October 4th, 2009

It depends on the size of their eyes.

Playing around with ArtRage some more. I liked how it allowed for the smooth blending of colors on the characters and the creation of varied dry-brush-like textures over the background surfaces

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September 3rd, 2009
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August 17th, 2009

Above are some finished roughs with development thumbnails I completed in the excellent background design class at The Animation Academy. Lacking much formal instruction, I found the emphasis on perspective and composition extremely helpful. We even took a few field trips to The Getty Museum to observe these techniques at work in classical paintings, and spent an afternoon sketching foliage at the Los Angeles County Arboretum.

The Arboretum would also be a great place to visit for students in a peacock drawing class. The place is lousy with peafowl, and they are not bashful.

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August 15th, 2009

Some more Photoshop color studies of trees in perspective. Not dissimilar from the last batch, but sourced from the other side of the country. These are based on a watercolor sketch that I did on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

I chose a vantage point that obscured all recognizable monuments, though the version in the upper right hints at the Washington Monument and the WWII Memorial. The colors in this one are also sampled from a photograph, making them more real, but less overtly harmonic than the other versions. The colors in the other three images I choose myself based on memory, and it’s curious how the outcomes are so similar, and so different from what the camera recorded.

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June 15th, 2009

I scanned a thumbnail sketch of a street scene from a while back and played around with painting it in Photoshop, with the goal of building familiarity with mixing colors and tweaking brushes in the program.

For the first version (upper left), I selected colors using the eyedropper on the original photograph. For the next two, I looked at other pictures and paintings and mixed colors using the HSB sliders in the color palette, trying to copy some of those images’ color biases in light and shadow.

In the last version (lower right), I just mixed colors based on what I remembered from the previous scenes and tried to use colors across the image that felt related.

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June 5th, 2009

I’m trying to get used to building drawings using an incremental process, sketching and refining with loose thumbnails. Then enlarging a thumbnail to use as the basis for a larger rough.

This park scene started out as a sketch from Pan Pacific park before it diverged from reality in thumbnails to become a more idealized urban park landscape. In the two value studies I did, I kept getting sucked back into rendering detail, but after a few more thumbnails, I whittled the composition down to something simple that I cleaned up and colored in Illustrator.

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