Daily Art: A Change of Scenery

April 2nd:

I went out to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve today to take some photos. Most of the poppies were gone already, but I still managed to get a couple of good pictures.

Daily Art: Santa Barbara

February 8th:

It was a gorgeous day in Santa Barbara. My nephew and his friends found shark eggs attached to some kelp washed up onto the beach, and I snapped this photograph and a bunch more like it to make a new collage (eventually).

Daily Art: San Francisco Collage

January 26th:

This is a small piece of a much larger collage that I put together of photos taken looking down over the city from Twin Peaks in San Francisco. This view is near the center of the collage horizontally, and shows nearly the full view vertically, as the collage is much more wide than it is tall.

Daily Art: Framed!!!

January 17th:

A little creative framing work on one of my 3-dimensionalized photos today. (I wish I'd taken a picture of all of the hard work that I put into the back of the frame-job, because I think it ended up looking quite professional...)

Daily Art: Three Weeks of Daily Art

I've been working on the most recent pages of my Cut-Up Sketchbook for the past few days while I've been out of town:

Day 98:

 

Day 97:

 

Day 96:

 

Day 95:

 

Then I spent this past weekend with my niece and nephew helping my sister prepare for my niece's birthday party, so the art on those days is all party and kid-related:

Day 94:

On Sunday I acted as the unofficial photographer of the birthday party. I won't post pictures of the kids online, but I will show a snippet of an action shot of the piñata smash:

 

Day 93:

Saturday was cupcake decorating day:

The crab was following a design that my sister found (on Pinterest, I'm sure...)

 

Day 92:

On Friday I drew some pictures of "Frozen" characters for my niece and nephew that they chose to fold into fans. My nephew wanted Olaf and Sven, which he then colored before adding drawings of his own of Anna and Cristophe:

And my niece wanted Elsa, which I colored for her:

 

Day 91:

And before that was more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 90:

 

Day 89:

On day 89 I spent the better part of my work time taking screen shots, editing, and compositing progress photos for this blog. I think this qualifies as Daily Art considering the amount of time that I spent working in Photoshop, but it does not yield its own images. You'll just have to look at days 76-88 to see the results of day 89's work...

 

Day 88:

A tree:

In the form of a photo collage.

 

Day 87:

I made a list of all of the remaining tasks to complete in the revision of my Juggler's textures this day.

And then I decorated it:

 

Day 86:

The 86th day of Daily Art was a Saturday on which I spent 5 hours face painting. Here's a sample of my work:

 

Day 85:

I also face painted on Friday:

 

And made a quick sign advertising the face painting:

 

Day 84:

On this Thursday and the two days before I spent time creating a 10 second long demo reel for my former school's Spring Show. As a student who was enrolled in the fall I still qualify for entrance into this year's show despite the fact that I've already graduated. This is the reel that I submitted:

 

Day 83:

I submitted that reel because I realized that the submission guidelines prohibited having any contact information anywhere other than the first frame of the 10 second time span (I edited out that frame for posting on the internet). This is the reel that I created the first time around (and the way that I would have left it had I had free reign).

 

Day 82:

This was the day that I began the reel-editing process.

And the day that I discovered that the resolution requirements were full 1920 x 1080 HD and that I had to re-render a couple of my turntables.

(such as the Juggler wireframe turntable that includes the image above.)

 

Day 81:

I spent this day trying to turn detail that I'd previously achieved through a normal map into detail achieved through a displacement map.

It worked in general, but lacked much of the sharp definition provided by the normal maps...

 

Day 80:

Daily Art day #80 was filled with technical behind-the-scenes stuff that provides no great imagery, like transferring sculpting from one object to another to utilize the UVs of the new item rather than the original one...

 

Day 79:

On this day I concocted some designs for face painting:

 

Day 78:

I reorganized my Juggler's UVs this day so that each individual piece of her won't require its own unique map when I texture paint her. I probably ended up averaging 3 - 5 items per map instead:

 

Day 77:

On this day I finished UVing every single piece on my Juggler so that I could really texture paint her rather than relying on procedurals as I did previously:

And, before that, I built a new mesh for the tire in my Juggler's shoulder:

It has far fewer polygons than the tire with the modeled tread, but I think that I should be able to create the same look of a tread by creating a displacement map with the tread pattern in it.

