Color Photo

Awesome gallery of depression era photos. Fantastic work. http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Still Life

This is a texturing/lighting project from last semester that I decided to make a little video of the process for. I've been saving stuff from my Push/Pull, too, so that will pop up soon. I think I'm going to keep this as a theme.

PProgress....

DFA assignment turned in today. As with everything, there's so much that still needs to be done to it, but it will have to wait.

We started with thumbnails. I found it interesting to make random scribbles at high res, take a little section, then scale it down and back up so it loses resolution. The interpolation it does when it scales back up looks interesting, I think, as well as noise filters. Had a ton of fun.

Then we had to make some kind of sense of these things using characters we made in a previous assignment.

Then we picked one and ran with it, which is how I got the final at top. Some progress from the Push/Pull project. First one's my first render when I threw some lights in there, I love seeing where things start compared to where they end. It's interesting to see things so raw, with all the stand-in of where things get comped, where the bush goes, etc....

This is closer to where it's at, at the moment. Also, the basic blend shapes of my PP character. I just thought this was funny. He can do basic emoting now, but I plan on expanding the capacity of his facial rig after the semester is over, spend the winter making something REALLY pliable. Will post the animation when it's done :D

Animation Exercises

First one is a silhouette assignment, emphasis on posing and clarity. Character's required to go through 3 different emotional states.




This one is a character waiting with a prop. I have a friend who seems to have an outright physiological impairment with respect to waiting for the microwave to finish. Without fail, he always, ALWAYS stops the microwave with a few seconds left. On top of it, he'll heat things about a third of the time he's supposed to, and ends up either taking forever to heat his food, or eating it cold.




Now I'm working on Push/Pull(pretty much what it sounds like, but with our own character this time).

Quick stuff

Been doing stuff some nights after working on our game project with Polymath.


The last thing Captain Cook saw. Simplifying/stylizing, but still keeping some of that human anatomy I've spent so much time learning.


Thunder lizard, going to change the context of this one when I get back to it.


Trying to solidify the story behind this, going to work on the character more once I have his story.



Trying to make more images with some story, or at least a mood, in mind.



Observing, playing, trying to keep it loose.

Digital Doodles Part 3

So, after a long postponement, here's another set of random doodles.

Didn't really post these chronologically, the above doodle was done earlier on than some of the others I posted. Regardless, it was significant to me in my quest to become comfortable with going straight in with color/value and being more aggressive. Also, it was clearly done very fast, which I like
Anyway, this was my first life drawing I did with my tablet over the summer. At some point i finally felt brave enough that it may be ok to pull it out in the life drawing class and try to do a live figure.

I'm leaving this here as a note to add a few more of the digital figures I did later on, since I don't have access to them at this particular moment. Also should put up a gouache sketch or two. Next will be some life drawings from the last semester(though most of them are back home in San Diego, I do have a few photos) followed by an animatic, with my animations after that. Then once I've posted my few paintings from the winter break, maybe I can finally get this damn thing to be a contemporary account of what I'm up to.

Digital Doodles Part 2

So here are a few other bits. I played around a bit with different brushes, but a lot of the time I just constrained myself to the simple round brush and a chisel brush. I've tried to do a few digital drawings before, but it was always difficult. Especially dealing with brushes that I didn't really understand the function of, not to mention lacking a very good idea on how to apply them.

Here I used a bit of texture to play with some of the brushes I saw in the Gnomon video Barontieri did. I watched it several times during the semester, but had a hard time applying all of the brushes.
I felt like I could understand what I wanted to depict and how, but something wasn't working. At some point I figured it was that I simply didn't have enough experience with the basic idea of "painting" within Photoshop. I decided I needed to temporarily ditch the efforts to have tons of detail pop up really fast on its own. Because the truth is that the detail will never come up on its own because the brush is suddenly doing work for me. Experienced artists wield the brushes and settings in photoshop using their understanding of the fundamental ideas that are involved in art(light, form, color). I needed to focus on getting the big shit down right before I worried about the details in it. If I wanted details, there's no reason I can't do that with the basic brush. Then I also used the a chisel brush, to start getting myself accustomed to the various things that can be mapped to the pen tilt and stroke direction.
Occasionally I played with other little things here and there. But for the most part I made myself stick with the two simple brushes and just worry about trying to get used to some sort of work flow.

Work flow has been a big thing for me to figure out. It seems like everyone has dramatically varying methods. I decided at some point that drawing over an existing drawing doesn't seem to work as well for me. I usually did better if I only had a simple, relatively loose, sketch. Additionally, it seemed to help more as a reference to LOOK at, as opposed to photographing/scanning it and trying to color/paint over it. When I had a drawing already there, especially one I had worked into a bit, it seemed to get harder for me to get myself to just draw over it freely. I started to slow down and become overly meticulous.

The canyon bit above I did over a little doodle that I captured with my mac camera. I did a similar thing for the tibetan tower for perspective last year. The thing is, I feel like it's so quick to do so much digitally, doing things on paper is only really efficient(in terms of time/effort) for thumbnails and such. The time I spent on the tower, markering in value and such was not really very helpful. I ended up covering it anyway, and I could have done the value layout faster in PS.

I feel like it can definitely be helpful to have a drawing underneath(and all forms of reference make life so much better), but it's ultimately more beneficial to force myself to acquire a sufficient comfort with drawing straight into PS.

Just some thoughts.