Imaginism Workshop: Happy Endings and Farewells

Today was the last day of the one month Imaginism Workshop in Montreal. It's hard to believe how fast a month can go buy and how much  information can be stuffed into your brain during that month. Not only did I gain new artistic skills, but also knowledge of the industry, perspectives on character design, a new sense of appeal, a caffeine addiction, and what feels like 15 pounds. Damn you ,Thierry and your burgers. Damn you.

Oh, and new friends from all over and all that jazz too.

We decided to take a break from painting (not really), and go visit Old Montreal. We drew passers by for a while in front of the Basilica.

Rita, Tao, and Paul in front of the Basilica Fountain.

The Basilica

All in all, old Montreal is a really cool place. We didn't get a chance to explore even a fraction off it either; it's so big! I hope to come back some time.

There were also some awesome Street Performers.

And these guys

When we got back, T and I had an epic discussion about character design and concept art the pretty much melted my brain. The fallout was that I had to entirely rework my onion character to the extent that I started from the Initial Study phase all over again. If you're going to do it,  do it right. Right?

Imaginism Workshop Day 25: Silver Originals and Onions

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. Stephen Silver had to leave to go back home today. Though, not be for we pestered him to draw original Caricatures of us! Score!

It never hurts to ask.

Stephen also gave us all signed prints. What a nice guy.

For the rest of the day, I worked on my painting, and decided to knock out a second fully rendered character concept while I'm here. My goal is to do 2 every 3 weeks until I have 100. It might be a bit lofty, but we'll see.

Imaginism Workshop Day 24: Life Sketching and Poutine with Stephen Silver.

Today Stephen Silver graciously gave us a morning lecture about the art industry, character design, his life, our life, and just about everything in between. It was very very cool. I think it's going to be difficult to go back to the real world and my regular job after spending so much time on art and meeting so many motivated and successful people.

After that, Stephen wanted to see what all the fuss was about concerning some dish in Canada called "Pooh-Teen." See? I bet Stephen Silver reads my blog too.

So, we went to our favourite poutine shack, but my body couldn't handle any more starch/cheese/gravy stomach bombs, so I opted out and did a handful of caricatures of the patrons while we ate.

When we got back, T showed us about the next step in our Acrylic under-painting. Picking out the highlights.

Since my piece is set almost entirely in the light, I could skip this step and move into color. At this point, words cannot express my new found appreciation for digital painting. I think longingly back to my time spent with the color picker and the opacity control. *sigh*

And lastly Franklin the Duck returned. Though, I think our duck dinner left an impression because he brought along his crew Mafioso style. They were quite menacing so we GTFO.

Imaginism Workshop Day 23: Eating Franklin and Trying Acrylics

Today we embarked on the journey through "The Acrylic Lands." T's method for traditional painting is very very similar to his approach to digital painting. He said "if the word 'painting' didn't exist, they'd call it edge control." Like 5 times. Still, it's a bit more difficult than that (for me at least). I feel like I'm bargaining with the paint during every stroke. OK, that's a lie. I'm pleading with it.

Either way, Thierry said that my under painting was coming along well.

We aslo got to watch Stephen Silver draw an original in T's Travelling Sketchbook. Stephen also generously offered to give us a lesson on character design tomorrow. Score!

Apparently, the bigger the woman, the more fun she is to draw.

Lastly, T's parent made dinner last night. Holy cow. Grilled duck with bread fried in Duck fat, and tomato mozzarella  basil salad. It was so good that we all had to roll away from the table. I noticed later on that Franklin the Duck was conspicuously absent. Was it worth it? .........Yup.

Imaginism Workshop Day 22: Burgers with Stephen Silver

Yesterday started with the unfortunate realization that I was feeling ill. Very very ill. I believe the appropriate term is the "struggle bus." Regardless, I apologize for missing my post deadline.

I'm just going to pretend that the last 2 days were actually just one really long one. That's what it felt like anyway.

It's my birthday, Woo! I turned 25 and am now a real man. Like a really manly adult like looking man. I celebrated by getting my butt handed to me in Foosball and eating copious amounts of spaghetti.

