May/100
Daily… Thumbnailing
I finished up the last week of the semester on Friday, feels nice to have a moment to breathe. I’ll be leaving my job soon to focus full time on school/portfolio building. I’ll be taking a summer course now that I’m working towards a degree. I’ll be taking Color and Design which is pretty much a learn how to paint class. You start with the basics of how to mix colors (and of course the whole what colors go together).
I took such a class at my previous college, but it didn’t transfer over. It’s one of the core classes for almost all the degrees here. I’m really excited at the prospect of taking it now though. I have a few years experience at the school and my drawing and (digital) painting skills have come quite a ways, I’m excited at applying all that to traditional paint.
Throughout the day today I painted out these quick thumbnail sketches. I probably spent around 10 mins on each one all using the Oil Pastel brush again.
Feb/100
Daily… More napkin vehicles
Another set of napkin vehicle sketches, I’m liking this process.
Feb/100
Daily… Marker thumbnails
A few more vehicle thumbnails, this time done with markers. I want to take one of these and try rendering it out.
Dec/092
Daily… Thumbnail exercise
I was getting my software loaded up on my laptop after having sent it in for repairs. I did some thumbnail exercises to get warmed up.
Jun/091
Daily… Cityscape thumbnail
It was really hot again today, but tomorrow starts a cool week. I noticed quite a difference between this evening and last night.
I’ve been watching some documentaries from netflix, featuring the wonderful David Attenborough. I’ve watched a number from the ocean series and have been inspired to paint a fish. I had hoped to do that tonight, but I’m just feeling too tired. Perhaps tomorrow.
Instead, here’s a quick (5 min) thumbnail of a cityscape. If you take a closer look, you can see all the brush textures. The original file is 1600 pixels wide, but I zoom way out and just work on the overall composition. Initially I was just blocking in colors to use as a backdrop for a sketch, but then the blue shapes started to look like buildings, so I shifted in that direction. Put in a strong light source so I could have some nice hilites/rim lights on the buildings.
Jun/090
Daily… Environment thumbnails
I gave myself a drawing exercise today, to draw out ten environment thumbnails in my sketchbook. Scanned them and then added tone to No. 5. It was a fun exercise, I’m going to try and do it more often.
May/090
Daily… A valley study
In photoshop I used custom brushes, often based off a texture, to help quickly block out images. I haven’t quite found the same workflow in painter, but today I did some experimenting with paper textures. I painted a number of paper textures overlaying eachother and then used the image warp plugin to randomize things. I then picked out shapes and painted what I saw.
Apr/090
Daily… Ship thumbnails
I decided to do some ship thumbnails at the Tuesday evening Wacom workshop at school. Whilst unpacking, I came across my Scott Robertson artbook and felt much inspiration!
Apr/090
Daily… Thumbnails
I practiced drawing out some simple character thumbnails this time around. I need to go through my sketchbooks and look at what I’ve done in the past. It just wasn’t feeling as natural on the tablet as it had previously on paper.
Apr/090
Daily… Robot thumbnails
A few thumbnails using the chalk, square chalk brush. I like how it feels.
Jan/090
A different sort of thumbnail
I recently ordered an artbook from ConceptArt.org and it came with two tutorial downloads. One such, by Andrew Jones was focused on thumbnail design. It was really inspiring. I gave it a try this evening and while it is a more abstract creation method, I feel mine are more abstract than they ought to be. I do that a lot though, jump into a more advanced technique before spending the time on the fundamentals. I’m not caring much at this point, I’m having fun ^_^
