photo studies

A while back I decided not to post any photo studies i do, I do a fair amount of them every now and again. I think it was because some guy kept thinking I was cheating some how by doing it, which was hypocritical as he would trace or copy from photos, getting them very wrong aswell. My point being studying from photos can be good, although in some cases its often bad practice (if your tracing or something like that). It realy seems to be what you're using the photo for, if youre using it directly to draw over, thats kind of crappy however you can use them to study things like values and tones, aswell as shapes and other things.

These are 30-40 minute studies looking at shapes and tone.

How did I go about them? Well I gave my self a few restrictions to stop bad practice.

First, I select my image, making sure theres something interesting about the picture, I quite liked the harsh black and white. I than put the image into photoshop, select a boarder around the image and on a new layer, paint in the slection area, move the now painted box to the side and use that as my canvas. Thats the only help I give myself so that the scale is correct.

Im not alowed to use rulers or eracers. The pippet tool (eye dropper) is not alowed to be used on the photo, only your canvas, so no grabbing swatches or piching tones. And I can only use one layer. Only the brush tool is aloud to be used.

This way, I have to measure and get the tones by eye.

So its basicaly just training the eye.

Drawing in the labs today, decided to draw pokemon, as Ive currently been obsessed with Pokemon White, so I asked a few people to do a a speed paint of some pokemon. This was 50 minutes.

New York Duffy Square Race track

This is a concept for a codemasters brief thats currently underway at my Uni, the idea was to create a race track of a glamourus location, whats more glamourus that Broadway? Well, this isnt exactly the best part of broadway, but whatever, its the coolest looking.

Tesco's Flowers

I bought some flowers from Tesco today, these were only £4. Again, painting a few things I hate to paint, Glass and water, for some reason, theyre the things I hate to paint the most, but always seem to end up painting. Wanted to spend a good 5-6 hours on this, only managed 3, although it doesnt look like it. Although In those 3 hours some of the leaves have started to die. Bit of a shame.
I used to have a history teacher who said that painting flowers is easy and is a crapy painting, or whatever, I can quite easily say, the man never painted flowers. They're hard to paint, and under good lighting, look pretty cool. I think Ill paint these again.

Coins Revisit

As I rarely ever comment on my own blog, I think I've been coming across as some kind of, strange machine, submitting work to a dead blog. So to counter this, I think I should say just a little bit about the pices I submit, or the thigns going on in daily life.

This was a revisit of one of my older pictures, basicaly I collect all my old coins, like a particular stereotype and take them down to Morrisons to exchange them for fine ales. Only problem with this is I have to get the change first. Last time, I saved up to £8.70p or something. Im not close to that yet, and Im -£1 from scavanging all the 10p coins.

Oh well, just been working on character modeling in my spare time! I have a bunch of projects in my desk draws and so many distractions. Work work.

Happy 400th Post Y'all!

tristan is dumb

Week's worth of sketches in Belper

Hillside Asset Illustrations

Hillside Ruin, Work in progress