WHY SO SERIOUS?

The theme for this piece was a portrait...and though it's not quite a classic portrait, I was inspired after seeing the Dark Knight and Ledger's brilliant re-defining of the Joker. I used one of the posters available from the Dark Knight site as reference and painted the initial piece in Painter before taking it to Photoshop and adding shadows, highlights and effects over the card (which I found on Google images) to make it look more painterly. I wasn't trying to 100% replicate the poster but taking it into my own style, which I wanted to keep loose and sketchy, giving the image a more edgy look, reminiscent of the Star Wars image I painted. Took around 3-4 hrs, start to finish.

The Hunt

Inspired by one of my favourite films (the original, not the remake) i've gone for another concept art sketchy style. Only trouble being, to get that loose feel and to see how little you can get away with putting into an image so the eye recognises stuff and creates the story for itself without having to draw in every leaf and reed, is actually really time consuming and quite hard.

So another late post, but i'm happy with the result, i like the use of light and shadow to reveal the characters and even the depth of filed seems to have worked out ok. there is a sense of drama in the composition and the flat colours help this, with the slight offset of the splash of red.

Created in Painter X, using photoshop to add in some of the background textures. Time taken....too long!

Somewhere....beyond the sea.....

Another unfinished piece...not sure where the time is going these days. The premise being a sort of children's book panel with the kid and his motley crew of a monkey and a parrot spotting a far of storm heading in the direction of their home made raft.

Not sure painter is the best medium, maybe a flat vector illustrator style would be best. I had in my mind a monkey island type style, with a low p.o.v that is almost half in the water, but it didn't seem to come out right, partly due to trying to render the storm clouds. Doing them in a realistic fashion didn't seem to be right whilst getting the three dimensional nature of them and the way they affected the sky colour was causing some headaches. So all in all spent more time on the background without getting the elements in the foreground fleshed out. I do like the messy nature of the sea colour though. One to revisit at a later date.

Ho, Ho, Ho!

A Christmas themed challenge seemed appropriate after all the darkness I'd been producing, so I had a think and took my time on this one. I've gone for a nice smooth style this time around and concentrated on getting all the colours as rich and xmassy as possible. I wanted to get a real sense of depth with the light from the fireplace, and really utilise the vibrant, warm colours and shadows it produced, whilst working in the traditional greens and reds of xmas. I had the idea to do a scene of Santa getting toasted as he was coming down the chimney with a child at the fireplace warming his hands...and as i was concepting i realised it would have to be a fairly long piece!

Concepted the ideas, figures and composition in my little notebook, then went straight into Painter X to create the piece from scratch. Original size was 10000 x 4000 pixels reduced down to about 15percent to get it into the blog. Think it turned out alright, just took a while longer than anticpated!