|
|
|
[ Screenshots Blog ]
[2010][
2009][
2008][
2007][
2006][
2005][2004]
Digital Painting and Sketching I bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet and have begun sketching and painting digitally on my computer. It has quickly become an enjoyable hobby and I hope to improve my skills and become more efficient. |
| Late July, 2010 - First half-caricature |  |  |  |  | | | | 8B pencil and #2 stump on 80lb paper. I searched for "big smile" in Google images for the reference photograph. I tried to exaggerate the size of the mouth and teeth, while pushing the lower jaw out and having the eyes squint a bit more than in the photo. There was not enough room to draw the hair so it does not quite capture the character. I started with the mouth, and planned on drawing everything else smaller, but I did not succeed. | |
| Late July, 2010 - Male model | | | | | | | | Painted in Corel Painter 11 using only chunky oily pastel and grainy water brushes. I have learned that this brush combo is very powerful for large body parts and diffused highlights, but is a challenge for details and hair. Compared to the photograph, many parts are slightly out of proportion (especially the left arm), but to me it is good enough considering this was my first time painting a full human figure. | |
| Late July, 2010 - Cherries with Corel Painter (2hrs) | | | | | | | | I played around with Corel Painter a lot and found its chunky oil pastel brush, and grainy water brush, work very well together. I begin by laying down large splotches of color with the oil pastel at around 20-40% opacity, and then smudge the colors together with grainy water at around 10% opacity. I add white highlights afterwards. This is a very quick and powerful digital painting style! The majority of the painting was done in less than an hour, but I polished it with the remaining hour. | |
| Late July, 2010 - Flower with acrylic paint (14''x11'') | | | |  | | | This was my first time painting with acrylics on a real canvas. I was warned that acrylics is more difficult than oil paint because it dries so quickly, but I think it makes it easier.
I used two round brushes and one tiny one for details around the edges. The flower petals were very easy to paint and it was the most enjoyable part. They have about three four layers of different colors. The leaves were a bigger challenge. | |
| Late July, 2010 - Speed Painting: Flower (1hour) | | | | | | | | My trial of Photoshop expired so I downloaded GIMP. I painted this flower in one hour using a reference photograph I took in my front yard. I definitely like GIMP. It is something I would recommend to anyone. It is free and can do virtually everything Photoshop can. Plus it is open source so you can always modify it to suit your needs. | |
| Late July, 2010 - Memory game in Flash | | | | | | | | I scratched the previous memory game prototype, and instead made a straight up classic memory card game using Action Script 3 in FlashDevelop. This is sadly the first game where I have made 100% of all art assets. | |
| Mid July, 2010 - Memory game prototype | |  | | | | | | This game idea turned out not to be fun. A number of cards are dealt and shown face up for a second, and then the top one is shown. The player must click the matching card when they are face down. | |
| Mid July, 2010 - Fantasy icons/cards | | | | | | | | Here are 12 icons/cards I made over the weekend (not shown in order of creation) for a Flash game I am working on. Each successive one was completed in less time than the previous. The knight helmet and scroll, for example, were two of the last ones and took me half the time as the first two - the bloody axe and blue potion bottle. | |
| Early July, 2010 - Shadow Faces | | | | | | | | Shadowed faces that consist only of two colors, as described in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This is a good exercise in identifying and illustrating strong light sources on human faces. I must have played around with different shapes around the mouth and eye area for an hour, and was amazed at the huge variety in facial expression. | |
| Early July, 2010 - Zhang Ziyi | | | | | | | | Chinese film actress Zhang Ziyi (Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memoirs of a Geisha,..). I tried to get her to look exactly as she does in the picture, but I believe slight differences in proportion and shading have caused her to look a bit older or like a totally different person. I started with some guide lines and then shaded in light and dark region shapes. The smudge tool was very useful in drawing light streaks and giving it some curl. I used the lasso and 1-4 pixel Gaussian blur a lot to soften the shading of the face. The clothing has been simplified. | |
| Early July, 2010 - Brandon Flowers | | | | | | | | I read most of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and used the techniques to sketch the singer of The Killers. I used the pencil measuring trick, drawing of the negative space as a starting point, and forced myself to ignore the verbal name of the part I was sketching. All those techniques helped. But I expect it will take several more tries until my sketches look more like the person I am sketching. | |
| | A quick painting based on a photograph. | |
| A geisha with an umbrella on a drizzling day. Photo for reference from National Geographic. Likewise, I did not trace the image, I would not learn much that way.
