Hugh (Digital Painting)

A little painting of a character from a short animation of the same title that I created some time back. A short bald guy named Hugh.

Hugh

Initial sketch.

Reference Study #13

So I've recently been going through a bit of a "French phase" - listening to French music, watching French movies and movies set in France. I watched Amelie for the first time and just had to draw the lead actress Audrey Tautou. So I did. 

Et voilà!

Audrey

The reference image of Audrey Tautou.

Initial sketch.

Speed Painting #02

Another speed painting. This time partly based on a friend's dream and a strange thought of my own. So my friend was telling me about how she had dreamt about a cat that could fly by spinning its tail and also looked a little like a hamster, or guinea-pig (which she later told me wasn't necessarily the case - but I thought it was still a fun detail, so kept it anyway). During the course of our conversation or perhaps rather on another occasion, the discussion of fish came up and well, long story short, I had the thought of a fish with a more defined neck. Anyway, I decided that I would combine the two creature concepts together in this image.

Painting Time: Approx. 4 hrs

Fishing

Initial Sketch.

Speed Painting #01

Felt like messing around in Photoshop yesterday afternoon, so I decided to do a little speed painting. This was based on a dream that I had a couple nights back where a small group of people (myself included) were being stalked through castle ruins by a dragon; however at some stage I befriended a T-Rex, so, it wasn't all bad. I think in my dream I expected the T-Rex to come to our rescue at some stage, but I woke up before it could. Such a pity...

Painting time: Approx. 3 hrs

The Showdown

Class Exercise - Goblin

I was covering a class for a friend the other day where the students were learning stuff about drawing. For the tutorial side of their lesson, I had prepared a drawing of a goblin that they needed to prep for painting inside Photoshop (removing coloured construction lines and paper artifacts). Once the students had done that I took them through some methods and techniques for approaching painting in Photoshop using a WACOM tablet. I had spent a little time before the class painting the face to be able to show a quick progression of painting the character. Afterwards I decided to finish off the character. I had a lot of fun painting this character, and not relying on any reference material. I definitely want to do more of these!

Goblin

Line-work.

Wedding Gift Portrait

It's been a busy past couple of months which has meant it's been hard to find time to work on any personal projects, however there was an exception that I needed to make and that was to work on my brother's wedding gift. I decided early on that I wanted my gift to be something more than a toaster, something that would have heart, so I ended up going with the idea to paint a portrait of my brother and his bride-to-be. One weekend in the afternoon we visited Kings Park (Perth, WA) and I photographed the pair in various "romantic" poses. I wanted a pose that would be romantic, but also sweet [though nothing provocative]. Tasteful. I ended up with a selection of many great reference images, but ended up choosing the one below because it ticked all the boxes and showed a lovely intimacy as well as nice lighting.

 

It was a fun painting to work on and also the first one that had more than one subject in the shot. There was an added excitement to be painting people that I know personally, and will therefore mean that I'll probably paint more people that I know in future. I decided to focus the attention of detail on the faces and the exposed hand; this is why I decided not to get caught up with such details as the pattern on Keren's top. I also chose to get a little creative with the background and integrate the subjects with the background by blending edges with rough brush strokes.

 

This was one of the largest paintings that I've worked on with a canvas size of 85cm x 90cm @ 300dpi (the actual canvas that this image was printed on was slightly larger). Overall a great experience with the added bonus of knowing someone has a copy of it on a physical canvas and are happy.

 

Looking forward to my next one!

 

Beau & Keren

The reference image of Beau & Keren.

The sketch that I started with.

Photo of the canvas print (still wrapped in plastic).

 

A rough progression of my work.

 

Self Portrait #01

Just a little mess around in the afternoon. Listening to jazz. In the space of an hour. Decided to keep it a bit loose, and keep it "incomplete" looking.

 

Self Portrait