A big catch-up

Someone at La Scalla, the cafe I spend too much time at, offered to me the actual method people use for digital speed painting, which happens to be rather far removed from the physical medium.  Layers; immense amounts of layers with varying opacity and usually specific details in a giant vertical stack.

Now my Galaxy Note has only 2GB of RAM so my layer limit is actually rather low compared to what one would do in Photoshop on a PC or Windows tablet.  Regardless the technique still works out at its base level and just means I have to smoosh more work per layer and lower my expectations.  Also I have far less brushes at my disposal and need to dick around with what brushes Artflow and Sketchbook Pro do have for quick texture or to just keeping things from being too uniformed.

The following posts are reverse chronological order (new to old) as I continue my fight to get the technique down.  Though I'm still rather slow and meticulous at this as with most things I do.

And a bonus because I like the one with construction lines on it:

Desk toy

Wanted to mess around with my tablet but had no ideas so I decided to try and make a bobble head on my desk look dramatic.

Teddy

Pencil/Pen done at cafe:

Final image:

Timelapse of (most of) the work between the two:

Beanstalks

A friend looking over my sketchpad noted I was sorely lacking in drawing scenery and environment and challenged me to draw a sci-fi scene. Promptly I went over a mental checklist of sci-fi novel stereotypes and came up with the standard orbital elevator, which he informed me is more commonly known as a "beanstalk".

The drawing itself was a bit sloppy, and you can see the loose doodles behind it. But all the while I drew it, I kept imagining a bunch of blue. Dunno why, just seemed a a way to do it. The execution of digitally painting it blue however did necessarily go as planned on all fronts, but a stepping stone is a stepping stone.

I'm sure I could tweak it more, but I've spent enough hours re-re-repainting it to figure out what I had in mind as I moved along. It hit that point where one needs to take notes of what did and didn't work, and the project must be set aside.

Also, I'm not sure if it's my colorblindness or not, but goofing off with the overlay (a layer of pure orange to dim the intense blue) I found that I actually did like the inverting one, even if it wasn't what I had intended.

Week of 2010.06.25

My first pencil/pen/watercolor tests on the watercolor pad. While being pre-posted before the completed robot, it's actually being written after.

So, these are my first attempts to play with the watercolor pencils, and they didn't at all work how I expected in a relation of amount:intensity ratio. The blurry grey smudges on the one with the eye-flare are the result of a non-waterproof ink to see if/how it would work as an inkwash. I wasn't put off by the results, but I thought it would bleed a lot more and not leave lines behind like that.

Overall I like the not-really-complete doodles, but dislike most traits of the watercolor pencils. So not much changed after I did the play-doh colored robot, though I did get a mildly better grasp on controlling it.

Play-Doh colored robot

Well, the watercolor pencils I wanted to tinker with ended up like this.

Mixing them is a complete pain the ass, and so is sharpening them on the go. The best way to do it is with a cylindrical cutter/planetary sharpener with two conical gears that shave off the material. If you're old enough, you'll recall them having hand cranks in elementary school and being about mid-thigh height compared to the adults.

So, the drawing didn't change too much from my previous scan, but the color from the pencils only had the option of intense. The yellow went from faint yellow stain to yellow overwhelming blob while the red and browns mostly stayed as lines on the paper and barely bled out or even moved. The blues were more forgiving and probably were inbetween the other colors in terms of the pigment's hardness. So are they worthless? Not really. Are they useful? Barely, but yes. Good for an experiment in the middle of nowhere, or at a coffee shop, where I like to do my drawing.

Random Panda

These have all been cross-posted to my Deviant Art account too. But I don't bother to write as much there.

Out of ideas just a week ago from today I went about sifting through my gigantic folder of random images I've collected from Ye Olde Internet. It's a giant folder of random source images I've found via Google Image Search (GIS), memes from 4chan, links from Reddit, so on and so forth. It runs the gamut of horribly inappropriate humor to endearing to pics pilfered from National Geographic and The Boston Globe. You'd be amazed what can be a handy source image or inspirational in a rut.

