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.

Imaginism Workshop Day 13: Painting Prisms, Suicide Girls, and Being Fancy

Today was our first day off this week. Since Diana went back to Mexico, I haven't been working as hard learning to draw women. It was astoundingly nice out and I happened across Thierry's copy of Suicide Girls Art Book. SO, I spent my morning drawing women and working on my tan. I was unsuccessful on the tanning front.

If you haven't heard, Suicide Girls isn't what it sounds like.
It's a collection of high quality images of alternatively beautiful
women who happen to be scantly clad.....or not clad at all.

I'm making an effort to use T's Box head method with these rather than falling back on my old habits. It doesn't feel quite natural yet, but it's slowly becoming easier.

Also, one of the comic publishing companies that I met at Comic Con emailed me looking for inkers! So, I spent time working on inking samples.

I forgot to mention that the Imaginism Workshop got a 6th member. Hi name is Franklin. He's a Duck

Franklin lives on a submerged stump on the lake.

Lastly, T's friends came over. We drank fancy wine and ate fancy cheese on fancy bread. Because, here at Imaginism, we're nothing if not fancy.

Imaginism Workshop Day 12: Flat Tires, Fast foods, and Drawing Nudes.

Today started off well. I got a flat tire on my morning bike ride about 7 miles out. I guess those Continental Gator Hardshells were worth every penny. So, my bike Flo and I had nice relaxing (long) walk home.

A man and his bike - Happiness

However, the weather looked like something out of movie. The lighting on the quiet neighbouring farms was so nice that I had to stop for a minute and take it all in. 

Unfortunately, the picture doesn't quite do it justice.

During class, he reviewed the essence of spheres and the various ways that they reflect light. Our homework for the weekend is to graduate to cylinders and combinations of shapes, which I'll post when I'm finished. Upon my special request, T gave us extra home work for decomposing Bouguereau's nudes into boxes. Have I mentioned that Thierry love boxes?

T's example

We also went out to the food festival. The first Friday of every months a ton of food trucks in Montreal gather near the old Olympic stadium and people come from all around.

This is my first experience with Canadian Dollars.
They're made of plastic, AND they're see through!
If I didn't know any better, I'd say they weren't actually  money.

This is the old Olympic Stadium

The Food Festival was packed. Tao and I waited in line for 50 minutes to get a cup of Vietnamese noodles! I gave up on waiting, because we were going to miss our movie, but Tao persisted. And so, noodles were had. Thank you Tao.

The crowd at the food truck festival. Rumour has it that there
was a truck selling $80 Poutine!

While we waited, Tao and I got some life drawing in from the people in the crowd. 

Lastly, we saw Maleficent. It was pretty, but the story fell a bit flat for me. Angelina Jolie's new cheek bones screamed at me for the whole movie.