dirtscapes & RSS feed

Today's landscapeness.
Also, I updated my RSS feed. Added feed subscription buttons for Google, Yahoo and Bloglines. Hopefully it will be easier for people to subscribe now. Sorry about the prior strangeness.

more oil play

Small and quick w no real point.

woods

Just Painter this time. Made a few custom crazy "sponge" brushes for shape variation and texture hinting.

water and oil

Water-mixable oil paint today (at work). Cropped from the same 9x12 sheet. First time I've tried this stuff in over 1o years. Seems to me they've improved.

Branch pods

I wasn't expecting to paint tonight. Far from done, but I'm tired.
Here's the blocking if anyone is interesting.

acrylic play

y

Girl's head was the size of my thumb print and my brush was way too big. That was stupid.
Acrylics scare me. I never know what I'm gonna get when that stroke dries. How dark is that gonna get? Darker than what I put it down on top of? Who knows?

Does anybody know how to manage that?!

Hopefully I'll have an alkyd sketch page coming up soon too.

Photoshop. Tried a more intentional and limited palette.

one more

from tonight.

Speedies

Env paints today. Gotta start doing these in color. Scary.

Don't call it a soul patch!

Photoshop

drawerGeeks:Samurai

DrawerGeeks
I wanted to do this one in color but ran out of time w some tricky composition issues.

Book News: For those who have been asking, the book will be ready at the end of May! I'll post any updates as I get them.

life study

Vine and or charcoal pencil on newsprint. Had fun massing in a bunch of these with no contour. I really liked both of these models and that always seems to come out in the drawing in some intangible way. Random times under 5 minutes. I think the face was closer to 10.

And again

With the screaming.

squawk!

Anyone notice how all my creatures have been screaming lately? Don't go reading too much into it.

monster

Free time today. PS.

zan

This week's DrawerGeeks.
PainterX

Quick paint demo

Inspired by Tom Scholes, Ryan Wood and Todd Harris, I finally found a way to do a screen recording of a quick painter demo. I couldn't shake the idea that it was being recorded and started noodling and being indecisive. Next time I'll loosen up. It was 39 minutes crunched down to fit into just under 5.

Music by Richard Thompson.

Bip.tv (better quality)

Click To Play

Youtube (faster streaming)

head doodle

Doodle from a slow spot at work today. Acrylic, colored pencil, sharpie, whatever else was on hand - on watercolor paper. About 3" high.

sketch

painter + ps

DrawerGeeks: Galactus

My late submission. Drawergeeks is updating their site. You can now click on artist names to get a catalog of their DG work and click on individual images to see larger sizes if they're available.

Book coming soon

Just announced over at Brand Studio Press!
Update (may 8th) : the book should be available in early June 2008.

12WX + 6D

My tabletPC has passed on. Now it runs with other tabletPCs on a special farm.

I splurged to replace it with a little Cintiq and a 6D Art Pen. This was done with an oil flat in painter. So cool to just rotate your pen to get the angle you want. I've only spent about an hour in total with the setup so far. I'm looking forward to more experiments.

I was very disappointed that in PS, the cursor doesn't rotate w the pen like painter. So you don't know exactly what you're going to get until you put it down.

Fighting Monsters

Mostly painter. The doodles for these came out in Dailies. What does that mean?

speedie

Yesterday's speedpaint. Man this looks dark and unsaturated here at work.

C.O.W.

This round of Creature Of the Week is an elemental dragon. I thought that would be a good excuse to play more with texture and some environmental elements. He doesn't have quite the under-bite-mop-haired personality I was after but I like some of the grass. All PS this time.
Edit: Uploaded changes.

Website update

Finally updated my website! It's been *cough* 2 years.

This was more or less an experiment in texture and mark-making.
EDIT Jan 21:
I uploaded the original sketch, and followed through a little more on it. BTW, nobody is allowed to look for my old viking sketch that this pose is embarrassingly similar too!

Revelations?

Anyone going to the conceptart.org workshop up in Seattle next week? Be cool to meet some of you fer real.

fly

I know, the "landscape" is awful. I have to scribble in a new one later.

light

Trying to get a handle on different lighting situations. I rely too much on a couple simple situations that I pull out of my pocket to describe form. Quickie from last night trying to ambiently (globally) light this guy. Decided at the very end to add shafts of light cause it was looking really dull. Didn't pay enough attention to them, tho. Still, learned some things for next time.

more burnt vine

10 min.
Mostly vine & a bit of charcoal pencil on newsp.

monster

I swear I'll stop with the huge foreclaw motif ASAP.

Acrylic

On cheap watercolor paper. Maybe 3 inches tall. Keeping it simple at first. Never really used dry brushing before. That helped a lot where I needed softer edges. All in all it went faster than I thought it would. Anyway, I learned some things and will approach the next one a bit differently.

sith

Create-a-sith was this week's DrawerGeeks. Wish I had more than a couple hours to spend on it.

demonPiggie

Playing with photoshop to get a simple brush I might be happy with. This one was just flow and no opacity. And texture.
Edit: I'm sure this is no revelation to most PS users. I dislike that typical transparent, overlapping feel that PS gives me with transparent brushes. This brush has opacity up to 100 and not controlled by pressure. Flow controlled by pressure and tuned to fit what I'm after with the flow slider. I had it at maybe 20% or 30% on my tabletPC. When I brought it home on my intous I had to fiddle as they feel so different.