Class has taken a turn for the traditional now that we've all finished with our characters. We're putting down our styluses and pick up our paint brushes. This week, we'll be working to recreate our concept characters  in acrylic.

I've never worked in acrylics before. So, this should be, uh......interesting.

This is the corner where T keeps all of the Art Supplies. Magiks happen here.

As a bonus reward, Stephen Silver dropped by last night and he'll be staying with us until Thursday! If you didn't know who Stephen Silver is, he's the character Designer responsible for this:

And this:

And also, this:

Having created a pretty substantial amount of my childhood, it was pretty surreal to meet the guy. I also have to say that Stephan is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. HE asked US to show him our portfolios, and asked us about OUR backgrounds and view points. It's weird to have someone of that level stardom act like you're the most interesting person in the room. 

He also has a pretty great youtube channel about working in the industry as a starting artist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXYoD7wfOs 

All in all. It's going to be an awesome next few days.

Imaginism Workshop day 20: Finishing Timmin

Today marks the end of Hell week at the Workshop for me. I just finished the last of the revisions on my character, Timmin, and I feel great.

One of the secret fears I harboured coming here was that I'd go through the whole program and remain un-changed. It would be an opportunity wasted.

With the completion of this piece, I think I can safely say that this is not the case. My painting skills, my competency in photoshop, and my understanding of form and light have all really improved! It's really motivating to know that this is all a repeatable process. There's no mystical secret or elusive muse necessary for making appealing pieces.

Here's a sample of my work before I came here.

I'm not sure why, but the jpeg is turning neon on blogger. It's Bizarre.

Here is the final version on Timmin. After the training.

Definitely going in the portfolio.

The best thing is that I still have another week here. Thierry has plans for us to work in acrylic, but I'm going to try and knock out another character or two with this level of completion while I'm here.

My art book for today is for Mulan, which is my very favourite Disney movie. This book is incredible. First off, it weighs like 30 lbs and it's bigger than any other movie "art of" book here. 

One thing that this volume does well is that it delves deeply into the shape vocabulary and the composition of of the movies shots. Apparently, Disney was having trouble with their movie before Mulan came out. They we over rending because they could. However, this sucked the life out of their projects. With Mulan, they took a step back and did a serious study of classical Chinese art to simplify things in a pleasing way. The book even goes in depth about the style guide that the artists used. This is the same style guide that I posted earlier. It's very cool stuff. This is another book that I plan to add to my collection.

Imaginism Workshop Day 19: Ten Pounds of Poutine

The last few days here in the Imaginism Workshop have been rough. I've averaged about 3-4 hours of sleep a night, and I have been getting more than the other 3 students by far. I'm not sure how they're still alive. It's also been raining relentlessly. So much so, that Franklin's stump is now completely under water.

Before

After.
No worries, though. I have it on good authority that Franklin has killer home insurance.

Other than emotionally debilitating rain and sleep deprivation, the other students and I have been kept alive by healthy diet of coffee and poutine.

Power food.

If you you haven't heard of poutine, don't be ashamed. I wasn't fully aware of it's magical properties until I came here myself. It's basically french fries with a ton of cheese and then drenched in gravy. It's absolutely terrible for you, but it makes you feel better about yourself,  paradoxically. This is because you realize that if you haven't ever eaten poutine up until this point in your life, then you've actually been eating healthily the whole time. Savvy?

After a marathon 6 hour critique, we all went to the Canadian version of Denny's. I got a medium poutine which weighed about 10 pounds. I though this whole time that portion sizes were out of wack in the States, but boy was I mistaken!

So, we ate our 4.5 kg of poutine and went back home to paint revisions.

I'm really excited for this character. I think he's going in the portfolio soon.

Imaginism Workshop Day 18: Color!

We've final started working with color! I should preface this next bit with that fact that I've never been comfortable with color. In fact, it intimidates me. They're all mysterious, and they all need to be taken in context, and light messes with their saturation, and then you need to worry about reflected colors!

Luckily for me, these things all follow rules. And if you have a robot brain like me, then you love rules.

We did 2 one hour color studies and  then painted our characters.

