Characters, Movie paints and Gunz

I was sitting in on the exceptional Michael Buffington's prop design class last week and he asked me to demo how I design guns in a crunch. It's a photo-compositing technique used to save time when I have to do a lot of guns quickly, and I cranked out the following during the class:

The one of the left is the marriage of a number of different real guns I found using GIS and compositing, and left was the "finished" product from the demo (painting over it, tweaking etc.). I liked how it was coming, so I took it home and did some more work on it. The line is a little more sloppy than my usual standards, but it came out pretty decently:

It's been a while since I did a gun, so this was fun to do. Maybe I'll do some more in the near future.

Here are some fast costume thumbs for the character from last time:

...And another character:

And here are a couple new movie stills from the daily 1 hour paintings:

Avatar

Marie Antionette

Odds and Ends

Here is an environment I did in the lab while sitting in on a class last week. I think it has potential, so I'll probably work on it some more this week:

Some more film still 1 hour paints:

Doubt - 1 hour

Inception - 1 hour

Some mornings those are easier to do than others. I try not to directly paint over, but rather flip between layers so that I'm focusing on what looks natural rather than say, paint by numbers. In the end it's an amalgamation, but it's extremely informative and I enjoy doing them.

Here are some ~10 minute thumbs for a new character:

Character follow up

Some people liked the character I did yesterday, so here is some follow up work on her. Her name is Renee Murong, and she is a character for my thesis. I did a back view, some poses and alternate hair styles.

My thesis is a game about time travel. Renee plays a corporate investigator trying to ferret out white collar crime at a tech company by posing as an administrative assistant. Her time period is roughly 150 years in the future.

Some people remarked that she looks Mass Effect-y. I'm a big fan of Mass Effect and I definitely let some of that bleed into this design, especially the pistol in the poses ;) Sometimes you have to let yourself draw something you love.

A note - I tend not to go as all out with the rendering of back views. I may come back later and do so, but I usually find that if the materials are the same as the front view there isn't a lot of purpose to doing it. Most important to me is costuming clarity.

If you want to see larger, you can right click in lightbox and open the image in a new tab.

Character, Cinematics, Doodles

Evening drawing! I got a bee in my bonnet this evening and decided to redo a character concept I had from a while ago, Renee Murong:

Even though I've only been doing cinematic speed paintings for a week or so I can feel that they are really helping me. It only took me about 4 hours to do this start to finish, and I'm pretty sure it's thanks to the cinematics.

Speaking of cinematics, here are some new ones:

Zodiac - one of my favorite movies

True Grit

A Beautiful Mind

I've also been mucking around with this environment for the past few days. I like the idea but I'm not sure it's coming out. I may need to trash it or redo it:

Still, it's fun to mess around with ideas, even when they don't come out the way you hope.

Creatures

I recently did some creatures, here are two of them:

More 1 hour stills and a doodle

I set up a blog where a couple friends and I will theoretically upload our movie still speedpaints and I've linked to it at the top. Hopefully we can stick with it, and multiple artists means multiple paintings. Everyone wins!

I'll probably still upload at least some if not all the paints to this blog, I haven't made up my mind yet. Here are a couple new ones:

Amelie - 1 hr

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - 1 hr

I also enjoyed the little drawing of the sorceress from the other day, so I drew her from another angle. Here is the new drawing, with the original drawing on the right:

Environment and 1 hr cinema paints

Here's an interior I've been picking at off and on over the past couple of days:

It's probably not done yet, technically it's a piece for my thesis. It's an apartment for an obsessive workaholic cop in New York City 2032. It's supposed to have that messy yet barely lived in sort of feel. I want some futuristic elements, but nothing groundbreaking since it's only 20 years ahead of where we are today. Do you think people will still use gmail in 20 years? It'll probably be upload to some sort of retina display by then... like... actual retinas.

A few of my friends have started doing 1 hour paintings from movie stills every day. After a week of jealous observation, I decided I would try to shoe-horn in one a day as well. The idea is to pick a stilled scene from a movie that looks cool and do a painting of it in an hour, pretty straightforward. I'm hoping it will increase my speed at painting people. Here are my first two:

#1 Skyfall

#2 Raiders

I think I'm going to try and get a blogger group going of friends of mine who are doing this, it could be fun. If I do I'll link to it at the top of this blog.

doodles and quick sketches

Here is a series of 5-7 minute sketches of turn of the 19th century Russian chairs and tables! I know that's what you come here for, my expert quick sketching of period Russian furniture:

While I was sitting in on some classes at the Academy of Art today I was in front of a cintiq, so I doodled characters:

And I was playing with some new ideas when I did this painting. It's not my favorite, but I think it's interesting to look at how different a color tweak makes the atmosphere:

Photo-painting hybrids

In the past month or so I've been experimenting with how to use photos in my paintings, making paintings that are a hybrid of photo and brush work, re-using one photo in different ways within the same piece using transformations, etc. The goal is always to take photo reference and use it to create something new and different, I feel like I'm failing if a finished piece looks overtly like the photos I used. Ideally the way I use photos is more or less as glorified base textures. The technique is great because it often halves the time it takes to paint something while at the same time giving pieces a more realistic feel.

There is such a thing as finding a photo that's simply too good to use. When you sort of... fall in love with a photo, it makes it really hard to experiment, alter and ultimately destroy it. That's what happened to me today with this photo from the Atlantic:

It's just fantastic. The lighting and composition were so good I had a really hard time bringing myself to alter it. I ended up getting this out of it:

I'll probably just come back to it after some time away. I ended up altering it in a lot of little ways, but fundamentally I don't feel like I did too much to it. It was just too good. So, lesson of the day: only use mediocre photos.

Speed Painting

Morning speed painting before going to see Django with a friend:

Not really Django themed, is it?

Fun story - a half hour into it I accidentally closed Photoshop and somehow didn't save. Whoops! I'm probably going to move off the sci-fi reasonably soon but I thought it would be fun to try some bikers.

Last day of life drawing

The last life drawing workshop I'll be able to go to for the foreseeable future was today. So, this may be the end of people on the blog for a while. The model today had great hair:

I really love doing life drawing workshops, character work is something I enjoy but not something I've gotten to do much of lately. Workshops like this are nice so I don't get too rusty.

I just got back from a trip, so hopefully some more environment paintings on the way this week, I'm always fighting for time for personal projects!