Out for a walk

I don't know who these guys are or why they are out for a walk in the countryside.

Christopher Chant

Sometimes I have to get myself motivated so I pretend I'm working on a project. A while ago I was pretending I was working on vis dev type stuff for Christopher Chant (pretty great kids books, I recommend them). You can see one of those in this post (second image down)

Well, I decided to revisit that a bit. Here are two thumbnails for shots from the same world - a hot desert world. I've been trying to decide if the colors are too garish. I really want it to feel hot though.


Thinking back to what it was like working on this last year, it's amazing to me what a difference a year makes - I can crank out thumbnails so much faster now and not labor over lighting and colors nearly as much.

Dance hall and homework

Some thumbnails for a dance hall thing I'm working on.

And here are some super rough thumbs for homework. Sci fi and using some photomashing to get compositions to start with.

Stuff!

Normally Fin is a happy dog, like this:

But when I take him out in the rain, his ears go out to the sides and he just stares at me like I'm punishing him.


Some homework - color thumbnails


And some studies! Outdoor gouache painting and zoo sketching with a marker.

TIGER

Crawler

More studies

One plein air and two from the movie mongol. I have some gouache value studies, I'll see about getting those up soon, as well as something that's not a study.

Brushes used with wild abandon!

I usually only use three brushes - two hard rounds and one chalk brush. But tonight my environment design teacher gave us a whole mess of brushes to play around with. So I used them ALL. Well, not quite, but this is quite a lot of brushes. There are some really fun natural looking brushes and an incredibly handy chain brush. Brilliant!

Also, here is some environment design homework - greyscale studies:

Studies

Well, today was a day of homework and studies. None of the homework is really ready for posting, but here are some studies from various films.

Diorama sketch

I took a break from the usual stuff I've been working on and set up little dioramas with blankets, toilet paper tubes, and little plastic dogs tonight. I was just going to use them for reference, but I ended up painting over this one for fun.

Sloths

Sloths are hilarious. They have algae that grows in their fur. They climb all the way down out of the tree to poop. Their closest relatives - anteaters and armadillos - are as different from sloths as whales are from bats. They wear tiny hard drive hats (perhaps they aren't making a fashion choice there, but man, that's cute.)
Most of my sloth information comes from here

Swamp

Man, I'm obsessed with swamps and huts lately. This is a hut-free swamp, however. This is still a sketch - gotta fix that perspective and maybe change what the characters are doing/where they are.