The effect of the glass bottle being lit from behind was laid out in the first 3 hours (day 1) but the pattern on the glass was mostly ignored and there were clear alignment/perspective issues + overall messiness:

The 3 hours on day 2 were used to clean up & fix the perspective problems, and the 6 horrible hours that followed in the last 2 days were spent trying to get the patterns on the glass looking right. It never really happened — I just gave up. If I’d ignored the actual pattern and replaced it with something uniform, it might have worked out better, but by that point I didn’t want to invest more time into this thing.

I feel like I missed a lot of hues & the reflection of the cloth bouncing onto the patterns on the bottom killed me a bit too.

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 :|

Picked it up again today and limited myself to 15 minutes like a good girl (…notice how simple these three screencaps are. Hah!). Also tried using a square brush for the top two which ended up looking unexpectedly soft. Probably bad settings.

I did a google search for other (better) people who do the same sort of exercise to see their approach and found this tutorial. …Yea, that guy’s pretty good.

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 >:|~

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).

• CPU: i5 2500K
• Motherboard: MSI P67A-C43
• Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 912 (-$10 & another 10% off for having purchased a CPU from them)
• RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 (-$15)
• SSD: Kingston SSDNow V100 64GB (-$45 rebate)
• Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold (I don’t remember if this was a code or a rebate, but the final price I paid was around $100.)
• Heat Sink: Cooler Master Hyper 212 (one seller had it for $23. $30 after tax and shipping)
• Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti ($210 after a $30 mail-in rebate, -$10 for purchasing with a Visa card, and some other promotion listed on slickdeals.net. No sales tax!)
• Optical: Something by LG

Stopped keeping track after these items. I believe the total, including monitor and fans, cames out to about $1050. Ran memory and CPU stress tests over the course of 1-2 days without any issues turning up, but haven’t done major overclocking and am still wary that some random component’s going to go kaput in a week or two. Most painful part about this entire project? Threading the plastic fans by hand using a screwdriver. Cursed fans.

Purchased the CPU & monitor yesterday for in-store pick up from Microcenter. Love that instant gratification feature, by the way. Set up the monitor and laptop in a way that allows me to pretend I’m using a desktop until the full computer’s built. If only I had a USB keyboard :|

Don’t mind the ziplock change bag and plastic fruits…

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).