New Blog

Heyo Lovely Folks! I have a new blog and won't be posting to this one anymore. 

http://alexanderorionsparks.tumblr.com/

There is some fun stuff so come check it out. =)

As always, have a lovely evening!!

Some Studies

Heyo fine folk! I have a working computer and I hope to update more often (Lofty goals...)

Anywhoooo its late here and I have work in the morning so I'll just show a couple sketches I have done over the past few days.

These top three are sketches based on photos.

The last two are not =)

Have a lovely evening y'all!!

Sculpting!!

Heyo fine folk! So I've been doing a lot of art that I cannot show, but I just started teaching myself ZBrush. Since it is just for me, I figured I can post it =) I just started learning on Saturday, so to say these are rough is understating it a bit. Luckily I have several friends who are helping me a great deal.

So the first one is based on a prompt from a speed sculpting site. The prompt was Zombie Marvel. 

This is the turn around.

It took 45 min. to sculpt. 

This was my process.

The next one was about an hour sculpt of a dragon. I didn't use any reference and it shows. That being said, I learned a great deal about what I don't know about animal anatomy.

Below is my process.

So those are my third and fourth sculpts. My first two will likely never see the light of day. I will post more soon. Now, off to bed!!

I hope Y'all have a lovely evening!

Sketching in Texas

Heyo Fine Folk of the Interwebs! I hope you all are doing well! I'm being kept rather busy here in Texas, but here are a couple of things I have done during my down time.

These first three are thirty minute paintings of a skull named Yorric. Though quiet, he is a rather enjoyable fellow.

Much of my work in Texas has been very stylized, so every once in awhile I take a break to do something a little more painterly. Well Fine and Fancy Folks, I guess that's it for tonight. I am going to go eat some dinner. I hope y'all have a lovely evening. 

Blending In Photoshop

Heyo fine folk of the interwebs! It's been rather a long time... I am working in Dallas Texas as a concept artist for Green Grass Studios. It has been delightful and challenging and has taken up much of my time. I have, however, promised a demo for making blending brushes in Photoshop. So here it is. I hope this helps.

For quite awhile I have seen people blending using opacity. The technique involves setting a brush to fifty percent opacity and painting over the other color, selecting the new color, and repeating until there is a clean blend.

This process takes awhile and ultimately can still leave the painting with bands in it. A few years back, I learned that blending could also be done with the smudge tool. Again, by lowering the opacity on a soft brush, a blend could be achieved.

To make this work without a ragged edge takes time and patience. When I'm under a deadline I find I don't have either to spare. So I've been working on a brush that could expedite the process. As it turns out, the smuge tool works very well with the correct brush settings. I have gone over making brushes in a different post (here), so I will show you just the setting you need for a blending brush. You really can use any brush you want. For this I used the standard soft brush that comes with photoshop. You will want to modify the scattering settings. Scattering makes the brush do the work for you. 

 

One stroke with this brush had the following effect.

 

Using different brushes will allow for different blending effects.

 I hope this helps, and makes the process of finding the correct edge quality easier.

The following is a gif of my process with most paintings. In it you can see that I use blending a lot.

I hope you all have a wonderful evening, Fine Folk!