When I was a little kid, it was always so hard to understand how people finished artwork. I knew being a lover of Pokemon, comics, and cartoons that I loved drawing. I just never knew how to get to the final product. Most of the time I just copied things from my Pokemon video game guides. I'd look at the Sonic the Hedgehog cover art and copy Sonic line for line. Then I had access to a computer and started drawing in MS Paint. I still never knew how to finish a piece. So, I thought I'd show you that I've finally learned. While this is a way for me to assess my abilities and work flow, it is also me putting myself out to the people who don't know how to finish a piece of art. Maybe this will help you be able to find a way for you to finish your own piece. I figured I'd start with a piece I mentioned in my last post.
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| The sketch phase |
This is a playbill piece for the Broadway Theater in Pitman, NJ. The play is titled "Monster Mash". To the right is my initial sketch (after many little sketches and a few failed thumbnail sketches) for the final piece. I guess I'll just jump right in. After looking at it a bit, my teacher and I agreed that Frankenstein's monster was a bit too short. He needed to tower over the others to be a bit more believable. I was trying to go for a more family-esque looking team of monsters. This was for a children's theater show after all. I tried to make them all buddies, and even tried to make the wolf-man into more of a wolf-boy. So, after the sketch, I took it into Photoshop and cut out Frankenstein's monster and moved just is upper half up. I figured I could just paint in the rest.
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| The underpainting phase |
To the left is the second step, and then some in most areas. Here I am showing how I block in colors, and textures so that I can get a good sense of what the darks and lights will eventually be. What I mean is once I establish the middle green, then I know to make that green darker or lighter in the instance of painting Frankenstein's monster's face. It helps to keep the whole piece and its parts cohesive. This is also the step where I finalize a lot of key fixes from the sketch. I noticed that I actually didn't like the point on top of Dracula's head so I smoothed it over in the painting. There were also minor fixes done here like the bolts on Frankenstein's Monster's neck.
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| Final choices stage |
This is the stage where I make all lighting decisions and color decisions final. I make sure that all the colors are filled in, the linework and shapes are solid, and that everything is painted to the same level of completeness. I drop in a background color too. I knew from the start that I wanted them to be in front of a night sky with lightning striking behind them. I needed to find a dark blue color that I liked enough that wasn't too dark or too light and that worked with the rest of the colors. I felt this was a pretty solid blue with a hint of purple (a very indigo color) since my reference photos of night skies had hints of many cool (temperature) colors. With all character choices finalized I move on with the background.
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| The final image |
To the left here I've added some clouds, lightning, and the moon. Textures are all finished and established. I referenced about 20 different pictures of lightning before I got the look and feel that I wanted. In Photoshop, I just added a glow effect to the lightning to help bring it out in the sky. Same thing for the stars and the moon. It helps to reinforce the lighting of the characters in the front. They are lit up a bit too much, but the lightning has a pretty good ability of throwing light and reflective light around.
While this image was not selected for print by the theater, this was one of my more favorite pieces of the three that I did. I feel I am starting to evolve my style into a more digital workflow. I am pushing painting concepts that I otherwise had a hard time doing with real paint. While this piece doesn't deviate too far from my normal work, it helped me to open up to a new way of digitally working. Don't believe me? Just look back through this blog and you'll see what I mean. Thanks for reading if you've made it this far. If you have any comments or questions, leave them in the comments section. Also, if you have an idea of what my next blog post should be, leave that in the comments too. I'd love to hear some people's ideas!
How'd I miss an update?! Two weeks flew by so fast. That won't happen again. Let's see what I have to update today:
Well, I can't remember if I posted this yet, but this was a cd cover project I completed a few months ago. This was for my friend Adam Taylor, for me. In other words, I made this for my class without Adam's knowledge. He didn't use it as I know it has nothing to do with anything he is doing, but I needed to do something with the theme "Change." My interpretation was that the world needs to change. The back (which apparently I don't have saved correctly) features a skyline of New York City, and it is showing that things like this are polluting a world that we are supposed to love so much. This picture is mine, and was taken while crossing over to Long Island from Connecticut. Every picture here is my own. Hope you guys like it. I shows off a bit of my photo editing and texturing capabilities.
I created this page for a friend of mine online. I was a big fan of this comic and when I found out that the regular artist was leaving for a while I decided I would offer to try my hand at creating some. Dave liked my work and we began collaborating on the Interlude of his book called All Saints. It is a pretty sweet comic, but after the Interlude the original artist came back. Luckily because of school for me, but I really did enjoy my 9 pages I put in to it. Check it out here!
This is just a little hand study I did for a class as part of a drawing suite. It is basically a series of drawings that have something to do with one another. This first drawing is done with Conte Crayons which is basically charcoal and graphite mixed with wax. These are all my left hands except for one hand in one of the pieces is actually my right hand. These were all completed on watercolor paper that was approximately 18"x24".
This second set of hands are all pencils and inks. I had originally wanted to do watercolors on top, but 1. I ran out of time and 2. I am not the best "watercolorer" in the world, but I do love my inks and pencils. It is much more precise and not a lot of washing with colors. There are subtle ink washes in here with a few different layers and the overall feel was that it was a large page from a sketchbook. This is the one of the three that houses my right hand drawn with my right hand. How in the...?
By far the most fun-looking of the three, but this one was the hardest to work on for me. It seems that drawing everyday things like hands with odd colors is quite the task. I'm not used to seeing them in greens and oranges, so when I tried to draw them with those colors is never quite felt right. This was a fun one to do however, just a little tougher because of the colors. These are all just colored pencils...no regular pencil here. The blue pencil in the ink drawing was actually a blue drafting mech pencil whereas this blue here is all colored pencil.
