"No Longer A Pretend Artist"

This piece is inspired by a comment that an instructor made during class one day, "When you're a real artist, you'll have to spend money on your supplies." So for now I guess I am just pretend. It started out as a sketch and then a more traditional digital painting in Painter X with the new bristle tracking tech. That just was not working for me and I thought of a street pop artist named Shepard Fairey. So I put my own twist on his style and feel pretty good about how this turned out.

For those of you that do not know, this is one of seven or eight pieces I created for a portfolio series to gain admittance into a higher level degree program. I am currently a Bacheler Arts majors and will be a Bachelor Fine Arts major in painting, drawing and printmaking.

Sign Language Assignment

This is a drawing assignment for my Intermediate Figure Drawing. The assignment was to spell out a word with at least four letters from the sign language alphabet. The painting style is loosely based off a British painter that I have been studying lately, Jenny Saville. I first did a sketch on paper, scan it, and then added color in Painter X. This could still use one or two more passes to sharpen things up.

"Assassination" cool/warm color palette

This is a color palette reference dealing with cool and warm colors, specifically to double check the color palette of red and green. The five step color palette helped in simplifying the steps and breaking it down.

"Assassination" Sketch

This is the line drawing/cartoon sketch for a large oil painting that I am starting on a 30x48" canvas tomorrow. The point of view is from that of the canvas that this man is slashing. A nice long blood red slash mark will be on top of that with blood splatters and all. This piece is for an assignment dealing with bright and dull colors. The color palette will consist of reds and greens.

FINAL PRODUCT

Well I can't believe it. Its finally done! A great thanks to all of you who saw this through and for all of your great feedback and critiques. This would not have come as far without you. A big thanks goes out to Marc Gabbana for his instrumental feedback and encouragement during the progress of this piece.

So since the last post and all of your feedback, minor changes have been made. The moonlight distance fog has been cut in have (thankfully I kept it on a separate layer, got love layers). The flames above the figures have been increased in their brightness and the level of light pollution. The Inventor and the heart was given more detail and texture to pull it forward as the focal point.

I'm off to go get a frame for the 11"x17" print so that it can be showed in the gallery of the Chico Art Center. Thanks again, it means a lot.

Impressionist Lighting Done

Well after another day and a half I'm pretty far along in the coloring. Its a bit impressionistic, but I'm going to take some time off from working on this and come back to it in a few days or a week. Mostly just figuring out how much more detail should be added and using more textures, which will of course mean boasting the resolution.

I'm planning to make a poster size print and possibly even print it on a real canvas for an art show since very few people show digital art. I still got to research the expenses for putting it on a canvas and the turn around.

One of the things that I noticed about my work is that I've done a lot of interior shots and so I've found my next project. An outdoor shot, which I'm in the process of planning and researching exactly what I want to do. Maybe something less dramatic and more on the peaceful and serene feeling. We'll see.

Starting Color (2 hours)

Had some free time tonight to start on the coloring. We'll see how close I can get to realism in the rendering. Paper Textures should really help, they turned out fairly well on the Inventor's wife's robot flesh, a little rough in spray. I'll upres the canvas after I block in the basic coloring for everything. That's when I will be able to really get in there and get every crack in the brickwork and scratch on the egg cannisters.

Thee Final Line Work!!

So here it is. Finally!! This is around maybe 70-75 hours, largely due to working in small increments as opposed to large chunks.

So in this update, I finished the robot boy and his robotic insides. Other than that I polished and added a few more prisoners in the new cells.