B&W Study - Helina

I started this one yesterday, as a short study/exercise, and finished it up, today. Why Helina? Why not.

I've been meaning to do some more greyscale exercises, and I'm pretty happy with this one. It's a little on the stylized side, but I decided to focus more on lighting than on super-realism. I also spent a good bit of time on that tattoo.

Helina Kerensky

She's not a completely horrible person, by the way. She's just a bit cranky. You would be, too, if you had relatives like hers.

Weekly Sketches

Here's a little bit of what I've been working on, over the past week. After finishing up Sobel, I did a character sketch of Myron.

I spent a lot more time on this one, playing around with a larger scene. Ultimately, though, I scrapped the idea and went back to the simpler spot illustration style I used with Sobel. It was a little frustrating at first. I felt as though I'd wasted a lot of time fiddling around with something that didn't make it into the piece. Then I remembered how Tom Jech advised us, when he visited BGSU this past semester, that the difference between student and professional work is often what you don't include. It's good advice that I think I'm starting to internalize.

The next sketch that I worked on is a few months older: the clothing design for the High Priestess of the Syäloä, län-Eyloeiwä I started this one at the same time as the others, but felt unsure about how to finalize the design. I spent a few minutes on it again this week, and feel quite confident about the design. She shares some elements of dress with the temple guardians. This also shows, when compared with the other outfits, a cultural element of hierarchy through dress--the higher an individual's status, the more clothing they wear. This is a common practice in many real-world societies.

You can see the previous clothing concepts here; the Temple Guardian here; and the High Priestess here.

Sketchings

Remember these guys? Since I haven't done much with the characters since their initial designs, I decided some more illustration were in order. I picked Sobel first. Her sketch turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I expected, but it was a very fun exercise and I learned something in doing it.

The first bit of trouble I ran into was the pose. Because I'm not an archer, I felt that going with a photo reference was a good idea. I wanted to get Sobel's position correct, and knew I'd get something wrong if I tried to draw from my head, or pose in front of a mirror. However, I picked a reference that wasn't too clear in some areas, and ended up paying for that. The face and right leg took the longest to adjust properly, balancing how the model was positioned against what looks correct. That's the "con" of the pose; the "pro" of course, is that it looks very dynamic. Another "pro" is that the model is wearing a sleeveless shirt, so the muscles are visible as the bow is being drawn. (Again, this is a case of photo being preferable to live reference; I am not that buff.)

Ernest helped me quite a bit. He's done about 500% more archery than I have (which is to say, any at all), and was able to give me some tips. One thing that I had completely neglected, initially, was a chest guard. I'd seen them before, but it never registered in my head what they were for. It's sort of ironic, though. In the initial design, I got some flak for not making Sobel's bust noticeable enough (under a chainmail shirt, I might add), so I gave her a bit more definition; this time, I actually scaled it back a little, because the chest guard would compress her bust slightly.

I finished up the sketch with some greyscale shading and, again at Ernest's suggestion, some vegetation to ground her. I'm pretty pleased with this.

The second bit of work I did yesterday was more straightforward: a simple landscape. Since I'd just finished drawing Sobel, I thought I'd try to connect the landscape a bit, by giving it an English countryside sort of feel. Although I was able to paint the whole thing, it was a pain and a half to do so. My regular tablet has tilt functionality, and the one I'm using now does not. ...Which means I had to go back to my old, less efficient method of painting.

It didn't come out quite like I expected, but in the end, I think it came out pretty well. The sky (done with watercolor tools in Painter) and the river are what I'm most pleased with.

And I still can't wait until my tablet is repaired.

A New Species - Pt. 3

[Continuing from Pt. 2]

EDIT: After getting some great critique on deviantART, I completely reworked the background. It's a vast improvement.

Here's the final image! You can check it out here on my deviantART page.

A New Species

I've got a new species to add to the roster for my SF project. If you +devwatch me on deviantART, you've probably seen this species before. (No, not the woman--the fellow beside her.)

This creature is from a species called the Syäloä.

While they could be mistaken for humanoid at a distance, they share only basic biological similarities. One noticeable difference is that females of the species have no breasts. As they do not nurse their young, they have no mammary glands.