I painted straight lines for the wide umbrella support sticks, and then use the free transform to give them some curvature. A great deal of time was invested in the face - the first time I have ever attempted to paint or even draw a face. I used a charcoal brush with large spacing on the kimono, and a custom star brush I made for the red part of the kimono. | |
| Late June, 2010 - Sushi Painting | | | | | | | | Here is a painting I did of nigiri and a spicy tuna roll. Likewise I used a photograph as a reference, but only for sampling colors. The tuna was by far the easiest to paint, and the subtle brighter colors on the edges helps give a convincing look of subsurface scattering. The rice for the spicy tuna roll was very difficult and time consuming. There are some mistakes and places it could be fixed up, but I think it is good enough. | |
| Late June, 2010 - Black Pearl Peppers | | | | | | | | I painted this image using a photograph (by Susanne v. Schroeder) of black pearl peppers - something I am growing this year in my garden. The leafs are a dark gray and the peppers can turn a bright red. I did not trace the photo, however, I did use the photo for sampling colors so I could concentrate on practicing just brush strokes and color smudging. | |
| Late June, 2010 - Jellyfish | | | | | | | | A quick digital painting I did of a mystical jellyfish deep in the ocean. | |
| Late June, 2010 - Figure Sketches | | | | | | | | I bought a desktop wooden mannequin at an art store to begin sketching and shading still life. I found it easiest to break down the mannequin into dots representing each joint, making the proportion consistent when drawing the limbs. | |
| Mid June, 2010 - Tree Painting | | | | | | | | Here is a tree painting I did, by following a tutorial. It took about 3-4 hours, but I am pleased with the results. I used Photoshop 7 and a mouse (no tablet). | |
| Mid June, 2010 - Oil Paint | | | | | | | | My attempt at rendering oil on canvas in realtime using particle effects and absence of clearing the color buffer. It is very smooth in action and runs on pretty much anything. | |
| Mid June, 2010 - Helicopter Wrecking Ball | | | | | | | | Small game prototype where you control a helicopter with the mouse and have to use its attached wrecking ball to destroy things. I used Box2D physics and it was very easy to hook up. The game itself was not very fun. | |
| Mid March, 2010 - Clifford (Pickover) Attractor | | | | | | | | Clifford/Pickover attractor (a=-1.4, b=1.6, c=1.0, d=0.7) and choosing color dependent on change of angle in trajectory and speed. This attractor is iterative so does not need an ODE solver which can lead to inconsistent results. It is plotting approximately 12 million points and takes 1-2 seconds. | |
| Mid March, 2010 - Rossler Attractor | | | | | | | | I have started looking into attractors again. This is a basic application that fades the screen while blending a Rossler attractor (a=0.1, b=0.1, c=14) with an initial starting position consisting of x growing over time. It shows that within a few iterations, the iterative points converge to the shape. | |
| Early January, 2010 - Sierpinski Triangle variation | | | | | | | This is an implementation of a variation of the Sierpinski Triangle using an intuitive algorithm outlined in The Essence of Chaos by E. Lorenz that I finished reading. Consider a square of power-of-2 side length that is subdivided into four squares, discarding the top right square and continuing the algorithm recursively until the boxes of a small enough size are shaded. The result is a fractal whose fractal dimension is log(number of subdivided squares kept) / log(reduction in each spatial direction) = log(3)/log(2) ~= 1.585.
Note that if all four squares are kept then the formula gives log(4)/log(2) = 2, which implies that a completely shaded square is not a fractal because all fractals must have a noninteger fractal dimension. | |
| Early January, 2010 - Quarter million particles | | | | | | | This was an experiment of iterating a quarter million particles in real-time using a simple algorithm to determine movement. Each pixel is rendered with shade of blue dependent on the density of particles that are inside it. The particles move to a neighboring cell by a constant probability, and which of the eight cells is determined taking into account the lesser likelihood of the corners over the sides. The matter is a compressible fluid.
The fluid eventually settles at the bottom taking up a much smaller volume than it started. | |
|
|
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)