A Post Before the Break Ends

It's almost time to head back for my final semester as a undergrad. Actually, this has been the first break where I've been able to consistently produce and post work, so I'm really proud to show off some remaining work!

This week I've gotten the opportunity to work with some students and introduce them to digital painting.  This is the final result of the demo we've been working through.

Since I got back into digital painting this week, I thought I'd go back and attempt to do a study of my favorite actor, Claude Rains. For whatever reason, I've always had a lot of difficulty with any attempts to draw/paint him. This is the first time I've done a Claude Rains study that looks remotely like him!

This is an interesting piece. I was really excited to get a watercolor sketchbook for Christmas, and we were going up to Yosemite to ice skate, so I thought I'd try some landscape painting. Once we were up in Yosemite, though, I realized I had remember to bring almost everything. I had the brushes, the book...but I had neglected to bring actual paint. I remembered that someone had told a story about painting with chocolate, so I rounded up everyone's leftover tea, coffee, and hot chocolate. It had a different set of challenges, but I'm still really pleased with the work.

I wanted to actually get back to painting in the sketchbook with paint. One of my favorite films, 101 Dalmatians, has the most amazing style for it's backgrounds, so I attempted to replicate that style.

Digital Painting Demo

Here's a quick demonstration of how I approach digitally painting a still life in Photoshop:

A New Year of Art

Happy New Year

As one of my first official acts of 2015, I'm posting three of the most recent pieces in my portfolio. I haven't had a ton of opportunity to work on art, but I got two new sketchbooks (one regular and one watercolor!) for Christmas, so I'm looking forward to filling those pages up really soon.

Here are my final projects from my watercolor class and my first sketch in my watercolor book:

 We had to do a piece based on a memory or an event, but try to render it as realistically as possible. Since Christmas was coming up, I chose to paint a scene from my church's Christmas Eve candlelight service. Most of this painting is done from memory, since I couldn't take any reference of the service at the time...

 My professor really liked the idea of doing work that was more abstract, which was a big challenge for me as I've mentioned here before. I've always wanted to do a piece based on the way Christmas lights reflect on surfaces.

The thing that I'm most proud of with this piece was that I was working with really cheap brushes that kept shedding. This was not planned, I just happened to forget my brushes up at school when I came back for break...