Figure paintings...

Handful of digital figure paintings from FEWS, RCAD Faculty session, & Demo Night... 

Model with invented tattoo shapes

More figure experimentation from RCAD.

Watercolor & graphite in Leuchtturm 1917 Dotted Notebook.

Model with Apollonian Gasket - FEWS

More figure experimentation from FEWS @ RCAD.

Graphite in Leuchtturm 1917 Dotted Notebook / digital.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_gasket

Super Secret Figure Painting Group

Tao'tieh

The Tao'tieh from J L Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, 

painted as part of a demo at the Ringling College of Art & Design.

(The below approach was heavily influenced by the inimitable Sam Neilson.
Pay him a visit, if you haven't already.)

1. Graphite drawing, scanned & cleaned in Photoshop

2. Illustrator "live trace"(converting to vector for scaling purposes). 

3. Local color pass

4. Ambient lighting pass

5. Direct lighting pass

6. Steps 2-5 combined; the final (topmost) image has cleanup and layer effects added. 

Digital figure paintings...

More digital Figure Paintings...  

Super Secret Figure Painting Group

Digital figure painting from the Super Secret Faculty Figure Painting Group at RCAD. 

~3hrs. 

FEWS

Digital painting from FEWS @ RCAD; battery ran out before the end of the session. 

I hope to have a more substantive update soon; I need to get on this thang. 

Kiwi; back to school.

Demo from last semester; I plan on doing these more regularly for the coming year. 

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!