Finished. Finished? Finished...

This will be due tomorrow morning at 9am. It's finished for now. I'm just kind of tired of looking at it so I need to start something brand new. I've been sketching a lot lately. I'll post some sketches soon.

-M

Poseidon's Lair Concept

I needed to start a new painting because I got tired of looking at the castle, so I decided to start drawing thumbnails for project number 2. The concept that I'm playing around with is "Poseidon's Lair". I went a little further with one of the thumbnails and drew it on painter and painted with digital watercolor to explore value. Anywho....I'm not sure how I feel yet about Poseidon's Lair, but I'll continue to work up more thumbnails/value studies and hopefully I come up with something better.

-M

Ice, Ice baybehh....

Here is a new painting I started on today. I'd say this is about 2.5 hours of painting, probably at it's 30% mark. Before that I had done at least 10 thumbnails before I came up with a composition I was satisfied with. The purpose of this assignment is to illustrate "The Castle of the Great Winter Lord". We also had the option of illustrating a treehouse, an abandoned battle ship, an underwater sea lab, etc., but I decided to go with the winter castle. Although I'm still a slow painter (speed will only come with more practice!!) I'm having a lot of fun with it so far. Especially since I'm starting to get a little more comfortable with corel painter. I'll update later on in the week with more progress shots.

-M

Tom Hardy Study

This was a watercolor study I did a few months ago. At the time I was looking at the works of J.C. Leyendecker and Robert McGinnis, and I think the influence shows in this watercolor sketch. I just love everything about the original Tom Hardy photo. His dapper attire, the lighting, his expression, and of course the dashing Tom Hardy himself. I could have gone a lot darker to add more contrast, but I was kind of enjoying the simplicity of the value range.

Thanks for visiting!

-M

First Day of Advanced Digital Illustration

Here's a screenshot of my homework assignment that I started today. Our assignment for the next two weeks is to paint 10 apples in Corel Painter 11. 8 apples must be in single media, and 2 apples in mixed media. This is my first time using Corel Painter, and I think I did a decent job painting the apples. The apple to the left was painted in acrylic, and the one to the right is painted with airbrushes. The program is pretty complex and there's a lot of different apps and brushes...it's kind of overwhelming. I think this is a great exercise for starters. 2 apples down.....8 to go. Maybe I can shoot for 15 apples?! ......We'll see.

Recent Work....

Here are two of my favorite paintings that I've done over the past 3 months. These illustrations are based on dreams I've had. I have 4 more that I have yet to post, but I figure I shouldn't saturate my blog with recent works all at once. The one to the left is called The Mushroom Princess (painted in acrylic on illustration board) and the one on the left is Creature Of The Deep (acrylic on arches.) I plan to turn these dreams into short stories (I mean, they are already short stories, no?) and compile them into a dream book! I'll post more from my dream series later on.

-M

Illustration Friday

Here's a sketch I did today for Illustration Friday. I started a little late, but I plan on finishing this up in photoshop. I think it's a good start! This week's topic is "chicken".

-M