Reclining Nude

A quick sketch from photo that I did over Livestream. Mostly playing around with the chalk brush in Painter and trying to stay broad and avoid getting into detail. It's nice to loosen up now and then, with all the illustration work I normally do.

Sketchbook Pages

Some scans from my sketchbook.

Walls

I got some time between jobs to work on a personal piece last week and took some shots of the process. It's an oil painting on 12X18" wood panel.

The digital value sketch. I hadn't figured out how I was going to color it at this point, so the value pattern is slightly different than what I ended up going with. A red key light felt like the right direction, and it posed an interesting challenge, since it's an inherently medium-dark color at full chroma. That meant compressing the value range more than I'm used to, while avoiding crushing all the darks. That Craig Mullins study I did a few weeks ago is still paying dividends when it comes to handling that sort of thing. 

The loose drawing done over an old painting that I sanded down. I'm using reference photos of abandoned prisons, especially the Eastern State Penitentiary, and photos of myself in the pose. No, I'm not posting them. 

Normally I'd block in the whole value pattern in monochrome before going in to the actual painting, but for this one I went straight in to the figure, which I'm going to key the rest of the piece to. I'm also trying to make this efficient, since I don't have much time between jobs, and the piece is simple enough that I don't think I'll screw myself by skipping a step. I don't have a standard color palette for every painting- on this one, I'm using- Titanium White, Yellow Ochre Pale, Cadmium Red Light, Winsor Red, Quinacridone Red, Transparent Oxide Red, Dioxazine Purple, Ultramarine Blue, Phthalo Green, and Blue Black.

Painted the wall and the key light. The rock textures were a lot of fun, as rocks tend to be. The downside of skipping the value block-in earlier is that the painted area is now much darker than the surrounding area, so it's hard to properly judge whether I've made mistakes or not. At this point the red light looks more like red paint.

The painting near-finish, with the rest of the room done. As it turned out, I'd made some of the red light casting on the side walls too dark, nearly the same value as the blue of the walls in shadow. Once it was dry, I went back and painted over those areas with a lighter red, and lightened the top-planes of the broken fragments on the floor. I also dropped some glazes on the shadowed parts of the walls. The final is the first image in this post. 

Environment Concepts

Some environment concepts for a game I'm doing some designs for.

Mullins Study

I've wanted to do a study of this Craig Mullins piece for a while, since... y'know, it's Mullins. 

I figured out a lot of what I tend to do wrong with my pieces right from the beginning, just by studying the big shapes. Something you see consistently in all good painting, and which I still need to make myself pay attention to in my own work, is very strong silhouettes. Everything here is divided into light and shadow, but their overall shape is maintained. The light being cast on the floor is used to carve out the silhouettes of the people in the crowd, so that most of them read even with very little detail. Attention is first paid to the large abstract design. Notice how the big shape of the crowd blends seamlessly into the large vertical structure.

The shadows in this are also airy, with very dark accents only used in a few select spots. This allows them to carry much more color and texture information. Trying to figure out how this is done is one of the reasons I wanted to do the study, because in my own work I tend to either crush the shadows till they're nearly black, or go in the other direction and wash them out. That might be because I take the value too close to the light- in the Mullins piece, the shadows get very light in areas, but the degree of value separation from the lights is always consistent. 

Flow of light is important in the whole piece. The dark shapes in this get significantly lighter as they go back into atmosphere, but counterchange is used to keep them clear. Few of the shapes- the pillar on the left, for instance- have the same value from top to bottom though. If the pillar were the same value the whole way, it would look pasted on to the picture. It's darker than the arch behind it at the bottom, but as the arch lightens towards the top, the pillar does as well, without ever getting light enough to break the shape. You can see flow of light, and color shift, on the floor as well. It's more orange towards the right, near the windows. It cools and lightens as it goes back in space.

This is as far as I took the study. I didn't get into any detail, and didn't pay as close attention to edges, but still did pick up on how important they are to the piece. None of the big shapes are changed much from the earlier stage, aside from a little refining, but edges and texture are used so masterfully within those shapes that you can always tell what the material is. Definitely makes me want to hit the material studies, something I tend to neglect. Knowing those properties allows you to suggest how something looks without having to go in and render the crap out of it.

Another thing that the study reminded me of was the need to paint with a harder brush. It's not a problem I run into with oils, but in Photoshop I still find it so challenging to make the exact marks I want that I veer towards softer-edged brushes and pen pressure turned out. It makes it easier to inch towards what I want, but the flipside is that it becomes much harder to make a bold, clear shape with a sharp edge easily. I need to return to the hard round every now and then.

Edit: Notice how, even with the piece I'm copying right there, and full awareness of having this problem, I've still managed to make a lot of this just a little too dark. Note to self...

'Alien' Studies and some recent work

I am doing a really bad job of keeping this thing updated... I'll blame freelance. 

I've started doing comp studies from film stills- something I should have done years ago instead of only studying old paintings, especially since I want to work in that industry. These were done from the original 'Alien.' Such a gorgeous movie. It continues to blow my mind that these shots that seem so busy and full of mechanical details and complex lighting are actually so (deceptively) simple. Big shapes. Very clear silhouettes. You can tell what's going on from a mile away. 

This being an old movie, I also really appreciate how subtly a lot of the color is done, compared to the over-the-top complementary color usage these days. If anyone knows a good reason for the bright yellow-lit helmets in Prometheus, besides "It stands out against the blue backgrounds," I'm all ears. (Don't get me wrong though, that movie was still bloody gorgeous.)

Some recent work. These 2 are paintings for a client's sci-fi film pitch. Some of my more fun assignments. 

Cover illustration for Jared Sandman's new novel, 'Blackstone.' 

Finally, a portrait I did of the late Christopher Hitchens for the 'Notorious' group show at the Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco. I haven't had a chance to work in oils much lately, so this was a real joy, and I finally got to do some experimenting again. I might post some of the sketches and process shots in a later post, once I get them scanned.

'Rout' Process

I finally finished the oil painting I've been working on in my free time. Though I'd post some process shots.

I went through several sketches for this one, some of which I've put up in earlier blog posts, and finally landed on this one. Another awesome artist, Josh Godin, gave me some feedback on it that I tried implementing in the final- moving the horse on the right over a little to give the main rider some breathing room, putting some more contrast on that main rider, playing with the shapes of the flying dirt in the foreground to better suit the arcs of movement, and closing the window of light shapes formed by the guy's arm on the upper right.

I used a 20x30" stretched canvas for this. The major shapes and drawing were done in vine charcoal, since it's easy to erase and I wasn't working from a preparatory sketch.

Major values for the foreground, middleground and background are massed-in using thinned out raw umber.

The entire painting was going to be keyed to the main rider, so I painted him first.

This was the last progress shot I took. Once I got the ground done things started to fall into place, but some things still needed major corrections. The fortress in the background bothered me from the get go, and the sky was too plain, so I painted over the whole thing and added a cloud, which made it look like the dragon was coming down for the sky, so I played that up. I'd also gotten rid of the horse and rider flying through the air, so I needed to add more evidence of the carnage in the background, behind the main rider.

With the major corrections done, it was just on to refining, which is probably the most time-consuming part, and for me, the least interesting. Gotta slog through the boring parts though :). This is also typically the part where I hit the reference the hardest- I try to take my pictures as far as possible from imagination. At a certain point, I can't fill in the information from my head any more though, so I need the reference photos to tackle details.