Data's digital sketchbook

[Datameister]

Howdy, folks! After a couple years without doing much 2D art, I'm back in the saddle again, and finally feeling confident enough to start my own sketchbook. As I write this, I'm planning on mostly just posting my digital speed paints, but perhaps I'll expand into other media and workflows as I go. Except where otherwise indicated, all my work is done in Photoshop CS4 with a Wacom Intuos3 4x5 tablet.

I'm currently trying to do one speed paint a day, each one being a completely new work of art built off yesterday's results. The five images that will hopefully show up in this post are the first five of that series...if all goes well, many will follow.

Crits of every sort are HIGHLY appreciated - don't be a snob about it, but be real. Tell me how I can improve. Don't hesitate to tell me if you like what you see, though.

[Jacfat]

Hey mate these are really interesting. Quite vibrant colors and the compositions are interesting 2nd one is my fave . My main comment would be on thinking about the planes and sculpting the mountains/objects more with value. Also breaking up the shapes a bit more and detailing the areas might make the images hold my attention more. Keep up the great work.

[Datameister]

Thanks, man! Yeah, I find the values on the mountain in the second piece to be particularly flat - I was working from reference on that one, and somehow I really botched the roundness of it. Didn't realize it till after I finished. But anyway, yeah, thanks for the crits! Hope I'll have more to post soon...I've been a little busy with 3D projects and other paintings that aren't finished.

[Datameister]

Here's today's thoroughly bizarre speed paint! 1 hour 25 minutes, starting with the crashed spacecraft and scribbling my way into a whole different composition. Never thought I'd paint a horse today, not to mention one that's persistently climbing up a green waterfall with a mane of what looks suspiciously like fire. But I guess that's life!

Here's my process in animated GIF form...



...and here's the final product.

[Datameister]

Well, I haven't really been working on that series very much. Had a few discouraging train wrecks. But I've been reading Nick Pugh's Luminair, which inspired me to do some digital plein air. I'd done it before, but the results were a mixed bag, quality-wise. I'm happy to say that I've gotten better. These paintings of my backyard are very messy, but I think each one does a fairly good job of capturing the essence of the subject matter, especially considering I was working outdoors on a laptop with a terrible screen and very limited battery life. All were done in PS CS2 (hadn't installed CS4 on my laptop yet). They took 40-ish minutes, 50 minutes, and 20 minutes, respectively. I'm hoping to continue doing these sorts of paintings for a while, improving as I go.

[Datameister]

Wheweeeee, tonight was fun! I went to see Back to the Future for free at a fun little outdoor venue, and I brought my laptop so I could paint in the 45 minutes or so that I knew we'd be spending there before the film started. I was about to paint a mundane little wall when my sister's friend recommended the brightly lit water tower off to the right, which made me feel very stupid but totally elated. It looked like perfect subject matter. So I whipped this together in a half-hour. I'm really happy with it! Hardly perfect, I know, but it was a lot of fun to sketch and the results are quite close to what I was looking at. With a little more time (and a laptop that had working OpenGL for on-the-fly canvas rotation), I would have made the letters and metal supports look neater, but the overall effect is still right, I think. Anyway, crits on this or any of my other pieces are DEFINITELY appreciated!

[EVOLU]

intresting colors and how you use them for backgrownd like!

[Datameister]

Thanks!

[Datameister]

Here's some more work from the last few days. I had one failed painting that I won't post here - I was at the beach, trying to paint on my laptop, but it was just too dang bright. Couldn't see the monitor.

Luckily, I'd say the ones I AM posting are successes! I still have a lot to learn, but it's so gratifying to see the improvement from my earlier work. And the best way to demonstrate for myself that is by re-painting things I've tried before. So this first image is a comparison between a reference photo I found somewhere online a few years ago, a very quick painting I tried to do of it at the time, and an attempt from a few days ago. Slight improvement, eh?

Then there's a painting of my speaker that I did yesterday. This was a bit of departure from my usual techniques and subject matter - I emulated Ryan Church's workflow a little bit, albeit in Photoshop rather than Painter. It took an hour or two, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out. The biggest issues with it are, I think, the edge quality in some spots and the fact that the silver face appears angled slightly upwards when it should be parallel to the dark body behind it. I also posted this in the current "Digital Painting in PS" thread, since it was essentially a still life done at my desk.

The last one is from just a little while ago, painted on my laptop in my backyard. I would have refined the foliage more and painted in the nearby bird feeder, but 50 minutes of battery life just ain't enough! The technique here was kinda...Nick Pugh meets Levente Peterffy. I've been experimenting with techniques I've seen in their very different styles, and they can actually work surprisingly well together.

[Datameister]

Not exactly the most picturesque subject matter, but I see this view quite a bit, and I liked the blue sky and shiny ventilators, so I painted this in a half-hour from the kitchen table. I must confess that I cheated on the silver ventilator to the right - in real life, they looked almost exactly identical, so I just duplicated the first one and fiddled around with it to make it slightly different. I like to avoid doing stuff like that, but it seemed appropriate for this sketch.

[Elam]

I like the textures going on in that first set.

Lookin' forward to seeing more.

