"Blah" 10 step breakdown

10 step tutorial

1. Layin a rough compostion to begin with.

2. Establish a general light source and direction early on because everything in the scene will be based off of that. At this stage, you want to nail your values well. Don't worry about color for now. Solid value grouping will enhance your color later on.

3. I decided that the composition will be more effective vertical because I want to show the tower and the vertical structure more so the canvas was expanded using the crop tool.

4. Using a stock sky photo, proceed to place it in. I used Multiply since it seems to work best for this piece because of the mood.

5. Continue to block in the major details. I used a stock photo of a rock for the foreground and used curves to correct the lighting. Using color balance, I proceeded to match the rocks to the palette of the painting. When using photo textures, it's a good habit to try to make the photo consistent with the "paint" in the scene. Usually in my tighter paintings, I end up painting it and variating a lot that there's no photo left. However, don't let the textures do your work, you still need to apply the fundamentals of painting. :)

6. The tower was detailed a bit more as well as the rest of the scene. Keep in mind to have the canvas in its entire view when painting the general area. This will keep you from getting "tunnel vision" and neglecting the entire composition. Make a habit to flip your canvas often to check for compositional balance.

7. In this step, it's time to add a bit of "drama" by placing high key values in key areas to make the scene pop.

8. Using soft light I added some warm and cool colors for the light. On another blending layer,
color dodge was used to add "light" to the scene. The clouds were painted over a bit for variation. Creatures were indicated for scale. Color was then further adjusted.

9. Flip the canvas again to check for balance. Continue refining.

10.For the second to last step, I wanted to achieve a feel of an old classical painting so a texture was overlaid on the painting to give it some "tooth", but it is very subtle.

In the final painting, the support column of the bridge looked too simple so it was beefed up. See previous post. This painting can be tightened to your heart's content, but for the purpose of this image, it should suffice.



Enjoy!

Blah..

Another demo for a class on texture application which came out decent. I'm getting tired of doing science fiction and war stuff and I always wanted to do medieval stuff for a change so here it is. I'll probably tweak more on this when I get time. Happy Thanksgiving! I'll post a breakdown on how I did this later. Stay tuned.

Fokker Fun

This was a speed painting demonstration done this weekend for a friend who is attending Art Center. His concept involves Fokkers battling it out in a distant future setting. This piece came out better than I hoped for a demo so I'll post it up. Sorry for not posting anything for awhile. Things are even more busy now since I've taken on a job teaching on Saturdays. I hope to post more things periodically. Cheers.

Fighting with Heat and Plastic

Painted over at Montecito Park today and fought against the heat and paint. I didn't finish, but I'll put this one up anyways. No pain no gain. This was done in acrylic. I think I'll try watercolor on the next one. :)

By the Rose Bowl

Acylic on 4x6 wood panel

Since I'm on vacation this week, I decided to drag my lazy ass out into the heat to get back into painting the hard way...in the LA heat. I gave myself about 30-45 min per painting. Let's just say the other two are being prepped for another painitng venture.

After this session, I decided to go up to Art Center and I ran into Gary Meyer. He remembered my face, but forgot my name. He asked what I was doing there. I told him I was finishing my 4th term. :P

cat play

Here are some pics I took recently of our bundles of joy playing. Hazel is the one sitting on top of the sink and Pepper pretending to be a sneaky ninja. Apparently, she forgot to pack her tail at home.

Painting 101

Back to the basics.....with real paint! It's been several years since I painted traditionally. Shame on me! So today I decided to go to an art store to buy a few tubes of paint. Prices on art supplies really went up! More reason to paint digitally....haha :P

This was painted at night from my deck. It was quite a feat considering getting back into it after a long time, but nothing is more rewarding than true painting. And yes...my car magically transformed into an Toyota Echo at midnight, really! This was painted with acrylic on a 4x6 panel. I'll be doing more of these life studies frequently. Enjoy!

"Houston, we have a problem...."

I did this one at work for fun for an hour or so before I went home. It was a good break from work stuff. Enjoy!

Friend or Foe...I don't know

I wanted to sketch a ninja tonight to make myself feel good, but it somehow became a swat guy, and then it went to a samurai. I didn't know what i wanted, but to paint a character. Here's what I ended it up with.

Harry, Larry, Chad, and Norm

It's been a very long while since I drew character related stuff. There are a couple of reasons for this: one is that I'm not very good at it and secondly I should stick to environments for my own good. ;) That's not to say I won't post some up in the near future! Well, you have to start somewhere. Practice makes perfect.

Anyways, these quick sketches were inspired from playing Gears of War and angler fish. Also, I decided to use a pencil! No offense, but the pencil rules anyday. BTW, this is not the "rad" image I promised earlier. That's still brewing right now. Enjoy!

Fine Art

My buddy Stuart challenged me or should I say "dared" me to place a fine art piece on my blog. Specifically, a nice orange dot placed on a page. Well, knock yourself out bud! Enjoy! :) BTW, I ran out of orange markers.

I will post something soon. I'll come up with something really rad. Promise! Or you can call me Matilda. My apologies for not updating regularly. Work has grabbed me by the balls lately. :(

Pan's Labyrinth

Wow, this is an amazing film on all levels especially on the visual side. Definitely worth checking out if you're a visual artist.

Getting it out of my system

I've been having a bad slump this week at work so I wanted to get it out of my system. Not really happy with this one, then again I didn't spend much time on this(thanks a lot xbox 360!) :P I'm going to put it up anyway. Only round brushes were used for this excercise.

doodles

Since it's been really busy at work, I didn't have time to draw a nice picture so I did a sketch of my family with my right hand for fun. Brings me back to when I was 3 ft tall.

ship doodles

Got bored watching a movie and ships floated into my brain.

Resistance: Fall of Man - Concept Art

Here are paintings that have been done for Resistance: Fall of Man. It was fun working on these paintings along with an amazing environment concept team. Kudos to Kinman Chan, Rolf Mohr, Darren Quach, Roland Tamayo, and John Wu for inspiration.

Back from the dead.....

Yes, I am back after three months of "sabbatical". It has been so busy at work that I had no energy to keep up the blog. However, this week sparked something in me to start it up again. Thanks Stu for kicking my arse back into this.

Since Resistance has been out for awhile, I've always wanted to show one of the myriad matte plates I worked on for the in-game cinematics before post effects were added in.

Mr. Ed bought the farm

A sketch piece I did awhile back which never saw the day of light.

It was a great vacation, but my Wii can't be found!

Hello friends,

I apologize for not updating the blog for a couple of weeks. We had just returned from vacation and no computer was to be found on our trip. During the vacation, I had started a Wii-quest which ended in absolute failure. The Nintendo Wii is nearly impossible to find! Although, a few of PS3's were seen at several locations. This has been driving me nuts, but life goes on. I don't want it...it's just a console...mmmm..hmm (denial sets in).

Blogging will continue next week once I get my head back into work mode. 2007 will be a busy year! I have been posting some past work on CGtalk and other sites as well and have been very well received so far. This year will be a full push ahead for my goals as a professional artist both inside and outside of work. I will post future works here as well. Stayed tuned. Thanks for your support.