Digital Painting 11/6

Second last week. I feel a lot more confident in my pieces now, how they have evolved over the last few weeks. Todays class was quite nice in that I was just playing around with no real set idea in my head at first. I really like the way that my black and white piece turned out, the focus becomes more on the textures, and the subtle gold highlight in the centre of the mans chest. To me, this piece feels like the conclusion to my series. The mans acceptance that the wolf is part of him, and with that acceptance comes the loss of fear, and the strength that brings to him. Limiting the colour palette helps with the impact. The other image I created is completely surreal, very few distinct shapes, colours all swirling together. This one was fun to make in that I got to smudge everything, in every which way which meant I could zone out and play with the effects. The muted colours help add to the sinister shadowy feel of the piece, while the sunset sky creates a contrast and helps to keep it tied in to the rest of the series, along with the two shadow figures.

Digital Painting 28/5

Today I stayed at home due to being contagious, and I didnt want to spread my cold around tech. My paintings are going slowly at the moment, mostly because of how bad I feel, but also because I am at the finicky, details point which naturally takes longer. I just hope that the end result is satisfying.

Digital Painting 21/5

Today I decided to bail on my hallway image, I just wasnt feeling it the way I do with the wolf series. So, I am now on a mission to refine the images I have, and tweak them to make them fit my proposal better. I am definitely struggling to keep on top of my classwork though. so I hope I can present my final images with the attention they deserve. Mostly today I was fine tuning the cave interior image, adding hues and changes saturation etc to make the lighting match the sky better. I like it, but I need to be careful to not overwork it.

Digital Painting 14/5

Completed a series of 4 images that I started when we were doing the class intro to photoshop and corel. I need to get my focus back onto my actual images now, and get them finished asap.

  

Digital painting 7/5

The beginning of the first image. Ive decided to head towards my childhood fears for this image, specifically the nightly run down the dark hallway if I needed to use the bathroom after everyone was in bed. Im hoping this inspiration merged with the supernatural side of gs will give me some decent paintings for my assignment.

Digital Painting 30/4

Today was presenting our proposal to class, I felt a little more confident with the public speaking side of it this time, hopefully this will help with my final presentation for animation. I got some good feedback and artist suggestions from Peter, I did choose quite a broad subject so I need to refine it a bit for my series i think. First step is research research research. Now that I have a tablet and corel at home, I can spend more time playing around with composition ideas.

Proposal notes.

 
 
 

Digital Painting 9/4

Todays experiment with Corel Painter. I quite enjoyed the zone i was getting in for this one, which originally was the flipped perspective of the cave that the wolf was entering in my previous images. However during the drawing, a new idea of metamorphosis was suggested by the interior edges hinting at shapes, a sinister bird looming over a person in fear. This could be a potential path to take away from lycanthropy, hiding sinister implied images within a landscape type image.

Digital Painting 26/3

Today we watched Howls Moving Castle, first time for me. Very interesting story line in this movie. I loved the almost oil painting backgrounds in this film, and the contrast to the basic, sharp colouring of the foreground images. The colour palette suited the victorian era of the movie well, with the bursts of bright colour creating an attention grabbing pop to break up the dull, dark colours of the town, day to day life and war scenes. The background designs are definitely more my type of art, landscapes, nature, blended colours.

Retreived from https://markcz.com/imposition/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/howls-moving-castle.jpg

Howl's Moving Castle is a story about a young woman with a low opinion of her image, a young cocky wizard and a countryside at war. The young woman is swept into a world of conflict when Howl comes to her rescue on an outing, and unintentionally drawing her into a battle between himself and a witch. The movie follows the cursed young womans journey with Howl, his fire demon, and a young child in a giant steampunk style "castle". As the story progresses, Sophie falls in love with Howl, and helps to change his outlook on life, saving him for his inner monster and his mentor. The story ends with Howl regaining his heart, Sophie's curse broken, a couple of additions to their wee family and the war ended.

Continuity is maintained by the use of the same muted colour palette throughout the entire movie. There is also a strong steampunk twist on every scene, tying every town together, and hinting at the time period. Every time Sophie starts to worry about her appearance not being good enough, the old woman appearance becomes stronger. When she starts to not worry about her appearance, it begins to return to its original state.

Whenever Howl goes off to fight in the war, everything is dark. The sky, ground and beings, with bright fire everywhere to contrast. This is a good visual representation of the darkness that Howl is fighting within himself constantly throughout the story.

When the castle was moving through the valley to Star lake, the entire background was scaled down to a very small size, creating a sense of huge distance in the valley, and the castle was scaled up, to give the sense of being close to the camera.

When Howl first dyed his hair the wrong colour, he was mad and his hair was red. When he became depressed because of his hair, it turned black like his depression. The colour change helped show his transition in emotions.

Digital Painting 19/3

More of the same today, working on our series of images. I am a little unsure as to whats supposed to be happening in this class so far, im hoping that will be made clearer soon. For now I will just continue with the lycanthropy theme and see where that takes me conceptually. Im really liking where this latest image is going, i think thats partially evolution and partly getting to grips with photoshop.

The different foreground has helped change the perspective, which fits the tail end of the series with the wolf leaving the village. I really like the Foliage brush that is part of photoshop, makes the ground and tree textures pop.

Digital Painting 12/3

Today was a continuation of the last couple of weeks, working on our pictures. This week I was playing with composition and fixing straight lines in the picture. We have to create a series of images that all relate to each other/tell a story, but are not the same. Im digging the lycanthropy twist, and I think mythology would be a good idea for my main project.

The foreground needs changed, and some form of framing. Also need to get some sort of ground under the wolf, lighter version of foreground potentially.

Digital Painting 5/3

Today we carried on working on our line drawings from last week.

This was the first concept, blurring the perspective between the man and the animal. I also made a translucent version to see what a more ghostlike/shadow image would look like. I like the fact that the solid wolf covers the awkward angle of the mountain, however the translucent image seems more shadowlike to me. The image almost invokes a sense of man and beast joined as one, as in the Lycanthropy myth.

This image was the second concept, insinuating a chase without seeing the actual participants, only their shadows on the wall. The size difference gives off an uneasiness, almost fear, as i think a lot of people can imagine the scary thing in the dark coming to get them. The foreground texture has muddied a bit too much, I need to go back with a bigger texture brush and get a bit more detail into it to simulate leaf litter more accurately. I am happy with how the river has turned out though.

Digital Painting 26/2

Photoshop colouring and textures, will be better once my card has scanner access.

Tips for getting 3D perspective correct, easier said than done. Practice makes perfect

Digital Painting 19/2

some fun examples of drawings for ideas

first still life attempt in class

Artist inspirations

Chris Metzen (ex-Blizzard) - http://www.sonsofthestorm.com/gallery.php?artist=metzen

Samwise Didier(Blizzard Art Director) - https://samwisedidier.deviantart.com/gallery/

Both of the blizzard artists have very dark, pencil toned pieces that I like in video game styles.

Anne Stokes - http://www.annestokes.com/

I love how smooth and colourful Annes pieces are, beautiful renditions of fantasy realms and creatures.