Happy End of the Year and a good start into the next one!
Another year gone by …
Wednesday December 17th, 2008
A night out
Sunday November 9th, 2008Recently I read the new graphic novel telling the story of Stephen King’s Dark Tower.
Though I never made it through the second volume of King’s saga, I liked the graphic novel very much.
Especially the artwork!
In the first volume there was a mini tutorial. I decided to try the technique on an old sketch:
The first and most important step: Create clean lineart!
Since I normally don’t do this, it took me a rather long time. But spending time and effort on this will make life easier in the following steps.
Next I worked on the background. I had reference material for the flames which helped a lot when it came to picking the appropriate colors. The fire was painted with different standard brushes and a low value for “Flow”.
According to the tutorial, I picked the darkest color from the background and filled my lineart with it:
Not bad, but this led to the next problem: How much color could/should be visible on the characters?
This time I tried something I learned in the digitalartforum: Treat coloring and shading as different problems.
So I did the shading with only one color on one layer. On top of it I had another layer on which I only painted the colors without any shading.
The color layer got the blending mode “Color dodge” and 50 % opacity. Now it looked like this:
Almost there! Some work on the metal parts and some highlights and I call it done:
I’m quite satisfied with the result. Having such a structured work flow was very helpful for me.
Maybe it is for you, too :)
Miniupdate
Wednesday October 15th, 2008I forgot a picture in the last update:
Snake’s getting ready for a night out.
And I’m not yet done with the duck theme:
Mighty Ducks rock! And I haven’t even watched the show very often when I was younger.
Braindump II
Friday October 10th, 2008
Speedpainting which is supposed to become a detailed picture.
I saw many beautiful and tattoed people during my holidays. This girl is composed of at least three of them.
Nothing new.
Incomplete band picture of Jul’s old band. I used a reference for the girl to the left. The reference wasn’t as deformed as she is now :(
Snake is posing again.
Drawing was therapy.
Jul again.
Do you know who he is (without looking at the file name)?
Mortis. He’s stuck in my head. Arrogant bastard.
Uhm … well. Kei_oz and me were watching some episodes of Mighty Ducks … which led to … this.
Wall decoration, part 1
Since I am living in this appartment there is a blank space above my couch.
Since about the same time I possess a bunch of acrylic colors and some cardboard and canvases. I just had no idea how to combine the two to something nice (which also is not too complicated because I’m not very skilled in acrylic painting).
However, I found something inspiring, a couple of pictures of the band Schandmaul. They show the band members in front of a reddish wall, for example? like this. So I thought I could do the same with my vampires. Two or three portraits on 65 X 50 cm cardboard.
The first one started with a digital color sketch:
It looks pretty different in acrylics – I found it hard to pick the background colors. Now they are way more saturated than on the sketch but I think it’s not too bad.
I used masking fluid to keep the sketch of Jul clean from colour. While this technique worked fine on canvas I had to learn that cardboard behaves different: After the fluid had dried it could hardly be removed again from the surface. Part of it is still there so I will simply paint on top of it. Lesson learned …
The next portrait is supposed to sport Kai. But I’d like to finish this one first.
