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!

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.

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…

I bet Jeff that noone else would come.

I was pleasantly surprised when 3 other people came along, 2 of which were complete strangers to Jeff and myself! Thus is the power of the interwebs.

And here is a picture – Party of 5 (incl me)!

We’ll probably make Saturdays a regular thing so join the group if you want to join us.

I used the opportunity to do a watercolour painting for Mother’s Day. I referenced a black and white Daily Mirror (Sydney) newspaper clipping from 1985, just after I was born. Mum and I made page 5 with a very punny article entitled “Boxer’s a champ at just eight pounds.”

This particular model’s “specialty” was fire with some sort of ~sensual wiggling~ similar to bellydancing, and during her performance she had flaming things (?) on her shoulders and arms… And I just realised I don’t know what they’re called. They were kind of like little poles with a flammable piece on the end.

Anyway, I’m not sure whether it was the way she moved, the bright flames dancing around, or the fact that I was ridiculously tired that sent me into a light trance, but it was hypnotic! One of the best Dr Sketchy’s performances I’ve seen.

And here are some watercolours. This was a 15min pose with greenish lighting:

I want to study the affects of coloured lighting more as some of the shadows were kind of orangey. My colours are exaggerated though.

Here’s one of the earlier 10 minute poses under orange light. I was trying to get a big patch of orangey skintone down then bleed shadows back over it. A much simpler palette, but since I didn’t get time to paint around the form and expose the white highlight I just painted a solid colour background in digitally.

Last of all, a little gift for Mel. She left her facebook signed in the other day so I did the obligatory status update. I then noticed she didn’t have anything in the “Write something about yourself” section, so it promptly became “I’m a sparkly princess YAY!”.

And without further ado, here is sparkly princess Mel:

• 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.

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.

Half a day on and work is on the walls! We’re pretty much ready to roll.

Unfortunately I overestimated the amount of space we have. Or underestimated the amount of work… There’s just enough room to get everyone’s main pieces in without being too crammed. However, the digital painting in my previous post didn’t make the cut – I’ve only put in oil paintings. You’ll just have to oggle it here on my blog.

Big thanks to everyone that’s been pimping the exhibition!! Really nice to see it getting so much publicity, especially since I didn’t even ask people to post about it! Big loves.

Also, the exhibition made it onto SixThousand amongst other websites.

This pretty much marks the completion of my works, I just need to varnish the last few paintings! I’m hoping they’re dry by now as we’re hanging tomorrow.

A few oil painting learnings thus far:

I bought some gloss varnish and it’s pretty sweet, but it must be some form of super solvent! I varnished a piece I’d signed the previous day and it wiped the signature clean off (the rest of the painting was fine). Thankfully you can layer the varnish with paint. It’s actually quite nice to paint over; it makes the surface a bit more slick.

I was also experimenting with glazing medium, which is somewhat unpredictable and ridiculously fast drying, leaving a sticky mess all over everything. And by everything I mean everything*. It even went on the dog, which proceeded to roll on the cat, resulting in some form of vaguely symbiotic pet. But not really, it might’ve gone near the dog. I hope it didn’t go on the dog because it’s poison, and I assume dogs clean themselves at some point. Or maybe they don’t. That wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway… When the glazing medium dries you can end up with a slightly patchy brown tinge in some areas. This is obviously most noticeable on colours that contrast with brown, or flat areas of colour. I tried glazing two paintings, and ended up having to repaint large areas on both. Frowntown.

Maybe one day I’ll figure out the glaze.

*the canvas, and possibly your hands.