Stylized Food studies

During the holidays, I decided to paint up some food studies, in a stylized style. Partially, I was inspired to do so, with how appetizing food is drawn & painted in the movies from Studio Ghibli and various anime series/films. 

Bacon & Eggs - from Studio Ghibli's Howl's Moving Castle

Danish Pastry - from Google photos

Fruit Pancakes - from Kimi no Namae Wa ("Your Name")

Hot Cocoa, with bread - from Google photos and Studio Ghibli respectively 

Ozoni (Mochi Miso Soup) - from Google photos

Red Velvet Cake (square) - from Google photos

House Plants

Influenced by my recent trip to nurseries, I decided to paint house plants.

First up was pothos!

Then cacti.

And succulents.

It was a ton of fun painting these since I got to design plant gardens. Cacti and succulents were particularly fun with all the color possibilities, though because of that, I had to really choose my colors while I was painting. 

I never really knew there would be so many mini cacti and succulent garden possibilities before I started this mini prop design project. It was definitely a nice study project as well. 

Rainy Days and cars - studies

To train my eye, I spend a few days doing studies. 

Sunburst Peak, Mt. Assiniboine - photo study

Girl Jumping Over 

The original photo I studied from had a different background, one I wasn't happy with so I opted to make my own, using SketchUp. 

Painting studies from photos of wet rainy streets in the city was a lot of fun where I got to really bring in a lot of color and try painting the streets with all those colors. 

After the rainy street studies, I wanted to try my hand at vehicle paintings. 

The first car was a learning curve with its reflections on the metal from the photo but it was still a learning experience and another painting to add to my art mileage. 

The next car went a bit better in getting the silhouette down better and it was a + 1 to my mileage. 

Particularly the painting with the girl jumping, I was able to incorporate SketchUp in creating backgrounds and really try to get certain shapes down in the city architecture. 

100 Material Cubes - personal challenge

All 100 cubes in one

When I did this challenge, I wanted to have each set of cubes follow a theme, such as fruits, fish, building materials, etc. 

Over time, I found myself able to pick out important details a bit better. During the 100 cubes, I struggled a bit with turning a material into cube form. Looking back, many many months later, I realize what sort of materials I struggled with and tried to design around them.  Additionally, I realize that these cubes don't show lighting and shadow too well, if at all haha.

Pasta Dinner still life - post critique changes

As the title says, these are post-critique edits! I can't recall if I made a post for pre-critique (50% and before turn-in), but I think for this painting , I completely forgot to take photos after the step, or before I began working on the next. I tend to do that for my digital work too...

Final edit was to include the shadow of the fork under, in the bowl. (That was some confusing wording.) I missed it originally since I was too overwhelmed by the pasta, and thought critique meant there was a shadow over the pasta from the fork, which, with this lighting, wasn't possible. It didn't help that my photo reference nearly lost that shadow! (Or perhaps the shadow was so close in value to the value of the bowl in shadow, that it got lost.)

This week, bird's eye view, blog questions and guest speaker Pascal Champion

 

Truth be told, that's not the actual color of the plate. I was feeling sleepy in the beginning of the class, and I completely forgot about using orange to mix with the cerulean blue to create the gray blue I was trying to accomplish, for realism sake. In the  end it worked out though, as the green-blue of the plate popped the red of the apple. 

In other news, aside from my work, I was told to treat my blog less like a diary (or art diary in this sense) and more of sharing other people's work and/or blog post. To other artists using blogger, is this true? From the  people I follow, most, if not all, the blog look to be their work or related to their work, rather than 30% their work, 70% other people I was told to follow. But the person brought a point, with a blog dating from 2012, why haven't there been comments?

I'm at a loss of how much to take of this person's advice. I suppose it varies for person to person but still, what is an art blog then? How much of your blog is suppose to be your stuff? I know for other social media, like Facebook pages, it's a good idea to share other pages' posts to share audience. And I believe this holds true to Tumblr as well, though sharing is, as far as I know, pretty common in the Tumblr community. But Blogger? 

