DAY 9: JELLYFISH

DAY 8: RIBBIT?

This guy took me quite some time to finish. I wanted to make sure that my clean up was improving. It may have taken me around 2 days to post this, although, I'm thinking of maybe posting every other day so I don't rush it.
 

DAY 7: WHITE FANG

DAY 6: CREATURE

 

Yesterday was one of those days. No matter what I did, I just couldn't get anything done. I had gone through 4 different concepts that got me bogged down and exasperated. After a night's sleep with a refreshed perspective, I had finally nailed down my second attempt to paint without copying. I did however use a reference of a tadpole for inspiration. This took me 2.5 hours to finish.

DAY 5: SPIKE

This is my first attempt to digitally paint a concept, design and lighting on my own. The challenges I encountered were changing everything midway since I felt everything needed to be pushed more. Because of that, I had to rework areas, erasing and painting over lights and shadows over and over again. It got a bit frustrating since I lost count how many hours I spent on this. I feel I may have bitten more than I could chew with this one. However, I'm quite satisfied with the result. On to my next one!

DAY 4: NO SWIMMING

I was thinking of subjects that would be good to practice painting on, and my thoughts went to one of my favorite artists of all time, Norman Rockwell. Knowing that I had to make one painting a day, and that painting something of his style would take way way longer than painting a finger, I decided to give it a try. It would be a good way to study how Norman Rockwell painted this boy and what he considered when rendering the piece. I particularly liked how he described the structure of the face through light and shadow. It's true that once you start painting (and not just merely observing) you get to see first hand what the artist did in order to explain certain forms in terms of how much paint he needed to use to bring out the bulge on the forehead, the subtle hint of the scapula at the back, the knee bone, how hard edges must be to show the glistening of wet hair etc. The wrinkles on the clothes were challenging, since your eyes just get lost in all the swirls and zig zags of the texture. At that point, I just told myself, if it looks like cloth, that's good enough for me. This took a total of 5 hours to paint and another 2.5 hours to clean up. Although it took a while, I'm pretty pleased at how it turned out, I was able to put the method to another test drive, making this complex piece, possible to paint in less time than I would prior to this class.

DAY 3: STATUE

My third practice painting of a Diadoumenos sculpture. Credits to Calvin Carter of Flickr. I took around 3 hours to finish this. It was rather difficult to get the right values around the face working. It doesn't look exactly like the original but hey, it's an exercise on tonal values and not so much on accuracy right? (just my way of making myself feel better)

DAY 2: WHAT'S YOUR POINT?

Apart from practicing digital painting, I'm trying to get into the habit of sketching as well. Last night, I decided to study hands and fingers since these are definitely my pitfall. I sketched up a few drawings on a sketchbook and pencil and immediately knew what I was going to paint next. So, instead of using pictures from the net this time, I used my own finger.  I didn't think this was going to take too long, I mean, it's just one finger as oppose to a hand. Well, this took me about 2.5 hours to do. It took that long since I just took my time and really wanted to incorporate what I could've done differently with the Lil Girl painting. I noticed that my previous painting looked rather dark from afar and "cleaning up" the edges was what I lacked. I tried to get both of those things I noticed into this painting this time and I hope to continue finishing one painting per day.

DAY 1: LIL GIRL

This is my first painting after lesson 1 of Bobby Chiu's digital painting class on Schoolism.com. I found a picture on the net (my apologies for not acknowledging the owner since I wasn't able to take note of it. I didn't think I'd be posting this online to begin with)  and used that as my reference for this exercise. I found that with this method, I was surprised to be able to paint  much much quicker than my previous paintings, it was less frustrating and more fun. I do however need to learn more about light and shading since figuring out where the light and shadow was coming from in this picture was already a given.

AN EGG, A STRAWBERRY AND A KIWI

I stumbled upon a fascinating artist who goes by the name of Jos Van Riswick in Youtube. He does one painting a day (using real paint on canvas) and as one who is eager to learn how to paint digitally, I used his video as reference to see how far I can push pixels with it.

NOT THE EYEBROW

HEY! IT'S SUMMER!

WOOLY RHINO

IT'S A CAT...MOUSE..THING

NIGHTIES

MOUSE