Since I’ve been showing pretty steady updates of the Shadow Cat and Colossus piece I thought it’d be fun to put it all in an animated gif. From thumbnail to final, you can watch the piece come together one step at a time.
On a related note: I installed the demo of Adobe Captivate so that I can film myself working on my next piece — I just have to decide what that’s going to be. To that end, I may post some candidates over the next week and let the good people of the internet weigh in.
Exciting!
After staring at it all day, I really only found a few small (but critical) moves to make to bring this piece to a satisfactory finish. Of course the more I look at it the more I’ll find that I want to change, but I have to let go sometime. The work is never really good enough and that’s okay. That’s what keeps driving many of us forward.
May the images your mind is capable of conceiving forever be better than what your hands are capable of constructing.
I think this piece may be done, but I’m going to sleep on it. Chances are I’ll find a few things here and there to fiddle with to make the piece stronger — I usually do. (Well, I usually fiddle at any rate.)
This is kind of the most important step in many ways. Sometimes you’ve gotta paint, and sometimes you’ve got to walk away to gain some distance and perspective. I’ll do whatever fine tuning I need to do tomorrow when I’m able to see things more clearly.
After a little more time things are looking pretty solid. If I had to guess, I’d say I’m about halfway done at this point. But sadly it’s the back half that — as I slow down to make better choices and fine tune the details — takes the longest amount of time. I have a vague idea of what I want to do with the background, but haven’t really begun to think about it with any amount of seriousness.
Backgrounds: ugh.
Here’s the first in progress shot as I was plugging away at this piece. Most of the hard work with these is figuring out the value strings — once that’s done it’s just a matter of rendering, which, really, is the easy part. At this stage I can also tell if my color sensibilities are WAY off, so it’s in my best interest to kind of knock things in.
As far as roughing-in goes, this one went pretty quickly. Next up: the fun stuff!
I’m going to try something new over the next couple of days; I feel as if I’ve been posting a lot of sketch work recently, and not a whole lot of finishes. So, I’m going to post some progress shots of a new piece I’m working on. It might also inspire me to get myself in gear and finish it up.
Have a good week, everyone.
The days are slipping away towards Rose City Comic Con a lot faster than I’m getting things done; there are just never enough hours in the day. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get all the work done that I wanted to, but I think as long as I get this one handled I’ll be alright.
So enjoy this sneak peek, and hopefully I’ll have something more resolved to show you soon. (Well, not too soon, you might have to come see me at the Rose City con if you want to see it.)
-Valentine
I forgot to post this last night — and of course by “forgot” I mean I was up too late and I got too tired to do anything except crawl into bed.
I have a tendency to think of things from dark to light and opaquely. I understand glazing and other optical mixing techniques, but I never really use them. So I’ve never really understood how to make watercolor look good. With all of the dark-to-light work I’ve got coming up, I thought (as I often do) it’s good to flex those creative muscles and try something completely different for awhile — I’ll be experimenting with a light-to-dark approach in my free time.
I’ll let you know what I come up with.
-Valentine
There are thirty-seven days left until the Rose City Comic Con, and last week I was concerned that I wasn’t going to have enough to show.
My original plan was to spend the last two weeks in July drawing and then spend all of August coloring what I had done. However, in those two weeks I managed to do twenty-four new drawings (pictured here) ; if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy there are about forty-three drawings from my sketchbook I’d like to do — and another seventeen or so that a friend suggested.
Needless to say, I won’t be able to color eighty-four drawings in thirty-seven days, but it will be interesting to see how many I can get done. So much for feeling like I didn’t have enough work to show.
-Valentine
It’s getting harder and harder to share things without spoiling the surprise for Rose City Comic Con, but I just finished this drawing and I’m too excited not to share it!
I’m in for quite the challenge finishing this piece and I couldn’t be more thrilled!
-Valentine
