Newest WIP Shots for "Psalm 88"

My latest version of "Psalm 88" now has glorious sea foam, the boat pointing in the opposite direction, and tighter rendering of the face, hair, suit jacket, and tie. If you click on the first image and scroll between the two images in the pop-up window, you can see the differences more readily.

"Psalm 88" WIP

The next painting in my undergraduate senior project to get a facelift is one called "Psalm 88".

 

Like the others in the series, this one is also in oil. It met a minor tragedy after I had tried to apply liquid varnish when the paint was still wet. The night before I had to frame and hang the piece, I experimented with baking the finished painting in the oven. Much to my dismay, the painting was still very wet and I had to make some fast decisions, moving the paint around along with the fast-drying varnish so I would still have a relatively even coat instead of fail puddles. You see those cool vertical black streaks? Yeah...

One of the first things I did was flip the canvas. The painting now reads much closer to the narrative I want with the head coming first, then the hand, then the ship--granted you read a painting from left to right. The face is much different in a good way. It looks less like my face and more like my model's face now.

I also centered the body better and gave a tilt to the ship. Now that I mention it, I notice that the tilt of the ship is nearly parallel with the tilt of the body, so I will be changing that too...

You will also notice some blobby things underneath the man's body. Those will be fish. Lots of fish. The original painting had a handful of fish too, but many were swallowed by the wrath that is varnish.

This cool guy is made out of Sculpey clay and paper on a stick. He is my helpful fish-stick I am using as the ultimate source of reference. Trust me, you just won't find a photo of a school of fish swimming towards a camera.

I downsized the head a little bit and now I have started to delineate the fish. As I outlined the fish, I decided that I would keep the fish 2-dimensional looking. I think the effect successfully preserves the silhouettes of the fish (helping with compositional balance), emphasizes their symbolic importance in the painting's narrative, and most importantly, looks really cool.

More in-progress shots coming next week!

Finished Mantis Mascot

Here is my fleshed-out mantis mascot, Mr. Monocle, for my Monocle Mantis Design alias.You can look at the previous post to see in which part of the poster he will appear in.

You'll notice the shadows are very gray. I have my shadows below my shape layers that are set to multiply. I might try to rearrange things so I can set those shape layers to "color" layer mode and put some colors in the shadows. However, I have decided that my shadows needn't be too realistic as the gray shadows remind me of hand-colored black and white photographs before the age of color photography, which works well with the aesthetic I'm going for.

Poster Advertisement WIP

A couple posts back, I posted some sketches. This is the piece those sketches are being used for:

This is a poster advertisement advertising my poster advertisement. It has proven a very tedious process so far as I am using the pen tool to create shapes for every little detail. I think I might end up just putting all of my pen shapes on just a handful of layers and then filling those on raster layers...The original plan was to make everything vector, but woah, those layers add up fast! Vector artists, I salute you! Everything will be in color, but faded a little bit for that "vintage" look.

Completion of "Psalm 18"

I finished! And with time to spare! You can check out my previous post for some of the details on the earlier process. 

This piece is titled "Psalm 18" with the specific text that I drew most of my imagery being this:

"--With the loyal you show yourself loyal; with the blameless you show yourself blameless; with the pure you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you show yourself perverse. For you deliver a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down. It is you who light my lamp; the Lord, my God, lights up my darkness."

I set layer mode to "color" for coloring the piece. By blocking out the base colors and setting the layer effect to "color overlay" and blend mode to "color" I could see different color options in real time. This is much faster and more exciting than re-painting a section or re-filling a masked-off area, for example.

Third Time's the Charm!

The fabulous Illuxcon Scholarship Competition inspired me to take a finished piece of mine and clean it up significantly. This is an oil painting I brought to a finish for my undergraduate senior art project, but there were some things that I was not satisfied with.

1. The light shining onto the girl's neck looked too much like a skin disease. I needed to either soften it considerably or take it out.

2. The rendering on this cloth bothered me. I was proud at first that I was able to create these out of thin air for I had not used reference photos in this particular spot. I later discovered that it certainly shows. The regularity of the parallel folds are a dead giveaway that I was winging it. Also, the folds don't flow in the direction that I think would optimize the overall visual flow of the piece.

3. I moved the arm out from the body whereas my reference has the model with the arm closer to the
body. I created a little bit of awkwardness from not allowing more of the upper arm to be visible. Also, the hand is...meh. The cords disappearing into the girl's finger crevices is odd.

4. Sometimes your reference photos don't translate well in painted form. Such is the case with this piece of clothe.

5. This part of the painting makes me happy. I was successful here.

Overall, contrast is much better.

1. Changing the fold in this way allows for a more circular visual flow around the piece.

2. The way this fold runs straight out is an issue. In the next step, I curve it like the fold in back of it.

3. I added way too much linseed oil to try to combat my oil paints from drying so quickly on top of the varnished painting. As a result, the paint started "alligatoring"--getting this crumbly texture and lifting off when it was suppose to stay put.

4. Still happy with this section. I was able to do some glazing to improve the contrast. My first success at glazing!

Between the paint falling apart on me and the major changes I needed to make, I decided to go digital. It was beautiful.

It took a matter of days to fix weeks of tortuous oil paint issues. Don't get me wrong, I love oil paints and still plan on improving my skills with them, but there's something divine about the remarkably fast drying time and equally flexible blending time of digital paint. Part 2 will be revealed at the end of this week!

Monocle Mantis Sketches

A recent project of mine is a poster advertising my poster design. The mascot for my design "company" is Monocle Mantis:

He is of the Victorian era and fancies dandy fashion. I will be using the above sketch as well as the following to put together my advertisement.