Some Hills

Desk Lamp

Painting from life of my desk. This might have bad color/contrast... hard for me to tell, been looking at it for too long.

A human-like thing

Was just thinking about a couple things relating to edges...

Red Mountain

Blah

Figure Studies

Doing a bunch of figure studies, mostly from Loomis's Figure Drawing For All It's Worth. Here you can find some good figure drawing books.

Future Sketch

Learned you can press Ctrl-Shift-# to use alpha channels as selections. Saves much time.

Couple of color studies

Prefer the top one. Not much time spent painting today. Instead I got through about 175 pages of Loomis's Creative Illustration. It is ownage and I can't believe I didn't read this earlier. I am learning a lot. Yay.

Cat Plus Bird

Really not a fan of purple. Oh well, I'm moving around the color wheel. One thing I did on this one was apply an unsharp mask, then go back in with the history brush, and blur back things I didn't want to have focus.

Wave

Very quick painting today.

I found these optical illusions that illustrate how our vision works. The first really explains the rule of thumb of having your lightest values in your dark areas be darker than the darkest areas in your lights. Humans naturally have a tendency to see a light area in shade as brighter than it really is and and the dark areas in light as darker than they are. You have to watch yourself.

Birds

I like this one.

Color is relative.... Lately I've been bringing photographs and art I like into photoshop and examining them with the eyedropper tool. It turns out my conception of color was very skewed. Something that I would have guessed was a blue, or a green, for example, would actually be a magenta or even a red with low saturation. Dark yellows look like they have a green hue, when they actually don't, as in this painting today. I've known this for a while, of course, in a general sense, but before I never released how subtle shifts in color can make such a difference.

At one point this was decent but I couldn't abide, so I marred its qualities.

Water

I wish practice would go ahead and make perfect already.

Nothing to show today. I did spend a long time working on an image, but I am thinking about spending more time on it and submitting it to the NVArt competition. Perchance.

The lips, they are poorly

I painted this out of my head, save looking in a mirror for eyebrows (you should have seen them before). I have nothing against using reference, in fact I think it's usually the best thing to do. But my problem is I find it very difficult to work *without* reference or working from life, so I am training myself to do so.

One trick I did on this image was create two layers, fill them with 50% gray, and apply the pointillize filter to each one, one with a cell size of 3, and the other with a size of 4. Then I desaturated the two layers, set them to overlay, and reduced their fill to 7%. That basically gives the image a subtle noise which isn't as ugly as the regular noise filter. I think it helped break up the flat areas.

What kind of shapes for mountains are those?

Nothing really special about this one, started with a gradient and used the default round brush.

City

Should have spend more time on this, but it's Sunday. Mostly this was me just messing with 3 point perspective using a grid and a vanishing point.

Constant Vigil

My Happy Place

Playing with the selection wand, the transform selection command, and a couple new brushes. And the pencil!

Mountain River

I blocked this in using an alpha channel and gradients. Got the technique from this Mullins tutorial. I definitely learned from this one. :)

Still, I have no idea how to render water.

Block Head

Trying to paint form and light.

Cliffs and water

Trying out a little color. I have no idea how to render water :)

Still working pretty zoomed out all the time.

Trying to have more textured strokes up close and less textured ones farther away.

Texture Brushes

Learning about textures. They are pretty fun to make. :) That picture is just two strokes.


This one is one stroke for the leaves, but then some extra stuff including the history brush to put in the gradient.

Poorly :(.

I did learn a few things from it though. Can be real useful to zoom out and draw from far away. Also just messing around with textures.

The image so bad it killed a barber.

Not at all happy with this one. :( Doesn't seem to have an interesting composition, bad values, etc. Last time I worked from a thumbnail and this time I was working from nothing, maybe that played a part.

I put the flip horizontal command on hotkey, which I found useful.

I also found it helpful in certain situations to set the brush mode to lighten or darken.

Waterfall

Painting Notes:

1. Painted w/ photoshop.
2. Blocked in basic composition from a small thumbnail drawing from my sketchbook.
3. Using the lasso tool, pulled in some textures of rocks from photos.
4. Selected areas of the image with wand and adjusted with levels to define planes.
5. In the middle of painting, took a break and looked at flickr images of fern trees, rocks and waterfalls. (The variations in nature make me feel so damn uncreative.)
6. Trying to vary brush widths.
7. Flipping canvas horizontally multiple times.