Final Portfolio

Life and Death of a star

Approved!

The trick is that the live star is the one on the right but the dead one is much nicer to look at. It's not a supernova though, it's supposed to be a planetary nebula, which is what happens when anything but a super-giant dies. The nebula has nothing to do with planets.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - Book Cover Illustration

Approved!

I had more fun painting this than most but I wish I could have added the same kind of detail to the tentacles that I did to the Nautilus. My main problem when making this was fighting against what I remember from my scuba diving classes about what colors are visible at certain depths, that would have been really limited and dull looking. More so than it is now.

World Record: Smartest Animals

Approved!

The most fun I've had even though it didn't take me too long. I was going to use my horribly done gauche 3-image project and only did this one as makeup, but I liked it enough to add it. The background was unecessary but it was too bland without it. In the last blog post I have alternate versions that could actually be used for a magazine nicely. I feel like the image by itself would be great if used in a magazine but by itself with no text it's awkward looking. My original concept was to have these two inside the outline of a chimp's head, but it didn't look so nice in the sketches and I'd have to throw in a dolphin somewhere too if I'm being fair like that.

Nine Ball

Approved!

Having the numbers on the other balls seemed to distract from the theme, even though they're set up appropriately for a game of 9-ball. I like what the 'alien' characters do to the feel of the piece. I need to work on the highlights and overall colors to this picture. It's too foggy and bad looking because of my rushed attempt as adding some atmosphere. It might just be me though, someone else might thing it looks more mysterious or something for it. They'd be wrong but they still might think that.

Progress details

Alternate versions of final projects

I've messed with the color and filters of this piece a few times but this was the only experiment that I like almost as much as the original. I should have done something similar to this earlier but without the blue filter, or at least a lighter version of it. Then I could paint over that and created some nicer detail on the tentacles and the ship. My main headache was making it pop out, this makes it pop but at the cost of some of the other aspects I liked about this picture.

Two alternate versions of my world record image. One is a simple .png image that would work as part of the overall design of a magazine page but is odd looking by itself. The second is just experimenting to see how that water layer works on a dark transparent background like this blog.

Production Stuff

I don't work with digital painting nearly as much as I think I should. I enjoy it more than creating vectors, lineart, typography, or and traditional art medium for the most part. There are a range of options and potential for some amazing detail but I always feel a little inept in making anything given how often I'm confronted by digital work online every day that I could never do myself.

Now at least I'm actually getting into it and taking example from others' work instead of letting it get to me. One thing I was surprised to find was how often very many of the best digital painters rely on 3d rendered models of a kind. It would be hard to qualify something as a digital painting if it relied too heavily on that type of thing, but there's one place it's almost a necessity. 

traditional drawing and painting has the advantage of being more easily able to pull out a ruler and draw straight lines at any angle. While some painting programs and tablets allow you to rotate the image, Photoshop itself lacks this option. So I've had trouble creating perspective in digital paintings a lot of the time. That's just the place where 3d models come in that I've taken too long to try out. There are programs made specifically for this so I wouldn't have to fuss with something as frustrating to learn on your own like 3d Studio Max, but using that or simpler programs like SketchUp I can create basic shapes and lines, position a camera, and place it into a Photoshop later for reference.

The amount of help you get from this depends on the amount of effort you give it still. The program doesn't automatically allow for spheres and is more for blocky architectural references. I had to try out a lot of custom models out of the many people have made and provide online, until I found one that worked well enough for what I wanted. And then I had to jump through hoops to make it work. Even though I'm very far from satisfied with my 9-ball painting I liked the perspective and I want to try this out for some more paintings in the future.