City Island, SRQ

Fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

City Island, Sarasota FL. 

Graphite & Officeworks "Invisible Tape" in moleskin sketchbook. 

Egg Temple / Env. Process

I was recently invited down to the Ringling College of Art and Design for an environment painting demo and to visit a few classes. It was a great experience, and I saw some very impressive work from the students there. I feel like I learned a lot too... a big lesson was that it's harder than it looks to answer questions from a live audience and paint competently at the same time. For the person who asked about my favorite food, it's actually kale... not eggs.

Anyway! My process always changes a little from piece to piece, but here's the basic breakdown that I went over:

B&W thumbnail sketches... I tend to do a lot of these. Trying to establish major value relationships; foreground/ mid/ background.

Quick 3D blockout of geometric shapes to speed perspective and establish lighting direction. Particularly useful for interiors or angular subjects. Rendered out of Maya / mental ray on "Preview Final Gather".

Grid texture to serve as a guide for impending texture placement. The 3D isn't critical for this particular image, but I feel it's important to show the step.

Building off the B&W base, I throw in photo textures, noise brushes, etc... adding visual density while describing surface textures. Working over whole image, I try to integrate the 3D, photos, & painted portions. I start painting details where needed.

In a top-most layer set, I add atmospheric effects layers (screen layer light flare, curve adjustment, color adjustment, etc). Through the whole process, I try to keep my background, mid ground, and foreground separated into layer sets too. I'll flatten the individual sets as I go through, but I try to maintain these 3 basic divisions. It gives me a bit of wiggle room in case the art director has me change something.

Add/adjust details (can take a while), keep pushing depth, add post effects (adjustment layers, a few gradients)... & done!

If anything needs further explanation, please comment below. Also, if anyone has suggestions on how to improve the workflow, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to Ringling for having me visit!