Bringing you up to speed...

All of my internet sketchbooks (including this blog!) Are seriously out of whack in terms of pieces being updated...so here's a big old art dump to try and get everything back on the same page.

Last Digital Painting assignment

Above is the last painting assignment we received in class before we assembled portfolios - design an environment. I really enjoyed doing environments - not something that I expected to like. So I think I'll explore more of those in the future.

In the meantime, expect some more figure studies...

Week 6 - Creature! Squaawrk!

Here's week 6 of the digital painting class - design a creature using photo textures. Unfortunately, I think I ended up painting over most of my textures! I'm still fairly happy with the end result though, and I DID learn a few new things from it, so it's still a success in my mind.

Week 5 of digital painting - Photo textures. Blegh.

Last week's assignment was designing a robot and painting it using photo textures. For some reason, early on I got it in my head I wanted to do a construction robot. So, the Caterpillar Inc. Heavy-Lift Bot was created.

I've never been a big fan of using photo textures, and this assignment kind of reinforced it for me (though not nearly as much as this week's assignment.) I got lucky with my design being geometric, since it was mostly a matter of laying the texture into perspective with the Distort option and doing a few paint overs, but for the most part it seems like a messy process to me and more work than needed to get it polished.

In the end though I was happy with the result, though Erik was awesome enough to point out some improvements I could have made to it. Once this class is through I'm planning to go back and tweak it with those improvements in mind.

Imagined Studies

I completely forgot about posting these here - these have been posted before on CA.org.

Above is a collection of studies I have been doing from the imagination - I've wanted to push my ability to try and draw these things from out of my head on the knowledge that I'm familiar with from doing life drawing and studying the forms in day to day observations and photos.

I've been approaching it systematically, taking each major portion of the human body and isolating it to some degree, before I bring it back into the fold of the whole human figure. I'm right now about to start arms, followed by head and shoulders. Most likely after I'm done with these I'll do another round of them, but this time from life.

Week 2 of Digital Painting - Environments!

This is the second assignment from the digital painting class. We were given the task of designing either an environment or character, and paint it using the lasso and pen tool almost exclusively. The goals were to make it simple and graphic.

This was a fun assignment for me - not only was it way out of my comfort zone (Both content and style-wise), but at the end of it I had a blast! And I learned quite a few new tricks regarding masks...

Zbrush noodles and movie studies

I've started to get back into Zbrush after a long long hiatus from it. Surprisingly, I just needed to get quickly reacquainted with how to make a basic bust with zspheres or a polymesh sphere. The rest of it came back naturally. So now every few evenings I've done a quick sketch in zbrush (by quick, I mean somewhere around 1-3 hours.) No preliminary doodle, I just make a standard bust shape with zspheres and try to make some interesting shapes.

I'm also taking a digital painting class through CGMW (whose workshops I wholly recommend.) The first assignment was value studies from film stills. I've never done something like this, so the first few I struggled with - place down some values, double-check, see I'm ridiculously off, and readjust. After awhile I became pretty good at recognizing the value relationships, and it certainly taught me a good deal. Why I haven't done these before, I don't have a clue - they seem really invaluable.

More about Reilly's Values

This has been sitting on my to-do list for a bit, so let's try and finally get this done.



Above is a collection of charts for values in different lighting conditions, plus a Reilly Value scale. On the left are different conditions for Form Lighting (Which is defined by Faragasso as the typical indoor lighting that life drawing and still life models are under,) while on the right are the conditions for Sunlight and Rim Lighting (light that is illuminating a figure from the behind.) There is also front lighting, but that's one I'm still trying to sort my brain around, so for the time being I've left it out.



These charts have been pretty invaluable in helping me get a jump start on getting proper values down - too often I don't push values enough, and it ends up as a grey, soupy mess when it's done, without any sort of clear focal point. So let's try and dissect one of these charts, yeah?



They're actually pretty easy to decode - there's a light side column, and a shadow side column. On each column, you have a base value that that translates over to what the value may appear as in either the light, or shadow. For example, say your object is a value of 5 (that's middle of the middle of the middly grey, pretty much), It will appear as a value of 7 in the light, and a 2 in the shadow. If you're not quite grasping it, look at the chart again reread this paragraph - it'll grab you eventually.




