Saturday, July 25, 2009

Breaking the Habit





So Sangram told me one thing I should work on is focusing on the environment of paintings as much as the figures in them. He said one thing that would be a good exercise would be doing a few environmental paintings. For me this means stepping wayyy out of my comfort zone, but it's definitely worth pursuing if I want to rock as hard as I want to at comics. 


So I decided to take on these 3 different environment types as well as palettes.


I think the good thing that can be said about these is that they are much better then I thought they would be...It helped alot to just think about the composition and palette. I learned alot of neat texture tricks on these that you should look forward to seeing in my future work.

3 comments:

Amanda Christensen said...

You must give me your texture library! Okay I would say the tree piece is your strongest in terms of atmosphere and composition. The foremost tree really works well as a focal point and you've really got some nice tones going. Not in love with the repetitive obviously digital brush strokes in the grass in front of the tree. I think you could get the same rhythmic effect that I think you are going for with more variation in your brushes. It seems like your very comfortable with using texture, I would say maybe experiment with custom brushes and all the settings ps has. (then again I am a custom brush addict so whateves)

Piece #2 doesn't really read as an environment to me. More like a close up. Every thing seems to be rendered equally so there is no depth to this piece. I really like the ballsy use of color though.

Piece #3 confuses me a bit. I really love the tone of blue you picked for the shadows on the rocks. But some of the depth in this one is killed because of the small horizontal strokes you used to define the BG... it makes the foreground middle ground and bg difficult to separate visually.

Great to see you are pushing yourself- I actually think all of these are better than your figurative work

Cam Floyd said...

yo! nice work with these. environments are a great way to learn about light and perspective (atmospheric and linear). you seem to be grasping the importance of reflected light and how atmosphere affects shadows, highlights, etc. Since you are new to these, I would recommend using some reference and actually colorpicking some parts of the ref to clarify the color shifts. Also, try starting out with 100% opacity brushes and then working with pressure sensitive on top of that solid foundation. good luck!

B.Wallz said...

Thanks Guys. Feedback is always appreciated!