Work in my office....

HI, Work from the shows was in the Mac Lab for a while where some picked up their work.  Now it is in my office.  Not easy to get it though.  I'll be gone the end of the month through beginning of August, and anyway I'm retiring so someone else will have my office in the fall.  Transitions, transitions....  So I guess you should email me if you are around, or I'll just give them to the viz office or someone for you to pick up in the fall???
Both shows looked fabuloso. 

Digital Paintings at Federal Building, F&Sat, c 2-8

Thanks to Travis and Adam and Gary Villarreal for hang show.  Come on by and see some work from the class.  Priscilla, your self portrait with cat is there - took in from VIST show - looks good, as does all the work.  Wish there was room for more.

Custom Brush

For the animal fur, cat whiskers, and random lines brushes, I followed the tutorial on pg.12-22 of Digital Painting Techniques Volume 1

Final Project

This is a 20''x16'' painting. I followed the tutorial from Digital Painting Techniques Volume 1. I followed the "Painting Fur" tutorial on pg. 118-121
Step 1: Find your reference materials and fill in the background. Briefly outline the general shape of your subject
Step 2: paint in key colors (browns and white in this case)
Step 3: use the smudge tool to soften the edges
Step 4: Try to start refining a few of the details. Use an airbrush to show a few individual strand
Step 5: Add more fine strokes according to the direction the fur grow. Lastly, work on the eyes. The tutorial for the eyes can be found on pg.122-125

The key things I learned from this tutorial was the important of blocking in the key forms, and making sure that everything is very suggestive. I did not have to individually make single strands of hair to let the viewer know that it is a hair. Only a few strands was refined to suggest that we are looking at the fur, and blocking in the information first really make it easy to keep the artist mindful of the types of hair they are looking at (heavy clumps of hair or light and thin strands.

Inspiration

This is my "Inspiration" project. Originally, I was trying to study the works of Vincent Van Gogh. I tried to mimick the thick texture (bottom photo) he used to create movement. However, I was not very successful so I attempted something different. I tried to play around with the colors to retain the energy that was flowing from the giraffes to capture the mother-daughter feeling.
After the peer critique, Mrs.Saslow recommended I look up the work of Franz Marc, and his style is similar to mine. I love the vibrant colors he used for his subject and background. At first I couldn't decide if I wanted to keep my background a solid color (2nd photo) or put in an actual background. So here is a finished version of my progress. Although I did not entirely achieved the style of Franz Marc, I really enjoyed learning the ways he used color to convey emotions and landscapes. The colors were distributed throughout the painting so the entire composition will seems more synchronous.

Flying fish

Character design ended up being a flying rainbow fish. Was originally going to draw the god of Autodesk Maya (TM) but after several sketches... this happened.

I won't lie. I got lost in my own painting. At one point, I seriously asked myself what in the world I was making. There were so many ways I could have taken it. Here is the bizarre painting. I'm still going to change some thing like the platform on the right.