Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

Painting Exercise: Blade Runner (30min vs 1 hr), and the lack of fruit.

May 10th, 2011 at 1:05 am No Comments

I said there’d be fruit exercises about 3 weeks ago.

There is no fruit.

I did buy the fruit and it’s been sitting on my desk for 3 weeks (note: plastic), but no painting of the fruit. Felt quite rusty when I picked up the pen yesterday so I did a few more screen cap replications. The other 45 minute one I did featuring Harrison Ford is going to stay hidden on my hard drive because there’s an embarrassing lack of resemblance. Luckily, I don’t know who the actress who plays Rachel is or what exactly she’s supposed to look like.

An example of the difference 30 minutes can make (…or the difference focused detail can make). Also an example of why I need to focus on maximum capture at minimal duration. Reaalllly need to get better with that. Also would like to repeat excuse of how long it’s been since I last tackled one of these. It’s tempting to work past the 30 minute mark because I don’t want all of my exercises to be hideous ._. Must remind self that they’re for learning.

Reasons for neglecting the tablet (aka “Plugs for awesome things”)

1) The CreeD series, which Trent began publishing when he was 16 (!!), is being released by IDW (probably best known for their Transformers and maybe Zombies vs. Robots comics) this summer. I designed a mini-site to promote that fact.

2) Boey was prepping to launch a Kickstarter campaign so I helped with some updates to his site.

3) Trent received invitations to both Long Beach and Anaheim Comic Con which kept us busy for two straight weekends.

4) The computer building (previous post).

Categories: Art, General, Web No Comments

Painting Exercise: Star Trek

April 13th, 2011 at 10:57 pm 4 Comments

Did these last week (4/04-4/06) at about an hour each. Learned that (1) there is a whole lot of lens flare in that movie, and (2) tattoos are kind of hard. Had more images queued up, but after young Spock I felt like I needed to try something that’s not a screen cap. Fruit seems like a safe subject. Fruit later this week.

Categories: Art 4 Comments

Painting Exercise: Yimou Zhang makes pretty movies.

April 3rd, 2011 at 3:29 am 1 Comment

Going to post the products of my whole “learning to paint digitally” thing as I complete them. These are from yesterday & today in chronological order (they kind of get better toward the bottom, right? :| 30 minutes more time spent on details can make a big difference though).

I’d popped Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in at first to go for the general mainstream martial arts theme, but it’s not quite pretty enough. Most of these are from Hero while the first is from House of Flying Daggers (it’s also the only one I recorded a time for, apparently. I’m guessing the rest took between 30 minutes and 1 hour).

Categories: Art 1 Comment

Learning to paint digitally

March 9th, 2011 at 2:55 am 3 Comments

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.

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Sketch to wake me up this morning.

May 23rd, 2010 at 3:17 am 1 Comment

Obviously got distracted before I finished, so now it will forever be incomplete.

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