MSU Comic Anthology

So here's something fun. Back in the olden days of yore (circa 2010), I took a comics course at Michigan State. That class taught me a lot of things, mostly that I do not have the patience for drawing comics. Well, one of those old student comics is being republished in an anthology put together by MSU Libraries. The comic is called "Treasure Island" (creative, I know) and it's very much inspired by the Monkey Island games and especially Bill Tiller's beautiful background art. Here's the first two pages:

Wow, that looks like a setup for some pirate-y hijinks, I can't wait to see what happens next! You can purchase a copy of the anthology at the MSU Comics Forum this weekend (or online eventually, so I'm told) for ~10 dollars, and mend that gaping hole in your life that can only be filled by amateur comics.

(Oh and here's tonight's painting. Mr. Pirate is suffering from some nasty flipper hand there. Ah well, 'tis his lot in life.)

And some lines

Hey, are those pokemons?

Circles 3

Let's wrap some circles 'round some bodies.

Circles 2

One can never do too many...right?

Circles

Because being able to freehand ellipses in perspective is important (and also pleasantly meditative).

Living Room

60 minutes, from life.

Composed

These were so much fun to do. Three-value composition thumbnails, drawing on the practice of Robh Ruppel.

Zenozoik

And now, some vaguely Zeno Clash-inspired scenery. 

Zeno Clash is one of my favorite games of all time, I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel.

Speedpaints 2-20-13

30 minutes each. Easing into using specialized brushes a little bit. I don't want to go overboard, though.

Contours 'n More

Some Perspective

30 minutes each, from photos. Working on freehand perspective drawing...needs more grids.

Lazy Sunday Doodlin'

Time to break in a new sketchbook! Little bits of my family, the dog, stuff in the living room, maybe a random horse or two.

More Fun with Relative Colors

I gave it some thought, and I think my rule set is off. From now on, I'm just going to include pure black and white in my palates and ignore the color sliders altogether.

pic 1: link
pic 2: link

Fun with Relative Colors

Here's a neat exercise.

1. Get a random pic.
2. Grab a color scheme from your favorite color scheme generator.
3. Try to recreate the image using only those colors. In Photoshop, you can pick directly from your swatch or from the canvas. You cannot use the color picker. You can use the HSB sliders, but only the S and B sliders, and you can only move the S slider from more saturated to less.

Tips:
Don't use colors in equal proportions. One color should always dominate.
Getting value right is still a top priority. Check in greyscale early and often.
Use more grey and fewer bright colors than you think you need.
To easy? Try again with the same pic and a different color scheme.

Hampton studies

More stuff after Michael Hampton. Just trying like crazy to commit all this to memory. 

Sartorialist sketches

I'm almost to the end of my sketchbook, which means now I get to go back and finish all the half-filled pages in it. So... here's some cruddy drawings of clothes and people wearing them (from The Sartorialist).

Gestures 2-12-13

45 seconds, from Posemaniacs. Focusing on landmarks, a la Michael Hampton. Afterwards I tried to flesh a few of them out using contours and boxes.

Speedpaints 2-11-13

30 minutes each.

pic 1: link

pic 2: link

Speedpaints 2-10-13

30 minutes each.

The View From Saturday

60 min, from life.

Basement paintings

Paintings in the house, 60 minutes each (30 drawing, 30 painting). After I finished these I brought them into the nifty (and free!) program Carapace to check how accurate the perspective is. Rollover to see Carapace-generated grids.

Ugh, okay this one is clearly not right- check out that green horizon line. Pretty sure I was not tilting my head while painting this one.

Better! But I think the legs of the chair are way off on that last one. Also ellipses, especially free-floating ones like the side of the chair, are crazy hard.

Texture Drop

Few more impressionistic textures, including several based on earlier textures.

Just Some Random Outdoors Scenes

40 minutes each, using the chalk brush.

Palace Bedroom

Hi, my name's Marie, I'm an environment artist and I...........can't paint environments for shit. Phew, admitting that feels good. Not that it's impossible to BE a good 3d artist and not know how to paint, but I've always felt this gaping hole in my ability for not being able to concept scenes for myself- which is a big part of what this blog is supposed to fix. Well, it's time to finally bite that bullet, so here's a scene 100% from imagination:

Hmm, the composition here is pretty bad. The candle to the left was only meant to break up the symmetry  but it's too bright, takes focus away from the bed. There could also stand to be more contrast between small and large shapes, and better range of values all around. Time to work on rendering forms, I suppose.

Took I forget how long to do. (45-60 minutes)

Abandoned HQ

30 min. More creepiness.

Original pic: link

Spirit Lake

30 min. I really am enjoying these moody-lighting scenes.

Original pic: link

Sunset Boulevard

30 minutes, full opacity on.

Original pic: link

Allods texture studies

Studies done based on textures from Allods. I started out doing just opaque painting.

But that got frustrating pretty quickly so I moved to full opacity.