Sunday, July 29, 2012

Painted film.

Anyone who knows me knows it's no secret that I have an obsession with movies.  It was only a matter of time before that finally found it's way into my art, and it's finally done so with a bit of a bang.  Looking at how these pieces stand up next to my work from the rest of the year, I have no idea what took me so long to finally get to this subject.  That being said, I think this will be a common subject choice for future work.

Now Alien had been dwelling in the back of my mind for a while this year and while I'm not entirely happy with it (wish I'd thought out more thumbnails and compositions, making it more experimental at the start) it still turned out fairly decent I think.


There was still a lot I had to force myself to push color and contrast-wise, and even then I was fairly leery of it.  As a result, a few paintings in the near future will feature more strict color-palette choices and more experimental values (no more of this hiding in the middle norm, I need to push these things that I'm finding I'm uncomfortable playing with). 

All of that being said, the second movie piece I wound up doing kind of at random has made me absolutely giddy with future experiments.  I had no idea what I was doing half the time while working on this painting, so when things kept winding up looking great I was a bit astounded.  Eli is therefore my encouragement to get the hell out of my comfort zone and start playing more.  My paints are demanding more spontaneity and they're quite right in doing so.


And some detail shots for those of you who are just as obsessed with paint strokes as I am.









   As always, if you want to see more progress shots or other various projects that haven't made their way to this blog, check out my tumblr.

Monday, July 16, 2012

The Griffin

So far this summer I'm surprised at how productive I've been.  Now that I'm done moving until the end of August things have been kicked up another notch and the first piece to be finished is this particular painting.  Overall I'm rather pleased with how it's turned out!  Initially after drawing out the line work for the underpainting I had to cut off more from the sides for a much better perspective.  Beyond that it's been a fairly trouble free journey.  Why?  As I'm quickly figuring out reference and best of all lighting is your best friend.
After creating the drawing on the board and cutting down the edges, I shot several different lighting scenarios on a quick little sculpt I did of the pair.



Following those shots and my culmination of reference ranging from various antelope and deer to owls, hawks and eagles the underpainting progressed and was finished within a couple of hours at most.  


Not quite my usual method but it worked nonetheless.  
At this point colors are the biggest obstacle.  And I've kept it no secret that I'm pretty terrible at colors.  But between advice I received from Tardigrad (whose work you should definitely check out by the way) on another project and a painting I've always adored it wound up being fairly straightforward.  


The painting I'm referencing is Horace Vernet's The Lion Hunt.  I realize my colors are more muted than Vernet's palette but I would be remiss to not credit this work with this post.


In the end the brushstrokes just fell into place better than I could have hoped for and I'm glad whatever my style's become is finally finding a happy place.


In the end I've wound up with a piece that I have learned a lot from and that also made me remember how much I really do enjoy painting.  I couldn't have asked for more.