So I'm not dead... even stopped sucking the blood of the inicent at night time. School started a couple of weeks ago and have been warming up a bit, hitting workshops and getting the first assignments out of the way.

Corciano, Italy

So I am pretty much living the painters dream at the moment. Spending the summer in Italy with the Academy, little hilltop village called Corciano from the 13th Century. In between cheap wine and delicious Gelato there is the odd sober moment where I try my best to get some paintings and sketches done. Happy with the improvement up until midterm, color and paint handeling have improved a lot.

Quick studies

Spent the week in Norway, and in between catching up with friends and family I got some small studies done. Spent in between 1,5 - 2 hours on each of these. Basically a warm up session before I leave to Italy for the summer on Monday. I'll be spending 7 weeks in a small town north of Rome learning about Plen Air Painting, so look out for some landscape updates :D

Life Drawing

Its the 21st Century and all the motels got wi-fi (traveling these days), so I thought I would upload the last set of work from the semester that I had planned to do before leaving SF for the summer. Did not have any figure drawing classes last semester, so I spent time at the quick studies and clothed figure workshop. So much to work on, but feel like I have managed to boost my learning curve a lot. Hopefully I'll pick up this post in a year from now and have fun comparing.

1,2 & 3 mins:























20 mins:

Three last paintings of the semester

The first painting of the woman and the chair is a composite from two photos on Masonite board. I tried out Coles Phillip's Fade-away technique on the shawl, which I though was fairly successful. Seeing as the large shape of the figure is of to the left I was spending some time balancing it out with the more saturation, dark value and hue variation to the right of the picture plane.

The second piece is top view of wall street commenting on the near religious view a lot of people have of the capitalist economic dogma of todays america. Even in a time where the system has proven to be flawed people reserve their critiscism to mere details. The centered, strong and powerful composition was meant to build up on that. I believe the idea was a good one, but limited by my own lack of experience this one fell apart in execution. Did learn invaluable lessons on value pattern, saturation of lights/darks and shapes.

The third piece is a painting done for an in-class session on the figure in composition. I photographed the same pose from three different perspectives, then composited the figure together in photoshop without merging them. The idea is that the figure and composition study is of the same surgical nature as a dissection of meat.

Illustrative Digital Imaging final

Right in the middle of finals week, and as usual the stubble is uncontrollable and my pants are covered in oil paint. However, if I manage to wake up tomorrow morning and hand in my last final, a three week roadtrip is waiting around the corner. - Good things comes to those who wait (or some other cheesy thing people say)

For my final digital painting assignment we had a group project. The brief we were assigned stated we had to work with a mix of an archaic and a futuristic society. Collectively we decided on a mix of 70% Roman culture and 30% Star Wars (that first movie). We were assigned either two characters or an environment, and seeing as I still had not done any characters for this class I was glad to get the choice of our cultures evil emperor and his evil general.

Working with thumbnail character studies was a true eye-opener, and a small example of the ones I did can be seen underneath.



I finally installed my wacom tablet driver, - yeah I have been working all semester without pressure sensitivity (!). And managed to work with looser, more solid brushstrokes on this one. This made the painting part a lot quicker, and even though these were a bit rushed I am very happy with the learning process here.

Emperor

General

Figure in interior

Painted my buddy Kamil while he was animating some tests for that new Dreamworks feature you'll bee seing in 2020!

Cavemen Redux

Figure in environment, pretty open ended.

San Francisco Cityscapes

We had a landscape/cityscape assignment in my composition class. I tried focusing on the designed and geometric aspect of the city, playing up the repetitive and primitive shapes found in our neighborhood and cities elsewhere. Had a lot of fun with these, and it is a revelation to truly understand the importance of composition.


Tried out a square canvas for the first time. My intent for this one was for the eye to move around as much as possible, not creating too strong of an area of emphasis anywhere.


In this one I was playing more with the use of color contrast as a means to lead the eye into a strong area of emphasis, which you hopefully find to be around the person with the umbrella. Again without the eye getting to stuck.

Portraits

Did a portrait of a couple of classmates. Should have spent a bit more time on the composition, there are a few tight spots here and there. Pretty happy with these though, it was fun to get to spend some time focusing on a face with my brushes. At least they recognized themselves!



Then another in-class painting, been trying hard lately to gain enough experience so as to go ahead and loosen up my brushwork. Thicker paint, and more confident color handling. Have a few happy moments now and again, and felt like I succeeded fairly well in this one

Digital Environment

Night scene for my digital class. Ended up learning a lot about night lighting, could probably have pushed more blue into the piece. Pretty sloppy linework on this one, really got to work on my sketchbook skills.

Concept Art - Craft

Just a decade after I lay down my blueprints of flying cars that would drive me to school I got the opportunity to invent again. For my Digital Imaging Class we got to decide between a character or a craft, other then that the assignment was wide open. I chose to do a craft that I imagine would compete as a home-made outsider in some futuristic Rally-Dakar race going around the world. On the ground and through the air. A mix of a T-Ford and a jet plane, with a dash of Il tempo Gigante, Back to the future and Soap Box racing and this little guy was born.




Did a quick little comp, to set him in an environment:

Figure painting

So I've been taking Figure Painting at the school now for five weeks. Last homework assignment was a master copy, our choice of reference as long as it was full figure. I chose to work from Caravaggio's "Boy with a Ram" Obviously rendering after Caravaggio on an 18x24 is quite the challenge, but it was a lot of fun getting to spend more then 8 hours on a figurative piece. On the other hand, when you really look at the reference for 20 hours you start realizing what a genius Caravaggio was. The subtleties and hue variations this man had, in a time where paints did not come on tubes in every color imagenable, is truly amazing. I think Ill try copying another one of his paintings in... lets say 20 years and see how much closer I'll be!

This second image is a painting from model in class, about 8 hours on this one. 12x16 canvas board. Face turned out nice, need to work some more color in there.



Another painting done in class, tried working a bit losser with some elements. 5 hours on this one.



Third in class painting, thats it for midterms :)

Still life hw. - Composition and painting

First homework assignment for my composition and painting class. "One non-traditional still life of one or more somewhat mundane and overlooked objects. Make an interesting composition, the use of shadow shapes and positive/negative spaces can aid you in the overall interest of compositional abstract shapes." Basically create something interesting through creative composition, not exciting objects.

Decided to string up my objects with floss and then paint them as if they were hovering mid-air. The final composition turned out pretty bad, the empty area to the left completely kills the painting. On the pluss side my brushwork and color mixing are slowly improving, and I got to try out an interesting wider format. Next homework will be a cityspace/landscape and looks to be very interesting.

In-class composition:

Photoshop Composition

Digital Imaging Class homework, we had to create a composition in photoshop from 10 different pictures or more. Threw together this little naval battle scene. The reference material i found decided more then I did, but it all sort of came together in the end.