Spidey and the Green Goblin 01

This is OLD.  It even pre-dates the blog by a couple of years.  It's been on the website since I started it, and I've always liked it quite a bit, but never got to coloring it, or rendering it out.

Well, now I am.  I need to push myself on the rough render build up, as well as start working on some environment stuff too.  That's a bit of a cheat, since I plan to add a lot of lights (night scene) and blur the background...

...you can see the cars in the far background are little more than three shades of blobs, so it's really just placed there for mass.  Got just a little bit more clean up to do, then on to color...

The Wizard of Oz - Final

At long last.

It turns out I can't take very good photos of my large scale artwork, so I'm looking into having a pro get a decent portfolio shot for me.  This is the best I could do, but it really doesn't capture what this thing looks like in real life.  The top fades with the shine of light against the varnish, and it was taken in a low light, so it's got some grain artifacts obscuring the true colors.  At night, in the garage, with just the garage florescents.  I know it can be done better.

But looking at it hanging on the wall, I almost can't believe I'm the one who painted it.  I'll be making a lot of qualifications about the quality of the photo, and I know from experience photos just can't capture what the eye can see when you view paintings in real life, but I'm just pretty excited about this one!

Eagle eye readers will be able to see that I removed the red from the bottom left, I felt it was messing up the flow of the brick road, but that's just about the only significant change from the last update.  Everything else was just render and re-render.

The Representatives of the Lollipop Guild.  The patterns on these little buggers shirts were a pain in the ass.

Our Fair Friends...you can see the lights glinting off the varnish - it's not scrapes across the face of Scarecrow, it's just the crests of the strokes of the underpainting.  This is probably my favorite section, they're big enough and have a lot of character, probably the most successful elements of the painting for me, as far as the technical aspects of rendering, and capturing the likenesses.

And of course, the impetus for everything, those Ruby Slippers of my wife.  This was quite a learning experience to paint red, shiny, metallic objects.  They went through three stages of re-rendering, before I finally found the formula for success.  First they were too purple, and looked like snake scales, but that ended up working out, because then I remixed a brighter red, and airbrushed over them again - and that led to a much better color and detail integration, overall.  Then I discovered I really needed to hand paint the sequins to get the right highlight look, and then go back over with the same color with the airbrush for blending.  And then repeat that again with a white wash, for the hot highlights. Then the white pencil for the little flares, and again with the white airbrushed on for the highlight glows.

This back and forthing led to a lot more rework over the whole thing, in little spurts of pencil work, then hand paint, then airbrush, back to pencils, back to airbrush, until the whole thing came into shape, and every element matched and blended with each other.

There's so many other technical aspects that I can talk about, but it really was a culmination of a year's journey, getting the skills developed to tackle this project, learning the does and do nots of the process, that I could take into this large scale piece, and of course learning even more as it went along; I think that would be better served in a later post, looking back at the work that got me to the final painting of Oz.

And here's where it started, about two years ago - this thing has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, nice to finally be finished!

Eat Your Art Out IV

For sure better than Superman IV, and fingers crossed that it will be as good as Star Wars IV : A New Hope.

The theme this year of course, was the 'Dark and Mysterious Origins of Nursery Rhymes.'  And although I would have liked to do a scene of a king and queen getting their heads chopped off, or wandering Black Plague zombies, I decided to go counter-intuitive, and picked Mary Had a Little Lamb, the most innocent and banal, both lyrically and musically, rhyme I could think of, with absolutely no dark origins to speak of.  And then I threw some werewolves in there.  It's called 'This Lamb is Flocked,' and it's on sale this Saturday, at the gallery at Meltdown Comics, in Hollywood, CA.

It's kind kind of a big'un, 30" wide, by 20" high, done with acrylic/airbrush and colored pencils.  The photo doesn't quite do it justice, nor does the detail shot:

It's kind of somewhere in the middle, lighter than the top image, and darker than the lower image.  So all you pals of mine in the LA area, come on out, as I'm described as a 'Many More' artist, some really amazing artists are involved - it will be a great time had by all.

Info below:

ANGEL CITY DERBY GIRLS “EAT YOUR ART OUT” RETURNS TO MELTDOWN COMICS WITH A REMARKABLE ROSTER OF ARTISTS FOR THIS ONE-NIGHT ONLY SHOW FEBRUARY 26, 2011

No longer one of LA’s best-kept secrets with over 60 international artists participating this year, Eat Your Art Out has become a “meeting of the minds” in underground art culture.

Los Angeles, CA January 3, 2011– As frosty winter begins to thaw out, Meltdown Comics will once again open its gallery on Saturday February 26, 2011 to curator Carmen “Jane Dope” Acosta for her annual event EAT YOUR ART OUT to benefit Angel City Derby Girls. EAT YOUR ART OUT IV shows the growth of the event and it’s curator. This year over 60 international artists have donated works to be included in a show that always draws a packed house. “It’s rare to have this many artists showing and appearing in one venue,” says curator Jane Dope.

