You fight like a cow.

Monkey Island Redesign

I finished a wonderful class over at Red Engine Studios last Sunday: Sketching for Environment with John Park and Mark Castanon. Seven out of its eight weeks were devoted to designing environments with just the basics - pencil and paper. We were only allowed to cut loose and paint something up for our final. I enjoyed that the class paid so much attention to draftsmanship; it is something I feel that I really needed to hone in on.

I chose to do a Monkey Island redesign since I loved the games as a kid. Twenty years later, they are still just as enchanting.

Malo

George

Lauren

Lauren, Photoshop

It was really fun to paint this digitally, because if you understand how to read the RGB sliders in Photoshop, you can mix colors in seconds flat. It would have taken me two to three times as long to do this traditionally with oil, and I'm not sure if the result would have been better.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking oil or abandoning it as a medium. I just had to finish this painting as fast as I could, as I had to leave the workshop early to watch the new Harry Potter movie. Haha!

Into the Woods

Eaton Canyon, 4" x 6", Gouache and Watercolor

I went for a hike with my buddy Vahe today to go plein air painting at Eaton Canyon. Spent a couple of hours painting this scene in the shade while gnats tried to nibble my face off.

Digital Studies

I'm still alive and I'm still drawing. Most of my doodles are on newsprint or in a sketchbook, which I'm too busy to photograph these days. However, I'd like to keep the cobwebs off this page and sweep the old stuff under the rug, so here's a new post.

Below are a few digital studies from life and reference done over the past couple of months. The portraits are based off of black-and-white images from the Fairburn System of Visual Reference, a classic set of reference volumes for illustrators. I'm starting to develop a good process for painting digitally using a minimal set of tools.

I plan on doing more of these.

Breaking off is misery

I began this doodle at a sketch group session last night and finished it a few minutes ago. As you might have guessed, I've been looking at Jana Schirmer and Benjamin's paintings a lot lately. Those two are so good!

I don't know why I like to paint sad girls. Maybe because I'm always so happy, I feel like I need to counterbalance it somehow.

Or perhaps I'm still in shock over Satoshi Kon's passing. I really loved his films, and to hear that he passed away at such a young age breaks my heart.

Surf's Up

El Matador State Beach, Malibu, CA

El Matador State Beach, Malibu, CA

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Dreamworks Animation artist Mike Hernandez. He lectured extensively on lighting and color theory. I hope some of what I've learned from his talk is manifesting in these studies. Both were done in under an hour and on site.

Beauty and the Beast

Here are a couple of paintings done for Kevin Chen's Character Design 2 class at Concept Design Academy. The project was to design different races for a fantasy role-playing game. These two are set in a desert world with African/Middle-Eastern influences.

Thanks again for all the help, Kevin. Your class was a blast and it helped me grow immensely as an artist.

Amy

12" x 16", oil on canvas board

Four hours.