Digital Still Life

A two-hour study done in my friend Jason Scheier's Introduction to Digital Painting class at Concept Design Academy. This was really fun because we had so many white objects (Asaro head, skeleton, paper, etc.) to capture the three different gelled lights aimed at our still life setup. The lighting was quite challenging, but I think I survived just fine! I learned quite a bit!

Photoshop

Forays in Style and Color

I'm gonna dust off the old blog. Here are a few pieces I've done for a visual development course I'm taking at Concept Design Academy. I'm having a lot of fun in the class. The first two are style experiments. We were asked to take existing photo reference and change them to add a new focal point.

The third is a color key for a Sherlock Holmes redesign project. I am adapting "A Scandal in Bohemia" and setting it in Song Dynasty China. This is the part of the story when the hereditary King of Bohemia becomes furious at Sherlock for correctly deducing his true identity.

I know I've been quiet lately. I will try to do a better job of being more active. Thanks always for following along.

Malo

Here's a quick two-hour study from life that I spent another couple of hours at home cleaning up.

Someday we will find...

One of my favorite television series as a kid was The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I recently picked up an R2 DVD set of the show and it holds up remarkably well. Someday I'll take a trip to see Mayan and Incan ruins for real, but for now, I can visit them with my imagination.

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.