Not anywhere close to done... Dome Bridge (WIP)

I've been running through various amounts of thumbnails to figure out what camera and perspective would be best. Even this work in progress is likely to change, haha. The idea originally was an explorer getting grabbed by spirits lurking around some ruins but it kept changing.

River Dragon - 50 min speed paint

50 min

+1hr of touch ups and clean up.

"Black Magic" 50 min speedpaint

I haven't painted in such a long time! One of today's themes in the speed painting group I joined was "Black Magic". 

I was able to get most of my idea down in 20 mins, which I was surprised about! Usually I have less than half the 50 min time slot left to start the details. Though the speed painting itself isn't that great, I'm pretty happy at my improvement in getting the idea down faster.

Abandoned Dragon - 50 min speed paint

Topic theme from speed painting group: Abandoned Dragon 

I actually decided to use SAI to work on this; I started with rough sketch lines using the pen and then painting over it with a combination of pencil, pen, brush and water brushes. The painting still isn't tight but I got a little more done in the time limit than before. If my computer wasn't a little laggy, I probably could have gotten the painting a little tighter. I'm watching a live stream of the League of Legends LCS. 

If viewers look at the previous blog post, they might notice a similarity from this painting to my latter 2 thumbnails. 

Painting 4 Thumbnails in one file

It actually was pretty helpful to paint 4 thumbs in one; I was able to get ideas off of the thumbs I painted previously. I didn't make it as tight as I would like though but loose thumbnails aren't too bad if I'm playing around with composition.

I really liked how the building structure I was starting out in thumbnail #3 turned out in the end. It inspired me towards thumbnail #4. I want to combine thumb #3 and thumb #4 for a painting. I might go more towards thumb #3 though since the perspective for thumb #4 was a little odd. 

Abandoned thorn house - 50 min speed paint

Wow, something went wrong with the colors, but it still works I suppose..kinda. It's a bit lighter than I would have liked. 

I mixed and matched several ideas and themes from the Speedpainting group. (Abandoned house from yesterday's selection and thorn house from today's selection. )

I didn't get to put in the gravestones before time ran out so the zombie hand looks out of place. Influences for the house came from several sources: Ravenswood cementary, Stay Alive's plantation house and a bunch of New Orleans' houses. 

Rain Maker - 50 min speedpaint

Of the themes from today's selection of speed painting topics, I selected Rain Maker.  The way I envisioned this was a person being the Rain Maker but I wasn't able to get as much detail in as I wanted. I focused most of the detail on the person, which is what I should be doing anyways since the person is the subject of the painting. The Tree and the background were fairly loose. I've realized I still spend too much time for the base painting part; by the time I get to the details and zooming from the thumbnail into the 100% zoom view, I've got less than 25 mins. That means I spend a little more than half of my time making the thumbnail which shouldn't be happening. 

Forest on a Moon - 50 min speedpaint

One of the themes from today's selection of topics from the speed painting group I joined was Moon Forest. I was debating between this, Alien Mall and fanart but I decided against Alien Mall, because it'd most likely end up as a simple 1 point perspective with windows and a few alien like creatures, and against fan art because I had too many to pick from and was afraid I'd do little justice to the fanart. 

Honestly, in terms of realism, there couldn't be trees on our Moon and unlikely to be in such intact shape. Instead I made those craters of our moon, the source of the trees' nutrients. I wish I had spent more time on the tree detailing; I was able to get a little closer to a tighter drawing with the middle tree but I guess I need to speed up my thumb nailing process so I can move onto the details earlier. 

Robot Junkyard Spit paint/ Speed Paint (50min)

12:27 pm Pacific

I joined a Facebook group that focuses on speed painting. (Super Speedpainting Funtimes for those who'd like to see the group.)

There are usually several themes given for the members of the group to paint daily. I attempted one of today's theme: Robot Junkyard. Originally I wanted to just paint the robot arm coming out of the ground but went with painting a lot more background. In hindsight, I should have stuck with just the arm as the main object and paint very little for the background. The colors are all wrong sadly. Too saturated for the foreground and not dark enough. But it was painting something outside my comfort zone so it's good practice. 

Inspiration from humming songs

4:48 pm Pacific

While I was humming random songs from my head, I eventually hit "Colors of The Wind" from Disney's Pocahontas and the lyric "Have you ever heard a wolf cry to the blue corn moon?". From that lyric, I decided to spit paint something from that lyric.

I got this:

30 min Spitpaint

12:56 pm Pacific

I decided to do a spitpaint while I wait for my breakfast to more or less digest before I went grocery shopping. When I started the spitpaint, I started painting a road to a open arch/doorway but switched the point of view twice before erasing it to paint a rock and a log. But then I didn't like that spitpaint and decided to paint a thumbnail I did while I was in my perspective's class.