Here's an example of two imaginative still lifes made using these value systems. The top uses the Sunlight chart, while the bottom is the Form Light chart. Can you guess what the base values are of the objects based off the light and dark values listed?



This whole system actually becomes really easy to understand once you try it out a few times. And like all formulas, it shouldn't be the end-all, but for someone that has trouble pushing their values, it's a valuable stepping stone to see accurate values and be more confident in their value choices.



Here's another example, a before/after of three figures. I first chose base values for the different parts, then applied values according to the Form Light chart. As you can see, it yielded some pretty fast and decent results. You still need to understand how light and shadows work, though, otherwise you'll be placing random shadow shapes everywhere without thought given to form, cast shadows, etc.



This is only the surface of this whole system. There's more complicated variables that take away the initial simplicity of it, and that's just without adding color (once that's added in, it becomes inevitabley more complex...something I have yet to figure out all the way.) For the start though, the use of this chart and value scale is something that should be taken and used with gusto.


(If you'd like to learn more about Frank Reilly's methods, I can't recommend John Ennis' blog "The Reilly Papers" enough. You can find a link for it in the sidebar, or in my previous post.)

Sketches, values, and Reilly.

Above are some digital sketchbook pages I done over the past two weeks. It's really nothing more than a photoshop file with an ever increasing amount of layers, but I've been finding it a great way to fuss about with my digital tools, experiment, and learn.

Ever since I graduated from SCAD, I've found myself trying to get a better grasp on painting. It was something that, regretably, I didn't actively pursue: I focused my efforts almost exclusively on improving my line drawing, believing that'd be enough to spring me forward into other avenues (you can guess how that turned out, otherwise I wouldn't be talking about this.)

It's been a forward march of improvement, but the progress can vary from tiny steps to gigantic leaps, depending on how well I absorb and understand it all. Self-learning can come easily to some, for others, you need a lot of learning material and grit to gain anything out of it. Which brings me to Frank Reilly and Jack Faragasso.

I've always been fascinated by Frank Reilly's teachings. His systems and methods are tried and true, and have proven to be a great springboard for artists to get a grasp of the fundamentals and hone their technique, allowing them to experiment and push themselves while relying on a solid bedrock of teaching. Unfortunately, for someone who is revered by a lot of modern day illustrators, concept artists, and painters, there's not really a lot of his teaching information available. Most of it is out of print, or if it is in print, it's usually glossed over and not covered extensively (I think this might be in part because the author's either don't know enough about Reilly's methods, or they have it so ingrained in them that a lot of things they know instinctively are things they need to cover.)

There have been some gems in the dirt though, with Fred Fixler's amazing site and the recent addition of John Ennis' "The Reilly Papers" to the internet (I highly recommend John Ennis' site - they actually are the lecture notes from Reilly himself, and he does try to elaborate on some points that seem murky in the lecture notes. Plus he's just a great painter to boot.)

So how does Jack Faragasso figure into all this? He was a student of Frank Reilly, and wrote two books that covered Reilly's methods extensively: The Complete Guide to Painting the Human Figure, and the Complete Guide to Drawing the Human Figure. Unfortunately, both have been out of print for some time. Fortunately (for me, at least,) I was able to get pdf copies of them recently, and have been poring over them like mad.

Although the figure drawing one so far is okay (I STILL can't quite figure out how that whole system of figure construction works, and I probably never will,) Faragasso's painting book is a real eye-opener. I had recently finished reading the chapters about values and shadows, which ended up with my digesting that information into one of the sketchbook pages above (value study has been an extremely weak point for me, and this was sort of solid footing I needed.)

It's a shame a book like this doesn't exist in print anymore, since I really do think it'd be a boon to anyone that is trying to learn painting on their own. Hopefully though, I'll try and disseminate anything I've learned from it in any future posts.

Awake from the Winter, new resolutions.

Above is a piece I submitted to the Dungeon Delve challenge that went on a month back over at Artorder. It's not my most favorite piece (in fact, to be truthful, there's a lot that bugs me in terms of the painting part even though I rather like the drawing) but I was happy enough with it at the time. I think I might revisit it and fix it up soon.

I noticed that the last two times winter rolled around I tend to drop off the face of the Earth because of all the holidays getting mashed together; and I find myself trying to get back into posting regularly a little difficult (you should see how I am on other sites though...I guess you could say I do not put myself out there well enough.)