Strangely, of all those to flip though a drawing of a panda in basically a split of a Shinto monk's clothing and Usagi Yojimbo's outfit stood out to me. But so did the sumi-e calligraphy tools in Painter, of which I simply could not get a fine painterly line from. Also, being a simulated art tool set and not real, I couldn't just let it dry and then angle it on a table and gently go over with a very wet watercolor brush to get runs and blooms of ink on it. Instead I settled for a water color layer in black and looked back over my shoulder to my drafting table and considered returning to it.

This was never meant to be an intricate drawing, but the digital tools don't work quite in line with my on/off watercoloring for the past decade, so I eventually gave up making it look how I imagined it (which, honestly, involved the crinkling sound of thin paper, so I was doomed from the start) and spent more time adjust layer transparencies and brush settings than I did actually drawing it. In fact it was meant to be a a minimalist ink drawing more in line with... [randomly searches GIS] this than what it came out as. Oh well, live and learn to manipulate the software for another day.

That's it for now. I'm not sure what else is on hand for publishing here at the moment.

Evening Goo... or something

Anyone else's opinion aside, my take on this is as follows: A mix of a watercolor layer, a layer with a pencil/pen tool, and disaster.

Overall it's a take on a pencil/pen drawing I did in my sketchbook. One of a very few I finished in my sketchbook over the most recent long period of inactivity present in this blog. The original drawing was my personal favorite combination of black ink over pencil layout. Problem was the sense of perspective was non-existent and it fell flat and looked dull.

While I feel I did a better job with the composition and the brick walls, I honestly can't stand anything else about this. Lessons learned about color theory and getting used to working completely digital I hope. Also digital coloring is hard to tone down with complimentary colors; everything is still coming out as a high-intensity blob of color. Nevermind my red/green colorblindness kicking me in the pants... I'll find a way to at least partially overcome it yet.

On to more backlog posting...

Random Painting #1

While I'd rather title this "NUCLEAR CHICKEN/COCK", it's a random digital painting I did back in March of this year for a draw daily thread on a forum. Not sure how long I spent on it, but the legs make me think I was watching a lot of Futurama at the time.

Minimal as it is, the background still shows more purpose than some of my earlier works, an ongoing struggle of mine caused by being a character doodler first, painter/illustrator second.

That's it for tonight. This dilapidated blog has just been given a handful more updates, in burst form as usual, but hopefully I can start updating this thing weekly or bi-weekly.

A digital painting that's dated late September '08. The painting went through a series of problems and successes, as can be seen by the guy in front, who doesn't look half bad, and the guy behind him, who looks more like a rigid joke. This piece is important because it was my first post-college painting that really highlighted my need to think through my environments better. You'd think that this would be something I wouldn't want to show off, but really, I find the opposite effect.

Truth be told, even "Random Drawing #4"'s environment needs work, but that one, admittedly and sadly, wasn't an afterthought.

"Ahead of it All"

A self-portrait painted digitally. Done achromatically, the second image is the color overlay used on it. While the second layer looks far from refined on its own, I still like the look of it and posted it along with.

Alteration by Generation

The first painting was an experiment in landscape work. The source was a photo of an abandoned factory with some Photoshop work to blow the too-middled contrast. The composition wound up working as a photo, but being a miss on canvas, so the second one was made in response to that outcome and a desire for surrealism to pull further away from the source.

A third one was always, and still is, planned, but the one to three work break from the same subject has stretched out indefinitely so far.

Two Trees

A painting commissioned by a friend. The pencil sketch and the final image ended up being rotated different ways when displayed, though a clear one wasn't intended. Other elements were then altered when he needed it sanitized if he displayed it at work (he ended up not) and by me when color temperature was introduced.

Drawing: 8.5"x11", pencil on paper
Painting: 24"x48", oils on gessoed hardboard