The Ultimate Pumpkin Slayer - W.I.P.

Ahahahaha, so fun to make! I really want to finish this... not sure if I'll have time to finish it before Halloween ends, but I definitely want to paint this! Just a very random idea that started out with me doodling a silhouette and wanting to draw some epic guy for Halloween... he ended up being epic in a way I wasn't originally expecting. Hopefully you'll see this finished soon!

Daily Painting #163

Grrr, not too happy with this, but here it is! Haha, it was fun even though it didn't come out quite like I'd have liked it to.

Daily Painting #162

A quick painting done from photographic reference.

Daily Painting #161

For this one I tried starting out laying out the composition in line first, then I wanted to sort of focus on varying colors as they go back into space to (hopefully) make a more appealing atmospheric perspective. I like how this one came out.

Done before catching some z's without any reference.

Random Girl Doodle

Just a really quick doodle I did this morning. I wanted to (and still want to) paint a person, so I just this before I had to get ready. Obviously not done, but it was fun. I think it's a lot easier for me to paint faces when I can start with some sort of line-ish under-drawing. Haha, and this is a really random pose, not a lot of gesture, but I sort of did what I wanted to do.

Daily Painting #160

A really quick painting before bed... I wanna paint more though! This is from a picture I took at SJSU.

Daily Painting #159

Did this at school today on my laptop before class. Ha, I like the idea and the direction it's going (the color needs a lot of tweaking... along with everything else, but it's going!) I was thinking it'd be some sort of radioactive man or something flying off the earth.

Daily Painting #158

This was done really fast today before I had to head out for class. Haha, so his proportions are pretty off (He's supposed to be a kid... it's probably his shirt that's off too... and a lot of other things. Oh well, I got the idea out!) Painted with no reference while listening to a new album by Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto" and more specifically the song "Hurts Like Heaven" (I quite like that one).

Daily Painting #157

A quick color study of Rembrandt's painting "The Philosopher in Meditation" before bed. I didn't quite capture the color as well as I'd like to, but oh well, I'll do better next time! That's what these are for!

Daily Painting #156

Another daily I painted before I head off to sleep (...I gotta start getting these done on the other side of the clock). Supposed to be an underwater scene with strange tower type things and a girl that fell in. I had fun working with these colors, I should definitely study how light acts underwater though. It's tough stuff!

Daily Painting #155

Just a quick painting before I head to bed! I haven't painted a face for a while. Just a random creepy monster-y guy.

Daily Painting #154

I painted this on  my laptop. It's supposed to be a bunch of missiles or escape pods or something. The lighting doesn't make too much sense, but we can pretend it does!

Done with no reference.

Daily Painting #153

This one took quite a while to just figure out what I wanted to paint, but eventually came up with a story for it. My thoughts at first were just that there was some sort of person that was sitting there overlooking some sort of landscape. The landscape also started off with a bunch of pillar looking things, but I wanted something a little more interesting than that. 

So I made the person a robot dude, and the pillars a bunch of statues. Now (not that you can really tell this by looking at the piece right away) I tried making the statues look like various "heroic" robots. I'm thinking that this piece, if finalized, would be titled "Conquerors of Man" as though robot kind had overcome mans rule of earth.

I'm still thinking about if I should keep the statues as robot heroes, as though it were a long and ancient past that robots had to overtake mankind. Or perhaps I could change them to sort of famous/recognizable statues... OR, I just thought if this now, maybe I could add a human sitting next to the robot representing that the robots and humans have become equals long after an ancient struggle for robot rights! (Haha, I'm just thinking of ideas for stories)

Daily Painting #152

Painted this using my laptop. I like the idea! I might take it further at some point. Haha, I kind of want them to be mechanical fishies flying toward some big city off in the distance (may not really seem like that now, but that's where I was going with it). Fun piece to make! The atmospheric perspective is a little wonky... but shhhh, don't tell anyone.