I still don't like the outcome as much; I guess since I have to paint with whatever comes to mind without any planning, the result won't be satisfactory all the time.

Toxic Waste - concept, rough painting

I wanted to paint something non urban this time for an environment. I didn't really know what to paint subject wise except for "non-urban". After some random splashes of paint on the [digital] canvas, I ended up coming up with toxic waste flowing in the foreground with some sort of mountain and part of a city visible in the background. I figured with toxic waste, there's chance for mutation which would lead to some sort of toxic waste monster. Then again, this is my imagination running wild haha.

I didn't want to go to sleep just yet, haha.

12:17 AM EST

After " finishing "* the Fight in the Distance concept, I didn't want to go to sleep just yet and spent 1-2 hours on this digital painting, including time spent deleting the original brainstorm.
The original brainstorm featured a valley of green hills with a river running through it with a large bird or dragon (or dragon bird) flying from the foreground to the background. But the image didn't look that interesting so I scrapped it and started anew and ended up with a cave.Then came everything else. 

The story idea I began to develop behind the image was something along the lines of some guy survives a crash or something that involved using a parachute and finds this cave. The guy ends up camping out and gathering materials to survive in this cave on some mountain before any help arrives. 

* The reason why I put finished in quotes was because I ended up deciding to continue coloring the Fight in the Distance concept. It'd be a shame if I didn't! This'll be my next large digital painting project, after the Sun Staff concept. 

Leap, Jump Forward - final colors decided

1:34 AM EST

Originally I splashed some random colors to see what I might like, I believe weeks ago (June 27th). However, today (well, technically yesterday) I had the sudden inspiration/idea to use just one color: blue. 
Though I did end up playing around with color balance and hue/saturation to change the appearance, it more or less stayed blue.
The image on the right shows that. The image below the text though was the digital painting, textured lightly. 

Rocky mountain side with ocean

12:45 am EST

I started painting random splotches and it turned into a rocky surface in the foreground, which lead to the background and then the ocean. 
It's a rather simple and quick background as I didn't want to focus too much on the details. (I might go back to this in the future and increase the detail.)

This is my background for Spirit (remade)'s digital painting.

Sunny Day, Sunflowers; Two Daggers - concept, sketch

3:07 pm EST

It's sunny and warm out so I had the sudden inspiration of drawing sunflowers. 
I don't know why I thought of flowers though since at that point of inspiration, I was walking down the hallway in my dorm and there weren't flowers visible. Perhaps I unconsciously thought about allergies and pollen?

I was bored and trying to figure out what to draw. Some way or another I thought of the pose and then drew in the daggers.

King of Rocks - part 2 (more color and adjustments)

1:28 AM EST 
(I should sleep and catch up on lost sleep from yesterday.)Inspired by Lion King (particularly the scene just before Circle Of Life song starts)

Played around with Color Balance and Levels a lot in this piece haha. The blue of the water doesn't look right still but this is more of an experimental piece I guess.
I don't think I spent more than 3-4 hours on this? (with a large break between the first 2-3 hours due to class, dinner, meeting and practice). 

King of Rocks - part 1 (sketch, base colors)

After having not been able to touch my tablet in, I believe, a week, I was finally able to start working on a quick composition I thought about a while back, just about an hour ago. This particular one was inspired by Lion King, specifically the scene just before the song, "Circle of Life" starts.
At the moment, this only has the base colors and very little shading for the rocks.

Rainy Day on Highway digital painting

12:49 am EST

After I got Photoshop CS2, I wanted to draw something to sorta test out CS2 (after having worked with Photoshop Elements 8.0 for so long).
I couldn't decide exactly what I wanted to draw, since I wanted to try something that wasn't a person/human like character.

In the end I decided to finally get to the idea of car lights in the car, on the highway, which came to me as I was in the car on a highway during a rainy night and seeing the oncoming traffic 's lights on the other side of the highway against the rain in the dark. It was beautiful, in my opinion, due to the many colors of car lights (the "white", "yellow", "purplish -florescent" ).

I painted this as one would traditionally with paints.

"30 Minute" landscape painting composition

11:39p EST

I decided to give myself a challenge with trying to paint a landscape composition in 30 minutes max. Sadly, though I don't regret it, I was distracted. The reason why I don't regret it is because I was chatting (read: fangirling) with a friend over a show.

I took at most 39 minutes to paint this.



I tried a method from a video I saw while looking up Concept Art videos.

Background color > gradient color > really rough sketch of  initial subject > 1st layer of rough trees > 2nd layer of trees > 3rd layer of "trees" > details > details on the house > fog.

For the image though, after forgetting to turn back on the fog, it looked better without the fog in the end.



For those who are wondering what video I watched> video link