Music Poster

Another illustration assignment; I had to create a poster for a band that conveyed their style of music. I chose to do the rock band Torche who couple sludgy guitar riffs with soaring vocal harmonies.

Bonus Image: This is a study I did mimicking a demonstration by Shaddy Safadi who has a pretty entertaining and interesting tutorial on youtube.

Mad Max Screencap Study

I recreated this shot from the movie Mad Max in pen and ink and watercolor for an illustration assignment.

City of Thieves Book Cover

For my illustration class we could create a book cover for any book of our choosing. I did City of Thieves by David Benioff which is about two kids who get arrested during the Siege of Leningrad and are made a deal: they can win their freedom if they find a dozen eggs in the starving and frozen city. An awesome adventure ensues. I decided to depict the two boys in the snowy fields outside the city walking past a dead body.

Speed Paints

Did some quick digital paintings (I spent about an hour on each) over the weekend. This first one is from imagination and is a locomotive heading through a jungle.

These next to are color studies from photos from the book "Classic Russia Idylls" by Proctor Jones that I checked out from the library which features some beautiful landscape photographs.

Scratch Board

Neon signs and rainy streets are awesome.

Little Red Riding Hood

I had to come up with a monochrome illustration in a vertical format for the story Little Red Riding Hood. I really wanted to do a piece that had a different take on the story. After thumbnailing a few ideas, I sketched out this rainy alleyway in pen with Lil' Red being the only color in the piece. I painted the final image digitally.

Another thumbnail idea I came up with was making Little Red a Russian sniper in Stalingrad during WWII. I could see the story in my head with the wolf being a German counter-sniper or spy and grandmas house is a key strategic point. Little Red is red because she's communist. I think the idea fell a little too far from the tree to be used in class, but I painted my thumbnail up anyways for fun.

Watercolors

I enjoyed doing these pieces after learning a good way to approach watercolor painting in media class. I  wish to do a few more when I get a chance. Below are the pieces I did for class.

And below are just some I did in my sketchbook for practice and fun.

Pen and Ink

Just finished up working with pen and ink in media class. For a final piece I did an eel because I liked the patterning on it.

The rest of these pieces are just some quick studies and sketches.

Gibson Girl Copies

Franklin Booth-esque sketches

Industrial sketches

woof.

First Oil Painting

First time using oil paints ever I painted this still life. I definitely enjoy the flow of them that you can't get with acrylics.

Monochrome Cowboy

I decided to try using a monochromatic color scheme for a painting this week. I just started randomly sketching this cowboy out in photoshop and decided to paint him in shades of yellow-orange to give that sunset feel. It was interesting playing around with the temperature of the hue by pushing it towards yellow or red. I'm pleased with the way it came out although some spots made need a little more refinement.

A Robot and Custom Shape Sketches

Last week I made this piece to experiment with edges. The composition was odd to work with, but it helped me use hard and soft edges to create a focal point. I tried to play with leaving the background abstract, but I feel I may have left it a little too messy.

This week I found a new technique using custom shapes to paint and create quick compositions on the conceptart.org forums. I decided to try my hand at it, so I went out and took some photos of the random half built and rusted out machines lying around my dad's farm. I silhouetted and combined them to make some scifi shapes to use with the custom shape tool in photoshop. By using the custom shape tool you're given more control over the size, proportions and placement of the shapes than the brush tool, it's easy to throw together some quick compositions like the one I did below in about 10 minutes.

Also by utilizing multiple layers it's easy to paint into the shapes while still maintaining their edge with the transparency lock on. I did these value sketches to experiment with the different shapes. I spent about 20-45 minutes on each one.

A Paintover

This week I digitally painted over one of my pastel drawings that I did at community college over a year ago. I wasn't happy with the piece originally and I figured it would be a good exercise to fix it up. Also, it would be fun to easily see an improvement in my skills.

 Above is the repaint and below is the original pastel drawing.

I did this to play around with color more, too.

Vietnam Color Studies

I'm trying to get better with color, so I did these two sketches from black and white reference photos and tried to come up with colors on my own. It wasn't working out too well so I ended up using a color photo as a guide. I'm happy with the way they turned out, but I think I need to have some patience and practice painting figures.

Landscapes

I finally started messing around with some textured brushes and did these quick paintings. The first one is from imagination and the bottom two are from photos.

Final Projects

Here's all my final projects from this semester. I'll start off with my academic drawings from figure class. 

We spent about 2 weeks in class drawing this one pose. It's still not quite finished but I think it turned out alright and I felt like I learned a lot spending the time to be precise in my drawing and rendering.

Above is a self portrait rendered in the same technique as the figure. While I was creating it I remembered doing another self portrait exactly 2 years ago and when I compared them I could see how much I progressed. It was quite remarkable.

My invented animal for drawing class which spent a week at the zoo down the road from Ringling drawing animals from life. We were then asked to combine some of the animals we saw at the zoo into one creature. I created this one from an aracari toucan, iguana, and python. Also my first time using colored pencils to render.

 The final product of my 3D project. I posted the concepts earlier here which I chose to create this futuristic-monk who has managed to summon a portal to the knowledge of the universe in his closet. I had a fun time building the environment and soldering together all the lights. Below is a final slightly photoshopped photo illustration.

3D Project WIP

This is what my 3D project currently looks like based on the illustration from the 3D character designs post. Still a long way to go on it though. I need to rig up LEDs and EL wire for the portal to the universe which he is guiding us to and figure out the balcony and cityscape background design. Sorry for the awful cell phone pic.

Clay model

3D Character Designs