Daily Painting #151

A quick painting from ref that I did before I head off to sleep. This is done from a photo that I do not own the copyright to, so I do not claim the design to be my own.

Daily #150

I need to practice detailing out machinery more! Haha, this started out as a giant red walking robot, but it looked way too much like something I've done before, so I changed it to some sort of floating station. Then towards the end I thought it might look cool if it were shooting some sort of giant lazer/firey beam thing as if it were digging or carving out the earth for... some reason. Haha, pretty fun to make... I should take a look at what snow covered mountains look like.

Done without any reference.

Daily Painting #149

Quick painting from photographic reference (I do not own the photo, and do not take credit for the design...haha, I'm gonna say something like that every time I post up something from ref cause I really don't want to step on any other artists toes)

Traveling Fire Sketch

This is just a little experiment I did in one of my sketchbooks trying out some of my new "Decocolor Acrylic Paint" markers. Very fun to use! I also used a "Presto!" whiteout pen (which is quite nice for opaque whites) and black India ink. Haha, a really random flame-ish dude. I thought it looked kind of cool though!

Oh, and this type of style/materials was inspired by seeing Colin Fix at SJSU (he's an incredible concept artist that worked on stuff like Bioshock 2. He's a very nice guy too.)

Daily Painting #148

Really quick painting before I head to sleep. Haha, really random, but kind of looks cool.

Daily Painting #147

This was a quick painting I did at SJSU with my laptop. About 25 minutes I believe. Fun to make! Really fast though, so I'm sure there's a ton that can be fixed and improved.

Figure Drawing "Portfolios"

 WARNING! There may or may not be (and probably are) some naked-ish people drawn below... maybe.

I have some really incredible classes this semester. It always fun when you can tell you're improving! Here's some work from my figure drawing class with Sheldon Borenstein (who is an INCREDIBLE artist. His figure drawings look like they're from the renaissance. Recently he was hired by Disney to teach their animators how to draw better. That's how good he is. I am impressed if you can't tell.) Just being in his class you can almost feel the artistic energy radiating from him. I feel like I've really improved a lot at my figure drawing in just the, what, little under two months of the semester? It's exciting! Looking forward to improving more! MOAR I SAY!!! But yeah, these are some drawings I'm am going to submit tomorrow (and some I've submitted earlier) for our "portfolio" where Sheldon reviews our work.

Portfolio 2: Structure

 

Portfolio 1: Gesture

Daily Painting #146

This one is from photographic reference. It had some pretty cool atmospheric perspective! (I do not own the copyright to the photograph though, so I'd be more than happy to give credit to whoever owns the pic if they care that it's on my little blog!)

Daily Painting #145

Haha, for this piece I was trying to paint some sort of temple that's in an underground cavern that has bright light pouring in through cracks in the ceiling. Not sure if it looks like that really, but I kinda like it for what it is! I gotta research some caves so I can make it better next time! (I should study Mayan architecture too, seems like cool stuff)

Daily Painting #144

This one took about 30 minutes. Very fun to paint! Experimenting with some painting techniques and brushes. I had to run off to get to SJSU right after this, so I didn't quite get to finish what I wanted, but got the general idea. I wanted there to be a very bright city/castle area off in the distance that was almost glowing because it was so bright. If I were to take this further I would definitely want to get some castle reference!

Daily Painting #143

A strange green ship crash landed on a distant world (haha, I suppose).

My daily painting for today. At first I liked the colors, then I actually tried using em... and I started to have a hard time. However, I pressed onward! (After some tweaking of the colors) I ended up with this. The design started with some sort of green structure, then turned into a green ship-ish sort of thing, then I tried making it look like it sort of haphazardly landed. I dunno, looks kinda interesting.

Daily Painting Compilation (From Imagination) - 03

These are all various daily paintings I did in photoshop over the past third of a year. I'm planning on probably posting these as individual posts in the future, but I wanted to catch up to the present all in one go.