My first attempt Painting Timmin

Imaginism Workshop Day 17 More Character Design, Less Sleep

T gave us another Character Design Project. Little sleep was had. I slept clean through my alarm and  I wasn't able to prep a whole blog post. Here my finish paint from this morning though.

Imaginism Workshop Day 16: Creature Design = No Sleep!

Finally, we started Creature Design! This is the first assignment we've had to show case our creativity. The only catch is that I've been painting from 6:30 pm until 5:30 a.m. the next day. So please, be patient with my loopiness!

Thierry Demo-ing a character design. He knocked out and awesome painting
in just a few hours.

Here's the step by step submission and work flow for character design.

Step one: Gather inspiration and come up with 5 different rough ideas. (30 min)

I chose to paint a sapling sprite. 

Step 2: Pick one of the ideas or your favorite elements and draw 5 rough poses. (30 Min)

The idea for this guy was that he's a little forest sprite who's a courier between
the Tree Spirits. He catches the wind in his leaves to fly around.

Step 3: Do textural studies for the individual elements of the character. (30 min each)

Ginger

 Acorn

Tonight I learned that Acorns are a bitch to paint.
I was really only concerned about painting the cap

Step 4: Refine your character sketch. (30 min)

I wrote a whole back story in my head while on my afternoon jog.
This Forest Sprite's name is Timmin, and he's a total badass.

Step 5: 5 contrast studies of your refined sketch (30 min)

It's important to note that these don't define lighting or even
 value necessarily. They describe path of the viewer's eye.

Step 6: 5 Lighting studies of your favorite contrast study. (30 min)

At this point, it was about 4:30 in the morning, and there was a beautiful mist over the lake

It was surreal to peak out of our studio cave to find
  the sun up and the birds chirping

Step 7: Final Render of your favorite thumbnail

Timmin

This whole process took my about 11 hours to do. T said that at one point in his career, he was painting 2 of these a night for a month. I swear, he isn't human! (Also, he works incredibly fast.)

My Art Book of the Day is Chris Sander's Sketch Book #4. I haven't really payed attention to Chris until now. Man, everything he does is either adorable or sexy, and usually it's both. I instantly bookmarked his blog.

More of Chris Sander's work can be found at his blog

Imaginism Workshop Day 15: Breakfast with Franklin the Duck

The weather here in Montreal keeps getting better and better. I had breakfast with Franklin the Duck while finishing my inking sample for and upcoming anthology.

Here's my finished inking sample. I'm cutting myself off. it seems like this is the type of thing you could spend hours and hours fiddling with and never be finished.

Class today was freaking grind. Since we all submitted so much homework, we spent 6 hours on critiques. Then, we learned about copying the essence of a thing without necessarily copying the thing exactly. For instance, you don't need to copy an exact reference of an apple to paint an apple.  

So, our homework was to paint an apple and which ever of the shapes we felt was our weakest. Mine was a sphere.

Here's my submission.

Imaginism Workshop Day 14: More Boxes than you can handle

We got a ton of homework this weekend, and we all put most of it off until today. I'm sorry to say that it's nothing to exciting. Unless you get inordinately excited about boxes. And then, you're a little weird.

I think we're nearing the end of our study on basic light technique. Hopefully, well move on to color soon.
Here are the 30 minute shape studies that we did. The goal is to paint all of the things that your brain needs to accept something as "real" and match the values as closely as possible in 30 minutes or less.

Past workshops also did  study of Bouguereau's nudes using boxes. "T" stopped assigning this in order to focus a second day on cube heads. Since we're all gluttons for punishment we asked him to assign it on top of the new content. Here is my submission.

Shit, I just realized that I forgot one!

Lastly, my Art book of the day is another one of Stephen Silver's Sketch book. I originally picked it up because it looks exactly like a 11x17 Bristol board sketch pad. I thought an old student left it behind and I could snag it. This book is filled with Stephen's lunch drawings. Lately, I feel like I've become more restrictive with my shape vocabulary when drawing people from life. The sketch book is a breath of fresh and gave me a ton of new ideas to try.