#whatisblogging 

In a weird connection to this, Pascal Champion came as a guest speaker at my university tonight, and for him, he just shares his work and companies/work comes to him. Most professionals I follow seem to just share their work, without the sharing of other peoples' posts, which I believe sounds to be a method of networking on social media. On another note, I was able to takeaway a few things from his presentation, such as you don't necessarily need to be good at every foundation (possibly) such as color, but if for example your lighting or values is good, you've got a chance. 

I suppose for me personally, I know I need to get better at my drawing skills but I'm always improving each semester so this is a start for me. 

Refresher after spring break Still life painting

Yikes, mouthful of a title, but as title says, it's a refresher from coming back from spring break. There's no glass but it recovers reflective metal and patterns. Ah, and of course value and colors. 

Portrait - WIP 1

Tea themed still life painting WIP 2

Oil painting still life - Story Theme: Tea. 

with reflective metal and glass. 

 

Slightly farther shot of painting and easel.

I up-ed the saturation on everything from WIP 1, then went back and toned down the saturation on the boxes to push them back a bit. If you look boxes in the glass versus the actual boxes, there's a difference, I hope.

Still life painting - Patterns

As the title says, this week we painted patterned objects, though most were glass/ porcelain.

Metal and glass Still Life (WIP)

 

 (This is a partial shot of  the painting since I goofed and forgot to take a photo of it while it was on the easel, and had to take it while it was in the drying rack, after I had already cleaned up.)

Our assignment was to paint a still life with 3-5 objects, 2 of them should be glass and reflective metal.

Still life limited palette #2

This is from 3 weeks ago I believe. 

 

It's not quite as limited as the first  painting but it's still pretty limited. If I recall, we had only titanium white, ivory black, yellow ochre, cad yellow, ultramarine blue ( unless it was another blue, or both temperatures) and terra rosa. 

Still life - Metal reflection

 

I'm improving pretty quickly according to my instructor and I believe him! This week's focus is on metal reflective items. 

Things learned, reflected items are darker than their actual color, and to keep things 3-D, things need to wrap. 

I'll be uploading WIPs for our next homework painting, which will include glass and metal. My original items , while worked composition-wise, lacked a story cohesion. Right now, I think my new items will be glass cup, filled with some water possibly, spoon, unopened tea bag packet and 2 boxes of different tea boxes. 

Still life painting - Learning to paint Glass

So this week's in class painting, we started on how to paint glass objects. My group selected a lightbulb as our glass objects.

Apologies , the top left corner is so blown out , I couldn't get a good lighting even with hitting the light side to keep it balanced. This week 's was almost more contained in terms of time with only 3 hours since our latter half of class was focused on our 1st homework critique. 

Last week's in class painting wasn't posted on my blog so I'm including it in this post rather than making a new one. 

Studies - Metal mug and plastic bottle

 

Done in SAI; my metal mug and  plastic water bottle.

Perspective thumbnails - on site and from mind

Story composition thumbnail study

As part of a homework assignment for one of my classes, we were to do 20 story thumbnails ; 10 from a movie (or tv or cartoon) using the said source, and 10 from a fairy tale, using our imagination. 

I chose to do The Incredibles as my movie and Red Riding Hood  as my fairy tale. I had some issues with getting the wolf down right. How would a wolf realistically look, standing? Google Images was, to say the least, creepy, in helping me figure out some ideas. In the end, I scrapped the zoomed out view idea I had for the last fairy tale thumb since I just could not get the legs, or anatomy for that matter, of the wolf down right. 

Keelung Fishing Harbor, Taiwan - rough digital watercolor

The painting is based off a photo I took when I went to Keelung. I didn't spend much time on it since I was planning on focusing on the shapes rather than a clean drawing. In the end, it was more of a rough than a painting I suppose. 

Hands, feet and shoes - study sketches

I'm finding myself deliberately selecting these unique poses for study sketches, haha. I suppose it's a good thing since I'll be drawing those less common poses. I might be even consciously choosing these poses because of that. 

My references were from artist.pixelovely.com 

In class 5 mins Head drawings

Done with conte crayon and of course, with help of models.