Practice painting in progress

So the above is the finished one (updated 27 june from the image below)  I had fun with the light rays, and then wanted to make the image all around darker.  always something more to do, but Im going to move on methinks.

I am taking a self taught class from Andrew Hou from Schoolism.com

I haven't tried his methods, so this was a fun process.  I usually draw on paper then scan, then color, etc.  This way was completely from the tablet.

Lots of things that need to be fixed and worked over, obviously, but this is a start.  Just realizing some of my textures are backwards...oops.

It'll be fun to do the gold reflecting on the scales.  Im going to try to actually finish this one.  

One eye, Two eyes, Three eyes

Well, here is the finished piece!  Im really please with it.  It was a really darn fun process to work out.  working on wood, at least the way i did it, was challenging, especially not prepping it.

it is acrylic on an oak plywood and graphite.  I think I will play around with this technique some more.

click here for a link to the story

1, 2, 3 eyes character sketches

This is a character "sketch"  for the aforementioned "dark fairy tales"  project.  I chose a story called "one eye, two eyes, three eyes".  Im not completely happy with the characters still, but this was more a practice of acrylic / watercolor / pencil /pen on a piece of board.  It's pretty crappy wood, but it served its purpose!

I think they turned out nicely.  hopefully better board will look even better!

House on a hill

I'm starting to play around more with watercolor.  This time I mixed in a bit of acrylic with some of the colors.   Two of my illustration professors, Bill Carmen and Ben Wilson, both water their acrylics down quite a bit, so I thought I might try it out.

I can't leave my zebra ball point pen alone, so I sketched on top of the painting again after putting the paint down.  I rather like much of the things that happened in the painting process.  

This is a practice for our next project dealing with "dark fairytales".  I bought the Marvel Comics version of "wonderful world of Oz"  graphic novel, and really enjoyed the style.  Some of it is similar to my own, but much more confident.  This painting is greatly inspired by that book.  

nope, not doing wizard of oz for my dark fairy tale tho!  Im going to find a much more obscure title!

Baby photo touchup

Fixed

Original (scanned)

Mother in law wanted me to see if I could fix this photo of her when she was a wee baby.  

It was fun!  I think it turned out well considering the crazy underexposed portion in the lower half.  There are probably ways to make this perfect, but I don't know them, hehe.  I learned a lot in the process of playing around tho.  

once I had the values correct I adjusted the exposure, and then used the dodge and multiply tools to touch it up.  The wall was fixed using the stamp tool, and the dust and scratches were taken out using the healing brush.  then sharpened the image in the final step.

AvA gig poster

2nd Illustration project with Ben Wilson!

Ok, so I wasn't actually commissioned or asked to do a gig poster for the awesomeness that is 

Angels and Airwaves.  This was a project for my illustration class.  It was a lot of fun, and turned out a lot different than I had imagined it would from the thumbnails in my sketchbook.  That is both good and bad.  

As usual there are things I would add or take away once I saw how it looked printed.  But I'm pretty darn happy with it considering!

Rat o Rama

This is the first illustration project this semester with Ben Wilson.  It is an illustration spot that we had to do for an article in the Boise Weekly.  (not actually going in the magazine).  The article was about the bad connotations that rats have (plague, rattail hair, rat pack, etc), and it was for a rat convention that had contests and such.  Some of the contests were fanciest rat, longest tail, etc.