tried to tried to fix those parts at least, yet somewhere down the line I distorted it into a more angular/weird looking thing. I’m not particularly happy with it, but moving on to the next project feels like a better use of my time now. Likely going to spin back from color to…figure drawing. With a pencil. I like pencils :|

…But likely more valuable.

Then again, the artists I’ve mentioned the cinematic exercise to all tend to agree that it’s a really good way to learn how to paint.

The pear on the left was my first attempt at a purely-from-observation digital painting. It took a lot of squinting and puzzled facial expressions (which I’m convinced helps me think) to understand what crazy things the colors were doing. I believe the resulting image resembles a pear, so we’ll call that one a success. The apple on the right is starting up faster due to having a better grasp of how all this light bouncing works and I intend to spend more time on it, even if pears are far superior to apples.

I’m beginning to regret having placed it in a super wrinkly chunk of fabric, though.

[Edit]
Stopping work on the apple. Screw cloth >:|~