FACEPOCALYPSE

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!

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 →

At the start of the year I was invited to do a digital painting demonstration by the Alfred Cove Art Society, who meet at the Atwell Art Gallery on the last Thursday of every month. I was slotted in for this week passed, and went along to share what I could with a room full of fine artists. When it comes to demonstrations I typically don’t have enough time to do anything really ‘finished’, so focus on showing different techniques. In this case I tried to liken it to painting equivalents. eg. Overlay mode is like glazing, painting in selections is like using masking fluid, and ‘undo’ is like travelling back in time. Something I do on a regular basis here in Perth.

There were an abundance of questions throughout my 1 hour painting, which was great! It’s nice to have an engaged audience, they all seemed really eager and interested.

I received a little traditional vs digital effectiveness and timeliness questioning along the way, which can be hard to field since I haven’t spent nearly as much time with traditional mediums as digital. Anyway, after I’d mostly been focussing on painting the boats one lady challenged me to paint a tree. As you might imagine I had a sly grin when responding “Sure, I’ll draw a tree.” and opened my brush list to select an appropriate tree. Then with a single swoosh a forest appeared and the room cried out “That’s cheating!”

I was amused.

But really it requires more manipulation than just slapping a line of tree clones in, and it was a nice segue into showing them brush creation.

Anyway, I worked the demo image into the painting shown below after painting into a lot of it.

It was mostly referenced from a photo I took at the Amazon River in Peru which I’d always wanted to paint. I loved the mass of boats sitting unattended as we approached the canoe we were boarding. It was almost like a dumping ground, all looking a bit abandoned like raw husks of their former glory. It’s almost haunting. I also added the bird, an escort of sorts. Your guide across the waters, like you need some protection from what lurks beneath. The Amazon is built up as a dangerous place with lots of animals quite capable of eating you and your new safari outfi; yet it looks so placid…

Alright, so I just had a big rant about the latest Transperth ad and thought I’d better put my money where my mouth is, so I’ve sketched up a storyboard of how I’d restructure the advert while sticking with their idea. Click the image to see it larger.

My key changes:

• The ad starts at ground level. You’re really in the thick of peak hour traffic, not a detached shot of the traffic from above.
• There’s more focus on the cars transforming into a robot, because this is (in my opinion) the biggest flaw of the actual ad – I didn’t notice that the robot was originally made of cars. The way I envision it the viewer sees something strange happening with the cars (they start lifting off the ground) and pays attention at this point, and then find out they’re merging into a giant robot. It doesn’t need to show all the transformation (production $$$) but it shouldn’t just happen in a split second.
• I felt the ad was very “face on, cut to side on, cut to blah.” I want to really emphasise the size of this robot.
• The pollution issue is exaggerated with the sum of the exhaust shown expelled from the robot as it moves. Also, the destructive nature of everyone driving as it crushes the surrounds (albeit man-made bitumen).

Ofcourse this is the kind of thing that would be reviewed in a real job circumstance, I just thought I’d take a crack at it.

Another minimal landscape.

Just a simple landscape. Very minimal, which is something that interests me. Sparth did a series of quite minimal landscapes some years back that struck me, but I can’t seem to find them on his website. Still, looking at the way he paints makes it very evident that I should be using a wider range of values.

The second ‘speedpainting’ lab I did at Murdoch was a little more structured (sorry 1st lab crew).  I just chose a reference photo I could easily demonstrate a few things with:

• Breaking the image into basic parts/layers. In this case a background (leaves, sky, ground), a layer for the dark tree branches, and a layer for the house.
• Blocking in sections and using masks/selections to paint with crisp shapes where necessary. ie. Focal points that benefit from a clearly defined silhouette. A lot of concept artists don’t do this at all when speedpainting, and I usually save it for when I’m refining the image (if required).
• Using custom brushes and brush modes to give the impression of appropriate textures (grass, leaves, paint, rust etc).
• Creating custom brushes (most of them had minimal prior experience with Photoshop).

Unlike the first class, I also had more time to actually complete my image since I was demoing it to show students while they did the same.

On a whole I was pleased with the class and how the students handled the task. Got some good results in a reasonable timeframe.

I did my digital painting classes at Murdoch University today, specifically focussed on ‘speedpainting’, which to me basically means painting an ‘impression’. Something I do quite often. Sometimes too often.

Anyway, for the first tutorial I chose 3 photos as references and let students take their pic. They then proceeded to replicated the photo using brushes to depict different surfaces/textures and I periodically went around and helped each student at their desk, giving mini demonstrations depending on where they were stumped.

In the time between wandering I whipped up a study of my own from one of the images.

So I just did my demo at Murdoch. The class before us was late out and then we didn’t have the correct cables and such. I probably ended up with about half hour to paint with in the end, which is not much at all, especially when you’re trying to demo techniques on the side!

Anyway, this isn’t what I ended up with after the lecture, I gave the painting another half hour or so at home to completely recolour and refine it a bit.

I’m doing a guest lecture (live demo) at Murdoch tomorrow followed by tutes on Thursday and have decided to do a building concept. I don’t usually do concept paintings purely in Photoshop so thought I’d do a sketch that way. This is just a quickie, refamiliarising myself with some brushes I haven’t used in awhile.

For the live demo I’ve predrawn a bunch of thumbnails and chosen one to speed up the process. The building I’ll be painting is a Gothic-revival/modern influenced building converted into a dodgy laboratory. All in 45minutes!