After several hours of messing around in desperation with this old painting, I managed to get a new direction into the whole project. This now a perfect background setting for a new girl painting. Yes, I’m going to leave the bomber as a secondary element to background and add a hot chick to the foreground, although the airplane looks quite nice and would make a nice painting as it is. I’m not that interested of painting airplanes though, and I have an obsessive need to paint girls, so I’m going to turn this thing into a pin-up picture once again.
What’s new in the picture so far? I did some detailing to the airplane and adjusted the colors a bit. And of course there is the girl sketch in the foreground that you haven’t seen before. I’m not sure yet what kind of pose I’d like the girl to have, and the one I sketched here, seems somewhat boring. So I will probably try to find some good pose (and lighting) references and try some alternative poses before continuing.
Not the final sketch of the girl. I will probably make few more in order to find a more fun and interesting pose.
I did few matte painting demos back in the days, when I was some what interested of the movie industry. This was a quick one that I did at school, when I was still studying media stuff. I got the original photo from some stock photo place and basically I just overpainted some alternative elements and tried to visually fit them into the original image.
My matte painting demo from 2007
Close up
Some steps to show the progress.
This is a previously unreleased and unfinished painting that I originally did for a Helsinki based tattoo shop called Luau Tattoo. I was planning to use this painting as an illustration for their web site, that I was also designing. Unfortunately the project didn’t get finished, but rather transformed into a new project, caused by the fact that Luau Tattoo changed into L Tattoo that has a different kind of concept where this kind of style is no longer usable. (L Tattoo has much darker theme, Luau Tattoo had a colorful Hawaii theme with aeroplanes, a-bombs and stuff)
The painting is quite nice none the less, and I’d like to continue it as a non-commercial work. I’m thinking about adding some characters to the foreground and some palm-trees + some interesting details and stuff!
The unfinished bomber painting
Luau Bomber close up 1
Luau Bomber close up 1
I did some while ago some black and white quick sketches and today I decided to put some color into one of those. After few hours of work, the sketch turned into a almost finished painting. I left some parts unfinished on purpose, because I wanted again to avoid over rendering. I focused on detailing the face, that actually turned out quite well, but I left other parts quite sketchy.
Öblivion IV
Here’s a close up of the face area, I you want to observe more closely.
Close up
This is the sketch that I used as base for this painting. I did this sketch perhaps a year ago.
Black and white sketch
This is a WIP picture of my latest sketch. I though, you’d be interested to know how use photo textures in a speed painting like this one. I got the actual texture photo of a rocky moss from cgtextures.com, and I overlayed it on top of the painting, when it was in it’s early stage. Here’s how I did it.
- First, lower the opacity. I used about 40% opacity.
- Set the layer blend mode to soft light.
- Reduce the saturation of the texture layer to almost black and white
- Add layer mask and erase stuff out of the texture layer from those parts, where it looks too striking. The texture shouldn’t cover everything, just bits and pieces. Erase textures at least from deep shadow areas.
Now your texture should be blended in pretty smoothly, like in this WIP -picture. Now just continue painting on top of the texture layer and it will be covered with regular layers, thus making them all blend together nicely.
This is how you use textures in a digital painting.
Here’s a quick sketch I painted today. I used about one hour on this and I was actually about to continue rendering this, until I realized that I’d like to, for once, leave a painting at this stage, and not to ruin it with trying too hard.
As usual, I painted this in Photoshop with my Wacom Intuos 4.
I love the famous and much used sketchy painting style with rough brush strokes with high opacity. It’s very popular among the digital painting scene. I am not unfortunately very good at this because I often use soft basic Photoshop brushes with no textures and I tend to smoothen out the edges between strokes. I was tempted to do so this time also, but managed to resist. I guess it’s a skill, in a way, to be able to leave a painting unfinished and move into a new one.
The early version
This one is quite recent, done about year or two ago. For some reason, I removed this painting from my portfolio although, looking at it now, it isn’t quite that bad . How ever, I am tempted to make another remake, again. Here’s already two different versions.
The first one is actually much better than the second one, I reckon. Although the first one is not very detailed and finished, it is much more natural and lively. I remember working on with the second version and having some difficulties with over rendering. I saw potential of some realism, and I tried to pursue it too hard, hence falling into the trap of over rendering. I like though the texture of the clothing, but the face is way of and the girl looks, well… drunk and the level of detailing is far away from her corset.
Later version
I’d like to give this painting a second, no wait, a third chance, and make yet another version by working on with her face a bit more. The pose is definitely quite boring, and there’s little I can do about it at this point, but there is a lot of nice elements going on here that saves the painting.
I’m quite sure that if the girl would have a much more detailed and prettier face, it would take the attention away from the boring pose and composition. Next time though, when I star a new painting, I HAVE to remember to give more attention to the pose and try to avoid this kind of boring solution where the figure is facing the camera directly.
I can’t get enough of digging out old art works from the depths of my hard drive. Honestly, I didn’t remember ever creating this picture.
Back in the days when I wasn’t into digital painting, I enjoyed doing photo manipulations. Nowadays, I don’t do manipulations at all, but in 2002-ish, I had about million photo manip projects per week. I used to be a quite active photographer too and I did my manips by overlaying multiple photos and then merging them together by paiting over with Wacom. Eventually I ditched using photo based backgrounds and switched into pure painting.
Back in the days, also, I was very interested of much darker themes, and I enjoyed sci-fi and horror art, but hey, I was a teenager back then and before I discovered the joys of pin-up art. Photo manipulation became, at some point, SO common, that I guess, it was one reason to move onto different techniques. Nowadays, you can find an endless amount of similar kind of pics around the net and I’m no longer interested of these kinds of works, although it is much fun to discover old forgotten works.
