New painting in progress (70% done). Based on an old sketch.
Killer Beach – Digital art & design blog
Observations, sketches, digital paintings & design works by Pekka Keskinen
Somewhere during the summer, I decided to sign up for an art class. I have very little of actual free time on my hand nowadays, and usually, whenever I try establish a drawing routine, it usually fails due to the haste. I though that a well organized art class could be an ideal solution for this problem.
Taidekoulu Maa at Suomenlinna seemed like a nice option, and luckily there was a class starting in september, about a month ago. I’ve been now attending two times a week and the course has so far been consisting of mainly land scape and interior space drawing. There should be some life drawing involved too, before the class terminates in around christmas time.
During the first few sessions, the assignments has been… well mostly boring. The first lessons was land scape drawing, but the weather was mostly bad so, we ended up drawing just some random still lifes indoors, made out of furniture.
Land scape drawing in which I really suck at usually
My first land scape drawing during the class.
Suomenlinna is an awesome place though. It takes about 15 minutes to reach there by ferry, so there’s like no escape, no matter how boring the assignments are. I used to work in Suomenlinna back in 2001 by the way, so it’s no strange place for me. The art school has a studio in a very old building that really sets up a great environment for creativity and on the other hand, it’s a great place to escape the city life, traffic, people and everything.
The premises
The art school's studio is quite moody old place!
Drawing land scapes out doors, in a pretty place like Suomenlinna is great fun. Here’s however an example about the assignment, when the weather happened to suck, thus forced to work indoors. I’ve never seen anything less inspiring. I wish the art school would have a live model, or something FUN, in the closet waiting, in case of bad weather, so the student’s wouldn’t have to draw this kind of crap.
The most boring composition I EVER drawn!
I’ve lot’s of more pictures waiting to be posted and I think I’ve managed to draw something a bit more interesting too, so stay tuned for those ones! I HAVE actually learned stuff, and I think I have now somewhat better drawing skills than a month ago.
Another 25minutes of work. I mainly focused on the eyes and the mouth. Next up is her nose and some more detailing of the facial features.
Öblivion V - work in progress step II
After about 25 minutes of work, my new painting looks like this. I started black and white, but I’ll probably add some color later on. This painting shall be the latest addition to my sketch series called Öblivion.
Öblivion V - work in progress
I made this base image for the painting. I didn’t just use a blank canvas, but instead I started to paint on this photo based image of some rocks. I transformed the pic into black and white and also added a black gradient at the top + adjusted the brightness and contrast just a bit. This way I had a nice color palette and values to work with right in the beginning of the progress.
Photo base for the painting.
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.
Öblivion III - 60 minutes in Photoshop