A Wizard of Earthsea

Yikes, its been awhile since I've posted anything! So I guess I'll jump right in. I have been working on a new project. I am doing the visual development for A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is based on a truly amazing book, and I think I have read it seven times now. ("read" is a bit of a misnomer, I have it on mp3) So here is some of the sketch work I have been doing.

Since I had time to kill while I was listening to the book, I got an interesting opportunity. I have noticed that I get an idea for a project, and have trouble pulling myself away from it. This time I decided to design the characters and environments as I saw them (Not designed for appeal, just honestly how I see them.)

 I figured once I had put down the ideas that I was connected to, I would have a little more freedom afterwards. (This experiment is still in progress, I'll let you know how it turns out.)

Often times, random strangers become the unwitting victims of my design process. This person walked by a coffee shop I was in--he didn't even stop to get a drink. I had just enough time to put down a blind drawing of him before he walked on.

 This fellow was sitting right next to me. Something about his mood reminded me of a character in the book. I was mortally afraid he would notice my occasional glances in his direction and realize he had become my model.

This was simply a blind drawing from my imagination. I find that I can get my drawings to have a bit more character if I momentarily remove my eyes from the process.

One of the characters I have had particular fund designing is the character of a beautiful female enchantress.

She has gone through a number of iterations, but these were the ones I based my paintings on.

 

This is my first gouache painting in over a year, and my second gouache painting ever. I figured since I spend so much time with the undo key at my disposal, I should try a medium that is known for being temperamental and permanent.

Here she is in photoshop form.

The main character is a goat herder who becomes a wizard. I have yet to figure out his exact design, but I decided to do a quick sketch of him as a goat herder to get a feeling for him.

Here he is again. This time I wanted to pay particular attention to his facial tattoos.

Every once in a while I get a bit obsessive about reference. Usually it comes in the form of researching some little thing for hours and hours, but this time it came in getting the correct facial expression. 

I now have 170 photos of myself treating a bottle of ibuprofen as if it were a small cuddly pet.

In stark contrast, every once in a while I find the need to test my creative thinking process on the fly. I don't allow myself any reference or thumbnails, and I just see how my brain deals with it. This image above was where the painting started. The only parameter that I gave myself was that it had to exist in the world of the book I'm reading. 

This was the product an hour later.

This one appeared using much the same process, but this time I was trying for a specific location and point in the book. 

Well, my stomach is telling me that photoshop and the internet are not good forms of nutrition.

(This is how my stomach feels)

I hope you all have a lovely day!

Now for breakfast =)

A Week in the Life

Hello fine folk of the interwebs. I have been meaning to put up process drawings for some time now, and to answer a number of other questions I just decided to upload everything I painted in the past seven days. Here goes....

To introduce myself to the project, I did a quick painting to feel the mood of the movie. This is very artsy sounding, but then again, you are reading the blog of an artist =)

The current visual development project is to design a scene from the Fifth Element that wasn't in the movie.

My process usually starts with thumbnails (very small and quick versions of the final painting) to get the feel for the shot.

With this assignment I decided to design a fertility shrine on the pleasure planet Floston Paradise.

What peaked my interest was just how amazing a planet would have to be to motivate someone to travel, outside of the solar system for a short vacation. This place would need to make Hawaii look like a dump.

I realized that if water and rocks could float, the environment would seem completely magical. I decided that some of the sand was made of a superconducting silt. Of course, problems arose with that idea.

If the water is so low density that it can float, swimming in it would be similar to swimming in a cloud..... it wouldn't work well.

Furthermore, the water would be highly conductive.... as would everything else. This, by the way, is my first attempt at animating straight away in color. It's a total blast. I did a couple other short animations this week, but they weren't quite as interesting so I left them out.

Of course local plant life, like these giant flying lily-pads, would gain oddly gravity defying traits.

I find that sometimes, my personal work ends up influencing my decisions. For example, this speed painting made me realize that a fertility shrine would likely have some sort of guardian statue.

These thumbnails were a result of that caustically colored painting.

After thumbnails and idea sketches, the line drawing is the next step. I put in some value for a little added clarity.

Of course then it struck me that this still has to feel like it belongs in the fifth element. So now I have to go back to thumbnails. Ah well.... such is the process.

This is just a fun little painting I did to show the location as it would be seen on a tourist pamphlet. The rest of my paintings are personal.

This was a three hour painting from a model. As with most of my personal work, it is both a study and a time for relaxation. The rest are all speed paintings between ten minutes to an hour each.

Some seem to work pretty well.

Others don't work quite as well.

And just like a sketchbook, odd themes start to come up. For example, red eyes...

...and the relationship between this small creature and its captors.

Every once in a while, you need something to make you think outside of your normal process. I was in Cafe Frascati today with my dear friend Steven Celiceo and we decided to give ourselves a challenge. We decided that we would do one hour speed paintings based on words that someone else gave us. We asked for two random words and a random color.

