FACEPOCALYPSE

Thinking about edge quality for this one. Edges are either hard, soft or lost, and I’m using different types of edges to render form and create a focal point.

Look at how sharp the area around its shoulder is. I went in and painted the forms with textural brushes, then to get it so sharp I used the hard round brush to just clean up the areas where surfaces meet. But it’s such a subtle cleanup that I can retain most of the texture.

I felt like I was summoning all these things I’d observed in Nic Klein‘s work back when I started digital painting. I love the way he paints robots, same with people like Jon Foster, Ashley Wood, Phil Hale and other classics that have a similar graphic style.

Messed a lot with the value structure of this piece. It’s still very graphic, but more readable than the ink version.

We’ve moved onto using ink in Media class, and our first assignment is to do a master copy of one of the artists shortlisted. While Tsutomu Nihei wasn’t one of those artists he’s a manga artist I only heard about today. I saw this piece of his and thought I’d do my own version with some adjustments.

I didn’t even attempt the smoke but he handled that very well. I may go back into the background and pick out some shapes, but otherwise I’m very happy with this! Haven’t indulged in inking before but it sure makes rendering clothing easy, and it’s so much faster than trying to ink on Photoshop… Unless you make a mistake.

Also, I tried a compositional ‘trick’ called counterchange. Where you have a dark shape on a light shape switching to a light shape on a dark shape.

Another portrait for Media class; one of my housemates this time. I’m trying to push my mark making and explore other stylistic approaches. It’s kind of based on one of Nicolai Fechin’s techniques, with a bit of improvised scratchy pencil over the top.

Tools used: graphite block, smudge stick, kneadable eraser, 2H and 4B pencils.

I also found that if I use a sharp 2H pencil to draw it digs the line into the page so when you go over with the graphite block those lines remain light. This could be useful! I must experiment further.

I did this caricature of Jon Foster for my Media unit at TAD. It’s actually my first finished charcoal piece. I’d always avoided charcoal because I never liked holding grainy media; it used to give me shivers. Anyway, if you don’t know Jon’s work you really need to check it out. Now. His work is incredible.

A picture of the man himself beside the portrait.

Jon does a few demo oil paintings at the San Fran POD.

Jarkko the crazy Finnish viking and myself display our enthusiasm while Jon paints.

A few more figures!

A 10-15min drawing people seem to like. I was playing more with softening edges for this one, also keeping in mind the idea of ‘sensitivity’. Paying attention to the marks you’re making and not being really heavy handed. This ties in with the rendering form in general; blending the pastels where the shadow softens and turns the form.

Plus an untimed drawing. I intended on using this for a poster but did a painting instead.

The aforementioned painting. Oil painting on canvas + digital wizardry. It was a bit of a rush; kept it very simple, reliant on implied detail. The poster design is in the works and due Monday!

Information! Process! Pastels!

Here’s my impersonation of someone trying to start something cool. I thought it’d be a good idea to have a TAD student tutorial blog.

I definitely learn the most when I know what I should be thinking about, or the specific benefits of a medium/approach.

There’s so much subtext in one person’s particular process that it may help to hear how other students approached a piece, or thought about when executing their particular process. The ‘why’s as well as the ‘how’s. These tutorials would be less of a demonstration, but more a singling out one particular process point and elaborating on why they made a choice which applies to the whole image.

I made a tutorial to elaborate on this (click to view larger):

The main point of this tutorial is to treat pastels like a painting medium. As long as the paper isn’t overloaded with pastel they can be applied very opaquely. This leads to a technique I adopted years ago after looking at concept artists that paint on a single layer, and ofcourse it’s also true for painters with opaque mediums. To adjust a shape involves painting adjacent colours over one another until the edge is in the right place. This idea translates to working with pastels, and I think when I realised it was about painting and not drawing was when it made sense. I see a handful of students trying this for the first time by drawing the silhouette then working inwards. This is the kind of tutorial I thought would help address that approach.

Following on from my original sketch I did some thumbnails of the girl on the bus, sticking to 3 values to make sure everything reads.

After my critique the decision was between the top left and bottom right thumbnails.

I chose the bottom right, and didn’t completely stick to the value structure (which I should’ve), but kept in mind the principles of composition. Most importantly, putting a light shape on a dark shape or vice versa. This assures the silhouette of everything reads and will help direct your focus.

Week 1 of TAD has just concluded and assignments have been flooding in! They’re given in the lectures but not all of the details are posted online which makes it difficult to track.

One of the more confusing assignments was to do a master copy of a drawing by Fechin. A master copy being where you find a master’s work and try to replicate it yourself.

I’ve never done a master copy before so I just lunged into it, which I shouldn’t have. So now, for the artistic viewing public I’ll elaborate on how and why you should go about doing a master copy, as explained by Carl Dobsky.

Carl told us that before doing a master copy you must have a goal in mind before commencing. My goal was to do the homework, and I just expected to have some revelation while doing so but it doesn’t quite work like that. I didn’t really connect the dots. My goal should’ve been ‘learn to use graphite’. Or more specifically, ‘learn how Fechin would’ve used graphite/charcoal.’ It all seems so obvious in retrospect.

Doing a master copy is supposed to make you figure out how another artist would’ve gone about doing something. To try and extrapolate how they produced the picture, assuming you can’t research and find out about their process. By thinking about it from this perspective it becomes more personal and invested. You chose this artwork because you want to figure out its secrets.

Here’s my master copy of Fechin’s Mexican Woman drawing using pencil. It’s not a perfect replication, and I have a lot to learn about working with graphite, but still I learnt a lot. Click to enlarge!

Andrew Android Jones, the man of a thousand faces. Literally. This is one of the reasons Conceptart.org garnered attention and grew as it did. It was started so there’d be something which kept people coming back to the forum regularly, and 1000 daily portraits later CA.org had grown immensely. Ofcourse, not all of its successes are attributed to this but perhaps this is one that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Anyway, Andrew is one of the best known digital artists, and virtually the face of Corel Painter, as well as the inspiration for Alchemy. This week he dropped by the Kansas City workshop and spread some inspiration. Read the rest of this entry →