Midday

Woah! It feels like it's been awhile since I've posted anything, so I thought I'd show some of my progress using colour. So I've entitled this piece Midday and I decided that I wanted to start on playing with colour with a simple illustration, nothing too complex. A big shout out to my mate Robson Vieira for his feedback when I was working on this; thanks man!

 

I decided that I should start messing around with using colour and getting more confident with it after viewing the work of Pascal Campion. I just love this guys use of colour and his compositions. They're what I call "feel good" images - rather emotive.

 

Anyhow, here's what I've done with some notes..

 

 The final image. Midday.

 So this image shows the original sketch which has been partially painted over already (I forgot to keep a save of the sketch on its own, but it still gives you an idea of what I originally started off with).

 

This image really shows what everything looked like after I had layed down the main brush strokes. It was quite bold and saturated at this stage, which was what I was originally going for, however after some feedback and doing some additional research, I realized that it was a bit flat and needed further work done to it.

 

If you compare this image to the final, you'll notice I toned down some of that intense satuation of the character, softened some areas and added blooming and some additional lighting effects as well as some more texture to the sky to make it more interesting to look at.

Blast From The Past! #01

Over a week or so ago I took a trip back to my ol' home town in the south (Mount Barker, WA) to visit my parents and unwind a bit. I used this opportunity to visit a sort of mural thing near town that incorporated some paintings from various individuals in the community (students mainly) onto a painted steam train (these individual paintings represented windows on the carriages).

 

I was responsible for one of those paintings. I think it must have been back in 2006 as a project for my year 12 art class. It needed to represent something to do with the town in some respect, if I recall. I decided that since the painting was going to end up on a train mural later on, I'd try and include a train theme in the design as well. What I ended up with was of a girl riding inside a train carriage that was passing through the country side with the Mount Barker tower in the background with a sunset glowing over the horizon. I remember it was an interesting and fairly fun experience doing this. For one, I had to paint onto a sheet of metal which I had never done before, but really it was a fairly straight forward process.

 

The funny thing is, this was the first time that I actually had decided to go up and closely inspect the mural in person, some six years after it was put up on display. So if you ever find yourself driving through Mount Barker one of these days and you keep your eyes peeled for a train mural just off the Albany Hwy, you might be able to notice my little contibution towards the end of the first train carriage.

 

The painting which I contributed to the mural. 

Here's a shot of the first carriage (1 of 3 carriages) with the steam train in the distance.

A better shot showing off some of the other paintings. What I also came to notice was just how well the other students did with their contributions. Good job!