ArtCtrl

Since my move I’ve had room to paint. I never painted in my last flat, except for a little in my journal. I don’t really consider this painting though - painting is working large on a board.

Since I have the space I’ve setup  of paintings next to my computer

I started with gouache. Then moved onto acrylic. Once I’m happy with the acrylic layer I’ll lay down oils.

All of these paintings have been recorded - I’ve only uploaded one to youtube…

I’ll do a voice over and upload the others at some point.

I wasn’t happy with this as a gouache but once I turned it to this:

Extremely happy with this. I felt I was able to give it real depth to areas with tone. The brush `I used was resemble small. I brought it last year when I got my oil paints. The hair on it is thick so it can hold a decent amount of paint. Helps to mix multi tones onto the brush and flip the brush in order to get a different tone. Bit like the technique that Roger tea

I was happier with the gouache painting then the previous. Maybe because it had stronger perspective.

Acrylic paint added. I wasn’t on the same flow as the first acrylic…  had lost my wind. I wouldn’t say this ones bad… I just feel it isn;’t as strong as the previous. With some more time I can get it up to scratch.

This was a bunch of portraits but I didn’t like it so decided to turn it into a landscape. I’ve already started the landscape with the goache. It’s a bit of a mess since its a mix of landscape and portraits…. the perspective isn’t in there. I was hoping that acrylic would hellp…

And the acrylic applied. It needs more areas defined. Currently there is too much empty areas. More layers to add depth would help. I’m using a larger brush then the other acrylic - helpful to cover areas quicklly. Working with a slightly smaller brush and adding more contrast to areas will help.

I’m getting a new drawing tablet soon, I thought I would get it this week but when Mightyape tried to charge my credit card it declined as I realised they had an outdated one. I’m going to have to ring up Kiwibank, change my address and order a new card. It’s a bit frustrating… I’ve been really careful with my wallet over these last two years. So weird to lose it all of a sudden.

So my old tablet is with my sister now - so no digital painting. I may get it back off her till my new one arrives. Annoying! In the meantime I’ve been working in Blender - created a new model and animated it. It’s the most strange creature animation I’ve done so far… quite digging it though. Working on creating longer animations - rendering out between 100 and 200 frames per animation instead of 50ish. This should lead to more finished and polished looking word.

I’ve also been taking several of my digital paintings into Blender and using them as background. These create something truly unique within Blender.

I’ll keep working with Blender and animating these scenes… though I would love to develop this work further into a game engine.

Textures I’ve been using in Blender. Thanks to Wood Workshop.

And the videos:

Yesterday I spend the day looking for my wallet that I’ve lost, working in Blender (video and screenshots coming soon), and digital painting.

Heres the digital painting:

Same idea to the recent landscape works I’ve been doing. Keeping it loose. I’d like to work towards having more in these - bridges, citys, characters/buildings etc… currently I feel it’s just a landscape and I need to work on more detail (but still keeping it loose).

Color added. Again similar colors to what I’ve been working on. The color helps the depth of the work helping enforce the perspective. Tones importrant. I’ve tried to varity the tone - especially on the hills in the distance - contrasting yellows and reds.

Speaking of tone - the sky and water felt too flat… mixed it up and added in plently of white. This helps with depth to the painting.

And finally a smudge added to it. I perfer the non-smudged version. I guess there is something about the raw brush strokes that I enjoy. The smuding kills it - especially in this one. Maybe if I had a larger range of colors highlights would show.

One element I do like from the smudging is the water in the bottom right hand corner. It looks like it’s turning into a waterfall, or at least a change in the water levels. I’d love to explore these ideas further and develop techniques to conveying a realistic scene with minimal time.

Spent the day working with on more landscape paintings… all from imagination but trying to extend and develop them each time. These are turning into a series. I’ve been using the same colors throughout these works and only increasing the white or black in colors… this helps keep a constant.

I live with my friend Andrew now and I’ve been showing him the paintings to get some feedback. I get very little feedback on my artwork so it’s always good to talk about it.

Anyway, here’s the works I did today.

