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 =)