Color and Light Experiments

Some new watercolors.
One of which features a new character from a new series I conceived.
The other is a random fairy/sparrow guardian I did just for the setting.

J.C. Leyendecker Inspiration

So I went to see a J.C. Leyendecker exhibition recently and I decided that he is my new favorite American illustrator.
I love his bold strokes and how easily he conveys cloth folds and such. My favorite aspect of his paintings though is how he does hair. The locks of hair curl at angles which give his pieces a more dynamic look. How he renders facial expressions is another thing I admire him for.

Anyway, I decided to do some more practicing with my tablet and I think this is the best digital painting (of the face at least) I've done to date. The face is done after one of my characters and I thought it would be nice to have a modern twist to the image. The juxtaposition of the bold shirt and tie contrast with the more carefully rendered face. The hand-lettered type adds a rugged look and seems to disregard modern conventions of computerized precision. Keeping Leyendecker and his ads for Arrow Collars in mind, I made the image an ad for a fake clothes brand.



Perhaps if I were feeling really ambitious I would actually do the rest of him with as much detail as the face. Oddly enough though, I would feel more comfortable if I did it with oil paint. Oh well.

Another Inspiration Yet Again

With the technique used last time, I have illustrated two new characters. I think they'll work well as children's books characters but I'm still not sure what their adventures would be about.

Another Ono Inspiration

Here I did a painting in Photoshop inspired by a technique Natsume Ono uses in some of her pics. These are my own characters as depicted a while ago in that oil painting I did.

3 Long Pics

More experimentation with the tablet in Photoshop.

For this one I used stock images as the background and cloth layers. I have to mention some inspiration was from Natsume Ono.

This is one of my newer characters from the latest series I came up with. His teammate is found below.

Another Color Experiment

Found a new way to do color images on Photoshop.

The first pic is actually the cover of a book that I made up. I don't plan on writing the book; but it's something one set of my characters read.

Basically the technique is fairy simple. Block in colors, define with highlights or shadows, and do simple line drawings for the face.
I'm happy with it.

Something from a While Ago

So I started this thing a while ago, hoping that I would finish before the summer ended (yeah right, look where we are now).
It's the most painterly thing I've done in Photoshop so far and I really like how it looks. The only thing is I've completely lost interest in finishing it. I'm sure that's happened to all of us, but I was really into painting it digitally.

Oh well.
Guess I'll keep the techniques and save it for a project I care more for.