The words were "Fart" and "Knockers" and the color was "Green."

Yikes! That was a very long post, and it is now nearly 4 o'clock in the morning. I hope you all are having a totally splendid day! Now for bed =)

Getting into the Element

So, I haven't posted in forever. I don't have a lot of time to wax philosophic. I am working on a Fifth Element themed Visual Development project. I didn't have a feeling for the environment, so i decided to make an animatic for myself yesterday. This is what I came up with. It's a bit rough, but it was absolutely a blast to make. The first frame is a screencap from the film, the rest is all painted in photoshop.

Have a lovely evening, fine folk of the interwebs =)

The Forest King

She tried to toss the chicken leg into the bushes, but it was too late.
He had already seen her.

Have a wonderful Friday folks =)

Rendering

As my artistic education has become more specific, I find myself having to explain terms more and more often to people who are not in my field of study. One of the odd ones that has come up a great deal recently is the concept of rendering. For an illustrator, rendering refers to painting something in such a way that it is indecipherable from a photograph.

(From a Photograph)

At least that's the goal.

(From Life)

People in other areas of study seem to get a variety of different mental images that rarely relate to painting. The one that I find most odd is that a number of people have asked whether I was rendering fat.

(From Life)

I would like to think they see me, Tyler Durden style, down in the basement of a condemned house planning the demise of "the system."

(Based on a Photograph)

Rendering from a photo or from life is all well and good, but rendering from imagination is quite a bit more challenging. One of the assignments this semester is to paint two views of a kitchen from a wonderful short story by Gary Soto.

Both of these are imagined environments.


On a completely separate note, I have been learning how to make brushes in Photoshop. It's rather fun. The painting below was done to test a new brush I made.

Well fine folk, that's all I've got time for right now. I hope y'all have a splendid evening!

The Tree is Dying

(Click on the image and the text becomes legible)

I have been following the riots in London. I wanted to have this on my blog while the riots were still in the public eye, so I didn't have nearly as much prep time as I would have liked. I'm really intrigued as to whether it reads.

We are living in exciting times.

Ukulele

I just dusted off my ukulele! Its delightful how such a small piece of carved wood can bring so much untempered joy. This particular piece of wood holds a special significance because it was given to me by three of my dearest friends! Playing music has such healing properties.

So.... art!

(Masterwork Study of John Bond Francisco)

I've done a couple masterworks from Photoshop artists, but this one was my first from a traditional painter. I learned from the Photoshop painters that I can simplify a LOT more than I do. There were tricks that I picked up from them. I was hoping to find similar tricks about color from working on this John Bond Francisco piece. He didn't use any. He just observed the correct shape value and color.


I've been skating by thus far with my Photoshop paintings. I've been depending on the fact that if I put down a swatch of color that is incorrect, I can just go over it and change it. With the way I have been painting, were I using acrylics, the paint would be caked on. I have thus far lacked precision. Realizing that I have to do more work to be better is obvious, but always a little maddening. I sometimes wish I could just go out to the store and buy the pack of "painter" pills, take them, and be totally brilliant.


I truly love this guy's facial expression. I think this is sort of what I see when I think of what a brilliant painter would look like.


I've also been playing with edges. This is one where I roughed it in and then painted it almost entirely with the blending tool. Like the others, it was done in 30 minutes from a photograph. I realized, while painting this one, that I couldn't just use the blend tool for a painting. There is an interesting quality to it, but it's just to soft and mushy.


Here I tried to use mostly the blend tool and just add accents with the paint brush. Here again, it is an interesting effect, but it lacks precision.


This one is a pretty even combination of the two and I started to like the direction this one was taking. Also I've been noticing how drastically different these paintings look on other computers. I've been told it's a matter of screen calibration. My monitor shows me more range at the bottom of the spectrum than usual. So with this one I just eliminated the bottom of the spectrum.


With this one I wanted to start playing with getting skin to feel like skin. Those little bumps and ridges that skin has are so distinctive. The right side of her face (the side on the right of the painting) is beginning to get there, but it feels a little furry to me.


With this one, I put down an initial layer, used the blending tool and then put the brush at full opacity. I wanted to see how much of the edges i could put in with squiggly lines. It's an interesting look, but I am not fully satisfied with it. It just looks messy.


So I used the blending tool. This second image is almost entirely done with the blending tool with the previous painting as the base. I am happiest with the left side of her face and the oddly implied necklace. For some reason, the necklace fading in and out of being defined really makes me happy.


There are a bunch of things I don't like with this one, but there is something pleasingly urgent about that facial expression.

Well fine folk, without further adieu, I am going to go eat some Chinese food and play my ukulele =)
Have a fun night folks!