[Datameister]

Thanks! Yeah, I've been experimenting a lot with different techniques. Right now I'm trying to find a good compromise between the heavily textured madness of the first set and the simpler aesthetic of the second. I love doing these plein air studies, but because of time constraints and the fact that I've got specific subject matter sitting right in front of me, I tend to not get as gritty or loose.

[Zirngibism]

Great work here so far!

I'm digging the color in post 1, and especially post 4. Cool tutorial process, too.

Nice start :-)

[Datameister]

Thanks! Just gotta figure out how to translate those colors and textures into a plein air context. In the mean time, I think I'm gonna do a few nighttime studies in the backyard...I don't expect them to turn out as extravagant as those earlier pieces, but they'll be fun. I'll watch some Levente videos on Vimeo first for inspiration.

[arrogantchild]

I enjoy your paintings.

I don't really post in journals so I'm not really sure what to say, but there you go.

[Datameister]

Thank you!

[Datameister]

Cloud studies! Some rain blew through today, and the clouds beforehand were quite pretty, so I whipped out my laptop and started doing these studies. Since the clouds move pretty quickly, I painted them very quickly - like, five minutes or less for each one. Obviously, I took longer on the first one, since I had to detail the foliage and the house under construction with the tarp over it, but I really never took more than five minutes on the clouds. Very loose, very quick, very fun. I'm not gonna bother posting my first two tries, though, because they depicted pretty uninteresting parts of the sky, and they were pretty poorly done.

[Chison]

i like the top few image most~and majority of you landscape and sky and tree
all of them suggest 3D well
althought a few thing like mountain is definity a bit of in your style

keep it up^^ looking forward for more

[Icedearth15876]

Great work so far, your digital painting skills are great. Keep up the good work.

[Datameister]

Thanks, both of ya! Like I said, I'm trying to figure out how to translate that textured style into the studies I do from life...it's not hard when I'm working from my imagination, with no preconceptions about how I want the piece to turn out, but it's amazingly difficult to get that to work when I've got a goal from the start, whether it's an imaginary image or one that's sitting right in front of me. It just ends up looking bad. =/ I tried it again the other day, but no luck.

[Robz]

good stuff

[Datameister]

Gracias!

I'm realizing that my laptop screen and desktop monitor look even more different than I originally though, though. I painted some gorgeous sky tones in more cloud studies yesterday...but when I viewed them on my main computer, they looked violet. Apparently, certain blues and yellows show up way differently on the two screens. I thought my main monitor was calibrated fairly well, but I'm getting sneaking little doubts. Maybe I'll eventually invest in some real calibration software/hardware. In the mean time, I guess I'll just make do with assuming my real monitor is a lot closer to correct than my laptop, and I'll keep color-correcting my paintings to look right on that one. (I didn't do that with any of these that I've posted...but most of them don't catch the full brunt of it. The one with the tree and the red fence does look awfully yellow in the highlighted areas, though.)

[adammelo]

You've got nice environments good sir, nice environments indeed! Keep it up!


Sketch back if you'd like...

[Datameister]

Thanks!

[sevarenge]

cool stuff dude lick the strucktjur stuff kipp them komming!


my sb : http://www.conceptart.org/forums/sho...13#post2435313

[Bendragon]

Cool stuff. Just watch out for a few perspective issues. Maybe draw out a perspective grid to help make sure things are lining up on the same perspective line and things are parallel when theyre supposed to. Keep it up!

[jatherip]

original stuff! we want moooree! (btw. some of you pieces lack depth....fix that and the will be even better, study depth from photograph...)

[Datameister]

Thanks, folks! Bendragon, would you mind pointing out which parts of which pieces were striking you as "perspectively challenged"? Looking over them, I'm pretty the only things I screwed up were the angle of the front panel of the speaker and...well, pretty much everything in my old cabin painting, but I think I did it right in the new one, even though the house came out too thin. Anyway, I do understand the basic principles of perspective, so you don't need to provide a really long-winded description or anything - I'd just appreciate a little bit more specificity.

@jatherip: Thanks! The thing is, all these more recent ones have been directly from life, so I guess either the subject matter doesn't have enough depth or I'm not picking up on it. Like Bendragon, would you mind being just a little more specific? I mean, paintovers would be awesome, but I understand if you'd rather just provide a few more written details about what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it.

Here's last night's painting - I was loving the spotlights, so I decided to paint them, and I threw in the building in the foreground, too. I would say this painting also suffers from a lack of depth, but it looked quite close to what I was looking at, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. The structure isn't quite right in its proportions either, but it's recognizable, and next time I paint it, I'll try to be more observant. In any case, I was pretty happy with the spotlights.

[Dile_]

great studies!

[Datameister]

Thanks, Dile!

Two more, both from the day before yesterday. I'd say the second one is a lot more of a success, though it took half as long (35 minutes). The first one has serious perspective issues; I didn't lay down a grid first, and I was in a hurry because there was so much stuff to paint. The foliage is also quite messy; I'm hoping to go back to that same spot soon and just paint a single plant for a while, focusing on really getting the shapes right. I've concluded that I picked too complex a subject - I need to keep the scope relatively small for these studies, since my laptop battery only gives me about an hour to work with. The second one, however, turned out pretty close to how I wanted it. I even ended up with a few people taking interest in what I was doing, so I got to explain digital painting to them and impress them with the painting taking shape on my monitor.