FACEPOCALYPSE

Took another stab at really exaggerating  proportions as described in my previous Torchlight post.

I think this monster would read well in 3D.

Unfortunately I blocked this in so quickly I forgot to save the base sketch (scribbly linework), but here’s a WIP animation showing the painting in progress:

As a sidenote to anyone who might save animated .gif’s for web in the future: Making the bottom section of this image transparent instead of white for the first 5 frames (before it was painted) lopped off about 40kb on a 150kb file. That kind of surprised me.

Ugh, I am so bad at colouring greyscale paintings it’s ridiculous. If I could be arsed I’d go back over this in Painter and completely repaint the background, then paint all the highlights properly. I don’t mind how the low contrast areas turned out (legs and arms), and I’m pretty happy with the wonky lazer beams shooting from its eyes (I don’t think there’s any way they could be better, really – except for adding lens flares maybe), but the head region is a bit fail, and the background needs to be a different colour so the figure pops.

Yeaaaa… Those are some nice legs and arms. Look at that sheen.

And with that I opened up Painter and did a quick overpaint. For reference, I also blueified (overlay brush mode) some areas that’d get bounce light from the background (top of the shellhat, shoulder, top of the leg etc). Gotta make sure your character is lit for its background! Although if this were a ~proper painting~ I’d do a lot more lighting tweaking on the character.

*pop*

In other news, I like the old lazereyes better… To think one of my final projects for uni had over 100 layers, and now I pretty much work flattened.

Gone are the days when I dedicated a layer to highlights and a layer to shadowing for each part of an image.

You get a much nicer effect from dodge and overlay if you paint directly on using these as brush modes instead of layer modes, but I will occasionally use a multiply layer for a shadow, mainly if it’s a silhouette cast on the ground/another surface.

Yeaaa, this probably isn’t appropriate for the laneway exhibition. I don’t really want to give any children walking through nightmares…

Or do I?…

No. No I don’t.

Although that could be a pretty brilliant marketing strategy! “My child has been afraid of going to bed ever since he/she saw Simon Boxer’s sketches at the Guerilla Laneway Exhibition.”
Then BAM! The right person hears about my nightmare-inducing art and I’m in the film industry designing long-limbed, lurking monsters with no eyes.

HMMMMMmmmm…

I like designing monsters.

PS. For the record, I don’t get night terrors. I have, however, (according to an ex) rode an invisible bicycle during my sleep. This may well be the reason I stay so slim.