 

Day 76:

And, finally, on the first/last day (depending on how you look at it) of Daily Art for this entry, I created a new, solid mesh to replace the very high-poly wire mesh in my Juggler's tea ball.

Then I created and tested displacement and transparency maps to use on the new mesh to make it look like it's built from the same wires as the original mesh:

 

That's all folks!

Daily Art: Film Art

I've spent the last week working on the film artwork that I mentioned in my last post, and I've gotten permission from the director of the project to share the pieces that I've created for the film here. The drawings that I created are basically set dressing pieces that are supposed to have been drawn by the main character in the film. So, without further ado, here are the pieces that I created for my first outside freelance art contract:

Days 51-57:

The First Concept:

The Drawing:

(Actually, the "concept" for the first one is really just the same drawing minus a few revisions. I just started sketching with pastels after I got the job and came up with that image, then decided that rather than creating everything on-the-fly at full size I should do a few thumbnails to give the director choices for the final pieces. Hence, from here out, the concepts will actually be completely separate images from the finished pieces.)

The drawing is pastel on black paper; approximately 11 x 17".

 

The Second Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is pastel on black paper; approximately 10 x 13".

 

The Third Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil and marker on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Fourth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is marker and watercolor pencil on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Fifth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, marker, and charcoal on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Sixth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is colored pencil on black paper; approximately 12 x 16".

 

The Seventh Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, charcoal pencil, and colored pencil on paper; approximately 11 x 14".

 

The Eighth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, pastel, colored pencil, and a tiny bit of liquid paper on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

I finished the last of the drawings yesterday and spent my artistic hours today fixing the extremely quick cell phone pictures that I took to document the drawings into something more professional looking.

Here are a couple of examples of today's work:

and

I am satisfied.

Freedom Post #2: Daily Art # 1

Now that I am out of school and done with my thesis I need a new topic for this blog.

I have decided to do some kind of artistic/creative exercise every day. It can be as simple as a doodle or as complicated as a full painting. It can be a whole, finished piece or it can be just one step of a multi-day project. It can be a mundane task that practices technical artistic skills (like color correcting images) or a much more creative process (like designing a new character). I just want to keep practicing and do something every day to keep my creative skills sharp while I search for my first real artistic employment.

I'm viewing this as an exercise for myself, so I won't be posting every piece of daily art; some pieces may be too personal for posting on the internet and some too mundane to be worth sharing. I also won't be posting daily. But I'm going to try for weekly. I'll post up to seven "daily art" pieces at a time. Not all of it will be my best work. Some of it will be just for fun, and some of it will be projects specifically aimed at enhancing my demo reel or portfolio, such as texturing my untextured thesis models.

I think that that about sums up the concept. Now to get down to it.

These are the pieces of "daily art" that I have completed so far this week:

Today: Base coat of paint on a mirror that I am painting as a gift for my mother's birthday. I painted her a mirror in cool tones as a Christmas gift, and she requested a warmer piece to complement it. I will be finishing the imagery on it tomorrow.

Yesterday: Digital Paint Doodle created in Adobe Photoshop

Sunday: Color corrections of photos documenting portfolio-quality work from my AAU anatomy class that somehow never made it on this site before. I manipulated about ten different images; the rest may be viewed in the "Anatomy" section of my "Portfolio" page.

Saturday: Charcoal self portait that I choose not to share.

Friday: Wooden plaque decorated with a quote from an unknown source that I found on the internet and accents in acrylic paint. This was a birthday gift for my stepmother.

I think that that selection gives a fair indication of how varied these posts are going to be. This week has included two acrylic painted projects so far, which is rare for me. I expect drawings and doodles in a variety of media to be pretty frequent in the future, and once I get all of my job profiles updated on various websites over the next week or so I'm going to go back to working on my "Fearless" thesis project models, so by then much of my progress will be digital work. I'm looking forward to it.