In anycase, one of my resolutions this year was to make an effort to post at least once a week - if I do well enough with that, I think I'll try and double it. Here's a few other resolutions I've made for myself this year (All art-related, surprise surprise):

-Have six illustrations done by June
-Have a basic concept art portfolio ready by June
-Get a better grasp of oil painting (a medium I'm finding myself liking more and more!)
-Continue to work on watercolors and digital mediums

I'm also kicking off this year by signing myself up for a bunch of workshops and a digital painting class over at CGMW (they have become one of my favorite sites so far for this stuff - I loved the last round of workshops.)

All in all, a strong start to what will hopefully be a strong year.

Horned Grouseback

This little thing was something I doodled in the corner of a random piece of paper, and the idea of an alien anteater took hold and got it done.


The whole drawing was done in Photoshop and Painter; Photoshop for the lineart and shading, Painter for the bulk of the rendering.


For those curious about the process, here are a few notes about it -


-Drew the lineart in with something close to 80-90% grey. Once it was done, I adjusted the hue/saturation on it to make it a dark red-orange color, which blends better than if it was just the grey line (got this little tidbit of information from watching a Carlo Arellano workshop.)



-In Painter, I didn't do a monochromatic underpainting (though on reflection I probably should.) Instead, I took the New Simple Watercolor brush and roughly laid in my colors that way (I also tried to place value in at the same time, and it didn't work out - more on that later.)


-From there, I took a new layer and started to render it out bit by bit. The bulk of this work was done with the oil round and the chunky oil pastel brush

-After I finished rendering, I realized that the drawing was overall very flat. So I took it into photoshop, and created a photofilter layer (under the same tab as levels, curves, hue/saturation, etc.) I gave it a warm overlay, and using a layer mask started to carve into the drawing, creating the shadows.


In the end I had to resort to cel-shading to take it away from looking flat - not my original intent, but it suites it fine.

Building a Pochade Box, Part 4

Now it’s time to bring this project to a close and add all the hardware.

First, we need to attach the tee nut. The tee nut is what we'll be using to attach the pochade box to any standard camera tripod. I took a spare piece of wood I cut out, and after finding the center of it, drilled a hole that was just a bit bigger than a 1/4" in diameter. I then took my rubber mallet, and started to bang the tee nut down into the hole (For some reason, the nut was extremely difficult to get in there. But a tight fit will ensure it stays.)

Once you find the center of the bottom box, attach your tee nut piece with some wood glue and once it's dry you can continue assembling the rest of the box.

The next thing to do is to reinforce the boxes – you’ll put an L-bracket in each corner of both boxes, to reinforce the sides, as well as attach a few to the bottom and sides of the bottom box. Since the plywood can splinter easily and the screws I used were made some of ludicrously soft metal, I’d advise to pre-drill the holes a bit.

From there, I attached the hinges. My hinges are placed oddly because I thought two would suffice, when in fact I need a third to steady the open/close action. Again, pre-drill your holes.

(It should be noted that it’s quite likely that the screws may poke out on the other end by just a smidgen. If this happens, take a flat file and file them down so you don’t get snagged by them.)

Now it’s time to install the turnbuckles. Without these, the box would just flop open, and I wouldn’t be able to adjust the angle of the top half.

The construction is fairly simple. We’re going to drill ¼” holes about 2 ¼” in from the edge of the box on either side of both halves. Refer to the pictures to get a general idea of where this is going.

Once we’ve done that, it’s time to install the bolts, which the turnbuckles will hang off of. Since space is at a premium on the side, the bolts will face outwards. It’ll be a tight fit, so some elbow grease will be required, but you’ll soon have them in.

If you notice in the picture, the turnbuckles can be removed by simply unscrewing the nut off the bolt and slipping the turnbuckle off. To adjust the box, you don’t even need to do that – twisting the middle part of the turnbuckle left or right will lengthen or shorten it, affecting the angle of your box.

And with that, the construction is complete! I still haven’t found a suitable clasp to hold the two halves together while traveling, so at the moment I’m using an old woven belt.

For the trays, I’m using an old breathmint tin with a binder clip to hold it to the side. It won’t hold my brushes at the moment, but it’s the perfect size to hold my water cups.