Starting off how I commonly do - with grayscale shapes. This is chaos. I don’t really know where I’m going but I just put down shapes that are pleasing to my eyes - with the intent to define them further later.

Color added. I feel color really helps me define areas. I should get better at defining with black and white. Maybe I’m too quick to move onto color at times. Got to love color though! The opacity in my brush is dropping… getting as low as 30% at times. I feel this allows me to layer easier which gives more depth into the painting.

The color was too powerful so I went in with plenty of white and black. I’m not sure if it helped greatly. This is one of my least favorite works I’ve done recently.

It’s important that I try different ways of working… here I’ve worked heavy on the contrast of lights and darks. Maybe a bit too strong but I can always go in with color later and blend.

I’m enjoying taking these colors into landscapes… I’ve used them alot in my life drawing and the landscapes have made them fresh and interesting. Andrew gave me some feedback on this - he mentioned it looked hellish but the blue gave a strong contrast. Perhaps a nice balance? I still wanted to push this further.

Followed the same process as the previous work and overlaid white and black. I went easy on the black and instead increased the black of the colors - especially the blue. This worked better in many ways - black tends to kill a color but tinting enhances and blends the color together. Exciting. I’m happy how this one one was shaping up.

I havn’t used the blend tool recently in GIMP but decided to give it a go for this painting. I do enjoy the look of brush strokes and the blend tool does tend to kill these strokes. It’s certainly changed the painting somewhat - certain areas are really glowing. I partially like the small mountain in the middle - the green glow on the left with contrasting reds on the right. Marc Hill always says ‘balance your reds and greens’. I think this is a lovely balance of colors. More greens in the work maybe?

This is the last painting I started working on. It’s still a work in progress but I’ll keep working on it. Decided to use a darker version of the red… certainly makes the image feel different. Just shows how important color is to a work.

This is a random scrap that I didn’t end up taking further.

I’m really in a groove with these works so I’ll keep developing them further and see where I get.

These works are very inspired by the video game Braid.

No digital painting today but yesterday I worked on two landscapes. I really enjoy doing these landscape works in GIMP, something different to the figure works.

I limited my colors - keeping with just a yellow, red, and blue. Added white and black to everything. This was my first idea - from here I developed the same image with slight changes.

This is how I started this out. Black background and working up white for the landscape. Like always - large flat brush. Varied brush strokes in order to create different textures. This is more important then with figures as these are build with abstract shapes…. important to define different elements. 

Slight development here. Not a lot though.

Here the colors have been worked up. I like to keep my palette limited… working on blending the colors up.

And finally:

Change with this - working with a blue background rather then grayscale. I had developed this further but I lost the data when I ripped my laptop out of the power today. Just shows how important it is to save regular

Plenty of digital painting lately. I’m happy with my progress. The break I had was helpful, I feel very fresh and loose going back to it now. On 4chan the other day I downloaded a bunch of portraits that I then took into GIMP and painted. This was a nice change from pixellovely.

First portrait:

The reference that I found on 4chan. Pale but decent lighting - lighting is always important!

I started with just focusing on the portrait - and working grayscale. As always, a large brush was used to block in the tone. I worked with the referece on my laptop and GIMP open in my Samsung. Working with multiply monitors makes the digital painting process smooth and seamless. I highly recommend working with multi monitors. Personally I could do with a 3rd screen.

A blue is added to the background for something difference. It was just a grey but felt it needed a little color.

Here I have scaled the portrait down in order to fit in more of the body. I’ve tried to keep everything loose and just roughly added the hands. These can be cleaned up at a later point. Important to get everything down for now.

Now for some color to be added to the portrait. I kept with just two colors - the lighter yellow and a darker version of the same yellow. Keeping my palette clean and under control is important for me.

Decided to add a pink to the mix, and work on those hands somewhere. At this point I’m just tweaking my painting to get it to a stage I’m happy with. From here I just left it. I doubt I’ll work on it anymore.

This was a great exercise to get me warmed up with working on a portrait for a period of time rather then quick life drawings from pixellovely.

This was the 2nd portait I worked on. The lighting isn’t as good on this one but I just love her hair - I had to paint it!

