Doneee... on this project

Here are the final two backgrounds :D. Miraculously the beetle one only took me a few hours and is one of my favourite backgrounds. Nice and simple and fun to draw. The Alien background may look familiar... that's because I completely cheated, flipped the Ant background, erased some trees and fixed it up a bit and called it anew :P I really had to get onto the Library project, though, (which i'm starting today) so it's allowed.

In this Library project, my job is flash animating... which even though I hate flash I don't really mind, i'm looking forward to making some good animations, although maybe when I actually start i'll become slightly less enthusiastic. Anyway, time to start flashing. The painting was fun, now the hard work begins.

updateupdate

k just 'finished' the Rhino BG a few hours ago:



I'm not really happy with how it turned out to be honest. I was really happy with it in the rough stages, and I think it was possibly stronger than it is now at that point. I threw quite a few snazzy textures and crap on the painting, initially to add the grit and dirt to the roads and walls, but I think in the end they were there more to cover up my poor painting than to directly add to the painting itself. And after three completely covers, playing around with photoshop I finally realised that I never had Opacity set to pen pressure... which would have made things a ton easier for me. Stupid. I feel quite worn out right now, so i've allowed myself a break for an hour or two. Can't decide whether to play in photoshop or maya, but i'm doing something for fun rather than for the project. I think i'll start my next (and possibly last? or second to last) painting in the morning. That's the dung beetle one, which is looking quite simple to complete; just a little patch of dirt and a background. Hopefully it'll be as easy as it looks. Andy's been doing a few of the backgrounds since he's animating some of the characters in flash, and while this eases the load for me, it's probably not the best idea for unity of style.

I've been looking at a lot of amazing paintings by digital and traditional artists today and i'm not sure whether they inspire or discourage me. I guess a bit of both, I definitely feel an urge to improve and while i'm not super optimistic at the moment I think i'm on the right tracks right now. Still working hard in class and when I get home I just look up more and more paintings and 3D stuff. Both mediums compliment each other really well too I think. It feels like 3D modeling is a lot more technical than painting, less emphasis on your artistic ability and more your mind for space. Or something like that. So when I'm not feeling particularly creative I can work with the mechanics of the stuff, and vice versa. It's hard to fit everything in but i'm sure that's a good thing, it means I won't be stopping for a while.

Also i'm quite into this blogging thing too, i'm quite a loudmouth really.

p.s. Bugger off Han :P

Wooo

Everything's going well with the new project; I've finished two of the eight? (*gulp*) backgrounds, and my third is coming along well, as of the last few minutes. I've been free to get on with my paintings and have been putting alot of time into them, most nights i'm in til past 6, but the atmosphere is really nice and I haven't really been feeling frustrated at all. The Dolphin background caused me a little annoyance with it's colour scheme and architectural details (it's really annoying drawing straight/curved lines all the time) but i managed to finish it, and while i'm not entirely pleased with the results, it'll do for the time being. Here are my backgrounds so far, Ant, Dolphin (completed apart from the Water. At present i'm unsure whether or not it will be animated. I do have a rough sketch of the water which looks much nicer than the plain blue, but I'm not going to waste my time finalising it if it'll just be painted over in the end anyway) and Rhino (rough) respectively. Click for larger images:










My favourite so far is the Ant, closely followed by the Rhino which might beat out the Ant if I do it well enough. The Dolphin painting doesn't sit well with me, maybe because it wasn't a lot of fun to paint all of those steps and poles. The colour scheme's a bit bright for me too, but really it had to be since it's an aquarium type place. I think it'll be okay as the actual background when it all comes together though, i'm not worried.

I think i'm doing reasonably well on time, I was never going to finish one per day like i'd have liked to, but that's quite unreasonable to ask of myself considering I usually take forever. I am learning to let myself loosen up a little though, which helps quite a bit. I'm getting each painting completely in about 2.5 days at the minute, which will do for me. I'm not sure what's going to happen next week when I'm meant to switch to the Library project and I inevitably haven't finished all of the backgrounds, but i'll cross that bridge when I come to it. At the minute i'm happy just to plod along having fun in photoshop :D I don't think i've learnt a lot more than I knew as far as photoshop goes before I started the project, but the practice helps a lot, and I think i'm wising up my colour choices and challenging my eye for composition. All in all i'm very much enjoying this project so far :)

new haps

Another week, another project. With the new setup (4 teams on 4 projects and mixing and matching) it's a bit strange but we've just finished the ideas phase and it's going okay. When we work in teams like this it's a little difficult fitting everyones ideas and expectations together, but as long as you come to a compromise it's not so bad. I'm a bit of a control freak so it's a little difficult for me. I'd like to be able to do everything myself but obviously I can't, I just have to have faith in the others lol.

I've given myself the hefty task of doing the backgrounds for the student project. This'll definitely keep me busy and surely improve my photoshop skills which is nice. Especially situations like this where you won't always be doing something which you want to be doing. In this case i'm skipping storyboarding for background design and this suits me fine. My only worry is taking forever on these things which is a very likely outcome, but i'm aware of my time restrictions and in one day i've managed to rough out the first background and have started polishing it already, which is probably a record for me. Maybe i'll upload some pictures in a few days.

Apart from the project, for the past week or two i've really been trying to study human anatomy. I've got the basic landmarks on the front of a human down and it's quite satisfying. It's something i've wanted to learn for probably about 2 years now, something which I think is extremely important if I want to improve as an artist, and i'm happy to have started. Up until now it's just seemed a bit daunting but when I was bored the other day I started reading a book by Andrew Loomis that I downloaded a while ago. It's a very good book and inspired me to finally start learning seriously. The book's out of print or something, so it's free and legal to download and distribute, and i've uploaded it incase anyone else would like to have a read. I'd highly reccomend it. Anyway, I think i should be able to keep up this learning and hopefully soon enough i should be able to draw completely accurate people :D Download down there.

ANDREW LOOMIS FIGURE DRAWING PDF