Monster Time! Part 2

Continuing from Part 1, it's time to do the environment and detail work.

The first thing to do is finish laying down rough colors as before. It's important right now to make sure the entire figure is covered with the general colors it should have; it's not important that the brush strokes look nice.



Next, it's time to sketch in a background and add some rough colors to it, as well. This is where the previous step becomes important. Harmony is very important in figurative works. The composition should be balanced, and so should the colors. You want to ensure that the less important areas of the painting don't "compete" with the more important areas, visually. In this painting, the creature is the focus, so it needs to stand out from the background without seeming to "jump out" from the image.



Now is the time when you should really critique the formal elements of your painting. It'll be much easier to fix mistakes now, than later. I'm pretty satisfied with the composition and colors of this piece, so I'm going to begin painting details.

My first concern in this step is to get rid of all my sketch lines. I'm using my regular default brush for this, with the opacity jitter and flow jitter set to my pen pressure. By varying those controls, I can smooth out the rough colors quickly. In areas that need soft transitions between color and shape, I keep my brush at a fairly large size; tighter areas call for a smaller brush.

I also spent some time on the bones. Because they're so close to the figure, they need to be just as detailed as him. For reference, I perused "Skulls Unlimited."

Now comes the really long part of this painting. From here on, it's mostly more of the same work as before. I took more time to refine and polish the figure, and began more detail work on the environment. The environment has a sort of Greco-Roman architecture to it, with lots of columns. In the background, there are a couple of small temple structures. The sky is a little more refined, and way off in the distance is the silhouette of a town. I also added some vases and bits of grass in the foreground for interest.

That's about 99% of the painting. Whenever I get this much of a painting finished I like to take a break and then give it a second look to see what else I can do. One of the last things I did was to "break" the vases. Hellcat pointed out that it didn't look right to have them intact when everything else around is broken and decaying. Sometimes, just doing little things like that really make a painting.

And voila! It's finished!

Monster time! Part 1

Often, I like to work on several images in parallel to keep myself from getting bored or tired of a single painting. So, today, I started a new one, based on the Greek anthropophage and depictions of the legendary Blemmyes creature.

Horror is not a genre I delve into often, but I figured it's always good to branch out. This creature gives me the chance to do some fairly realistic figure work, and also to take a rather ridiculous monster and try my hand at making it a bit more scary.

My first step was to find a good source image for the pose. I wanted a fairly natural pose, but one that would look slightly "off" in its stance, once I did away with the head. This photo from Felixdeon on dA fit the bill perfectly. The lighting in the shot is also pretty interesting, which is a bonus.

With a pose selected, my next step was to begin my sketch. Starting out rough and gestural is the best way to begin. It's so much easier to fix mistakes when you're at this stage, than when you're five hours into the painting.



Next, I refined my lines and started adding some background objects for interest. The bones are based on various pics from Skulls Unlimited.



I felt pleased with the figure at this point. But as a monster, the image was definitely lacking creepiness. Instead of going for a bloody, gory "ick," I decided to take a different route, and over-emphasize the musculature, veins, and tendons. While muscles are normally thought of as attractive in Western aesthetics, you can take it far enough that it becomes grotesque. For reference, I looked up musculature diagrams and drawings by Michaelangelo. An art instructor of mine once joked that an arm on a Michaelangelo figure looks like a bag of walnuts, because you can see every single muscle. Sounds like a good start towards creepy!



And there we have it! The finished drawing for the figure and a loose background. For the coloring, I referred back to my stock again. (I hope you can all forgive me the sin of censorship, but I'm hosting my images on Photobucket.)



I gave my creature a pale skintone, firstly because it's easiest to match the model, and secondly because veins show best under paler skin.

Despite the skin being pale, though, it's by no means different shades of the same color. It's a combination of several hues. The lights are mostly yellow-oranges, with orange-reds for the midtones, and red-purples for the darks. There are some blues worked into the darks, as well. As I said in my last post, it's really important to use complementary colors.

To begin, I'm just roughly applying color. The play of light is similar to the lighting on the model, but the more exaggerated muscles, (as well as the face, obviously) change things a bit.

Here's a detail view.



That's all for part one! I'll continue with more work on painting the figure and details in Part Two.