Friday, September 18, 2009

"Celebration" process

In the last year or so, I've started a habit of keeping work-in-progress shots for most of the major paintings I do. It can be a very interesting way to look back on the process of painting, especially for someone like me whose sketches often start out very rough; in some cases being little more than a thumbnail with basic composition. The rest is in my head.

I'll provide as an example my most recent piece, a contest entry for ImagineFX magazine, which focuses on digital sci-fi and fantasy art. The winner gets their art showcased on the subscriber-only cover of the magazine. Pretty nice! Of course, I happened to find out about this less than a week before the deadline.

No problem, I thought. I can definitely paint something in a week. And I sat down to sketch.

I actually sketched this piece entirely in Photoshop; which is a rarity. Generally I work with pencil for the sketch phase, as I still find that it gives me greater control and precision. When I'm sketching digitally I always feel like I'm trying to draw in crayon-- unless you zoom in and lose sight of the piece, everything is very thick and ungainly. But for this piece I needed to be able to erase and rework quickly, so digital it was. At last I settled on something I was more or less happy with.



I knew I wanted the lanterns against the fireworks, that was key. The choice of Izeli as the character was a bit last-minute. But I thought she worked best, with her odd coloring, to signal the scene (which is otherwise fairly ordinary) as "fantasy."

With the sketch complete and a quick check to make sure the anatomy was okay, I sat down to paint.



When working fast, it's always best to knock out the easiest things first, so I did the fireworks (which were loads of fun) and established the three poles and the lines supporting the lanterns.



Work continues-- I started on the lanterns, and worked a bit more to establish Izeli's facial structure-- something I was especially concerned with as not only was it the focus of the piece, but also at a difficult angle I'm not familiar with painting. You can also see the ImagineFX template laid over the piece.





Hey, it's starting to look like a real piece! The lanterns and light are established, and the figure is largely blocked in.



The finished piece. I added another green firework to balance out the composition, and moved a few others around slightly. There are still little details I could tweak, but with a short deadline I was less than inclined to argue. Overall I'm still very pleased with it. I got the colors and the composition about where I wanted them, and I quite enjoyed painting it, especially the fireworks. I must do another piece with them sometime.

And that, in short, is the creative process-- at least for me. I generally don't do much more than this; like I said, I usually jump straight from thumbnail to painting. But I do sketch when I'm fishing for ideas, and I should have a few of those up, shortly.


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