Doing these sort of paintings every day has helped me improve a lot I think. My eye for color and composition has improved vastly from what I can tell! Still have a long way to go though, so I should be doing these for quite some time (or at least I hope so!)

Also, as a note, these are all very rough pieces. All of them are done in under an hour and some of them are really more of an experiment for myself than anything else (but I'm posting 'em because... well that's what blogs are for aren't they!). So yeah, they could all use a lot of refinement. I also did not use any reference for any of these (they could definitely all benefit from some good reference)

Anyway I hope you like them, and please let me know what you think!

So, this was my first painting from out of my head. I believe this is the fourth "daily painting" I made. As you can probably tell, I was quite confused as to how to go about it. I didn't really know what colors to use, how to utilize them, and even just my painting skills were not where I wanted them to be. I remember intending this piece to be a reference point, and boy, I think it sure shows how much I improved!

Well, that first piece I attempted to do from my head was kind of scary for me, so I committed quite a bit of time to try to understand color and environments a little bit better. This is day #68. I could see a pretty big difference, so I was excited!

This is the first piece where I implemented a technique that I saw to find a color pallet. I basically found an image that I liked, made a random collage out of it, and then color picked from that to get the initial colors. I completely invented the imagery, but it helped speed up the process and gave me nice colors to work with (you can probably find the image that I used in "Daily Painting Compilation - 01"

This is supposed to be some sort of industrial town that was build upon a lush island protruding from the center of a (mostly) inactive volcano. It's supposed to use the gasses from the volcano to help power the city (and the grass is supposed to be slightly different from normal grass due to some of the toxicity in the vapors).

Fun piece to paint! (well, even more so than usual) Supposed to be some giant evil-ish tower thing.

This piece definitely needs a lot more work on it before it'll be anything.

This was mostly just an experiment with color and to try painting a jungle from my head... I found out it is difficult (haha, and that guys face really bothers me, he needs to be fixed). I should practice that some more now!

KABOOM!!!

First attempt painting from my imagination on my laptop with my older and smaller graphire4 wacom tablet. The colors were really wonky when I looked on my desktop (mostly just over saturated). So I just pulled it back a bit in photoshop.

Fun piece! I experimented with painting using only the size of my brush set to pressure sensitivity for most of the painting and having opacity manually controlled. I really like how the painting style can look (I'm still experimenting with it).

Second piece from my imagination that I painted on my laptop.

I liked the colors for this!

This piece really needs a lot of reworking. Supposed to be some sort of ship in an abandoned building that this guy is using as a workshop of sorts.

Mostly just an experiment with color.

Had a great time with this piece! I had the idea of these giant ancient statue guys (that were at one point maybe a people) that are trying to get to something bright way over yonder, then having some normal sized people discovering this place and interacting with the giant statutes.

Title to be: "There's a Cloud Hanging Over Me" I was feeling down the day I was painting this, but it really helped. I found the song "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles that day and listened to it pretty much the whole time I made this. It really helped to sort of paint out my feelings. I really like where the piece is going too!

Third painting with laptop. Ha, and that ship originally looked just like a star destroyer... ha, I tried to change it a bit, but I'm not sure if it helped too much.

Kind of a color experiment, and I think I like how it came out.

This was a fun piece to paint! Sack-rih-fice, sack-rih-fice! (haha, he's sacrificing gold or fruit or gerbils or something)  It started out pretty boring too. Just laying down some values, and they turned into three grey mountains. I just looked at it for a sec then realized, "Those are going to be volcanoes."

Just painted this today actually (err... or yesterday now I guess) Haha, some kind of random elements, but experimenting mostly with some painting techniques.

Haha, I will be quite impressed if anyone actually takes the time to read all of that text!

I hope some of the pieces were worthwhile though. I'd really love to know which ones you guys like!

I intend to start smaller and more frequent postings soon now, so hopefully I'll be putting up some stuff you enjoy looking at.