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 :)