EAT YOUR ART OUT was born four years ago when artist, part-time underground curator and skater for the Angel City Derby Girls, Jane Dope, needed to raise funds to support a struggling Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby League. Jane Dope took her passion for skating to her friends and family in LA’s subversive art scene. By February 2008 the idea came to fruition and a cool happening was hatched to raise funds and awareness for community-based Roller Derby leagues. In 2009 the event grew exponentially with more artists jumping on board. By 2010 word spread and EAT YOUR ART OUT was solidified as a “must do” event for artists, even having to start turning away donations from artists because of the limited amount of space. Understanding she was a bridge between artist and art enthusiast, Jane Dope reached even further for 2011 to fortify her vision as a show for the most impressive works by relevant artists today, yet still affordable enough to get the art in the hands of the culture that fostered many of these artists from their early stages of their careers.

The basis of what makes EAT YOUR ART OUT so unique is the impressive All-Star line-up that donates one of a kind works of art (and most often also make an appearance). The artists who have donated art for February 2011 include, Jim Mahfood AKA FOOD ONE, Jason Shawn Alexander, Dave Crosland, Michael C. Hsuing, Jeffrey Shagawat aka Bill Shag, Mike Huddleston, Apricot Mantle, Brooke Kent, Dave MacDowell, Luke Wessman, Brian Ewing, Jessica Ward, Nolan Tredway and many more.

All pieces have a minimum bid price, but are usually much less than gallery prices.

ACDG’s goal is to raise enough money to have a permanent home to hold roller derby bouts and events for the community. All proceeds go to support the league, which is independently run by the skaters for the skaters.

The event is open to the public and will feature gourmet food trucks, free drinks and music! This year the brilliant DJ Day, DJ Expo and DJ Mahf will be doing a live set throughout the entire evening. Lucky winners walk away with very unique prizes. And everyone walks away from a memorable evening filled with great music, free beer, hot girls in rollers skates and above all, a chance to view incredible art.

Eat Your Art Out
at Meltdown Comics
February 26th, 2011 7pm
7522 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Yet Another Optimus Prime

 
Been thinking of doing a traditional painting of old man Prime, here's the pencil sketch for it.  I've done a lot of organic stuff for the traditional painting, it's time to switch it around and focus on tech and hard surface exploration in reality, the way I've been exploring the organic stuff digitally.

So there.

Yes, this is a week of posting what I have lying around...busy, busy!

Mostly I draw things I want to see.

Wrapping a painting for the EYAO IV show, and starting a new project this week has got me pretty busy - and I have some after hours doodling to do as well.  So not a lot of new art to post this week, but here's one of those doodles...take it as you will.

Black Manta pt. 2

Final!  So over the Xmas break I worked on a complicated, full color render piece that was required to be able to be rearranged, and elements could be dropped out or replaced.  Because of that, I think the image came out a little less than it could have been, but it also messed with my mojo a little bit.  I had finished this one yesterday, but it wasn't sitting right.

Before the end of the day I reopened it to take another look and decided that I was perserving too much in terms of layers, so I merged a few to make it easier to work with, and created new alternate highlight layers, using the Overlay setting, with different colors creating the light source and diffuse lighting. It brought out a lot more depth, and it also afforded me the opportunity to blur around the legs and outer edges, to subtly pull focus towards the center.

So I may go back and tweak the Flash image a little, it also suffers from the restrictions I had to work with on the last big full color render image I did - that simply don't need to be there for my own development work.  It's kind of a nice lesson/reminder to have, not to get buried in the tech of photoshop, and do what's best for the piece, not use every trick just because you can.  If that makes any sense?

Anyways...I though this one came out pretty good, he looks pretty badass.

Black Manta, pt. 1

Ever since I did that STAR design, using an homage to Black Manta's helmet, I've kind of had a hankerin' to do a full piece featuring him.  Rarely have I done DC Heroes, so it's possible other than that Ledger Joker, I haven't done a Villian in a very long time....like since high school?  Anyways, there's a nice action figure of him out there that I recently saw, and it re-inspired me to get going on the piece.  And since I was playing a little bit in the DCU, it's a good time to do it.

As per usual, I can't leave well enough alone, and I wanted to update the suit a little bit, retain his classic silhouette, but give him a little more protection that what appears to be a rubber body suit.

Now that I have the block-in finished and cleaned up, it's time for another detail and shading pass, before color and f/x.  For the background, I'm thinking some sort of dark swirling vortex/whirlpool that he's swimming up out of, coming to get'cha!

Hope to post the final on Friday...