' Similar start to the previous painting. Keeping it grayscale. I kept with the same brush though both of these paintings - creating different textures by a variety of strokes. 

Color added. I left plenty of black glow though in order to create depth. I find starting with a grey-scale image easier to work up then going straight in with colors.

Next post will be landscape digital paintings - mostly from imaganation. Need to work on more Java as well - opened Eclipse yesterday and worked on a little but need to get more done. Blender is important as well.

Have a fantastic day.

It’s been awhile since I’ve uploaded any Blender work. Last night and this morning I worked on a new scene with new models and textures. The ideas are much of the same as previous blender works - particle and lighting tests with minimal modeling. I did model out some basic shapes in order to have something to work with. A chair, table, and two models where objects.

I’m not sure where to go with this work but I’ll keep chugging along and hopefully get somewhere.

I’ve spent the majority of my time working on GIMP - digital painting. Mostly just doodles but  last night I did work from pixellovely. I’ve decided I like GIMP much more then Photoshop. It’s friendly. Photoshop is just yuck.

This is experimenting with shapes in perspective. During the term of life drawing I had an increasing interest in shapes after my time working in Blender (something I havn’t worked on for a while…. I need to do more!). Taking these ideas into digital has been fun. I’ll work on developing this further.

Pixellovely sketches. I’m working with two minute timers on this. Again similar colors to what I’ve been doing in the past. I’ll aim to spent a hour or so everyday working on these. Allows me to keep up with the figure works without attending life drawing classes.

That’s all for tonight. I’ve also started work on a painting - on a large long board. So far it’s just in gouache but I’ll develop it further with acrylic and oil paint. I don’t have a photo of this currently but will take a photo tomorrow when there is decent light. Going to work on a collubrath painting with Andrew as well - have about 5 of these boards left.

So no updates for over a week. I’ve been playing Diablo 3 during the the week. I finished it on normal as a Wizard and partway though Nightmare. I’m not hugely motivated to play it right now - likely a good thing as I can get more important tasks done like artwork. I enjoyed the playthough but Blizzard isn’t the same anymore.

I have a new tablet pen and a new place to stay - so it’s a fresh start. I havn’t done any digital painting since I lost my tablet pen so I was happy to get back into it.

Thought I’d give Photoshop CS5 a blast since I have it on this laptop (though recent updates to GIMP are wonderful).

One of my goals I wanted to do with digital painting this month is look though my life drawings I’ve done this past term and paint over digitally. I wanted to stick with the colors that I had been using in traditional media, experimenting with techniques and brushes. I’m happy with this work but need to practice further with the digital tablet.

No background. All from imagination.

Background added. Painted this last night.when watching Primer. I’ve seen Primer several times before but it’s that type of film that I never get sick of.

The EOW of the week over at Conceptart.org is Orbital Refinery. I want to get into these activitys now that my tablet is functioning. I visit the site often for inspiration. A google for Refinery gave me some images that I worked from but nothing I’m happy with. I havn’t go alot of plans this week so may work on this further. 

More ideas for the EOW. Mostly just sketches or doodles. These arn’t really going anywhere.

Shapes! I used perspective heavily in my life drawing this last term so want to transfer this to the digital realm.

And finally, just a bunch of quick sketches. Again from imagination. This was just used as a exercise to warm up into using the tablet again.

That’s all for now. Expect to see further digital works.

Last weekend at Matchbox Studios I caught up with Catherine. I hadn’t seen Catherine since early 2011 so it was great to see her. She mentioned it would be good to collaborate on something…. I thought a  decided to do a journal swap would be cool.

The way we are working this journal swap. Both swap journals that’s filled with drawing/paintings etc… and enhance and work over one anothers work. I’m really exciting to see what will come out of it.

I have over the year followed her blog Black and Coloured Stuff. Go check it out, fantastic drawings and paintings. Plently of color which I’m always a fan of.

Here’s the journal that I’m going to be giving her this week. This is mostly filled with life drawings that I’ve painted over with gouache (found my nice blight brush recently). May take this into course tomorrow and life paint… something different to the drawing.

I may do another journal flip of the journal she gives me - before and after is important.