Daily Art: Changes to my Changes

January 10th:

Sorry about the blurry photo; it didn't look this horrible on the screen of my smart phone. Blurriness aside, however, the point of this day's Daily Art was to lighten up some of the colors that I added two days prior; the top half of the image was just too dark. Now it's too light. Oh well: more work for the future!

Daily Art: More Tweaks to Existing Pages

January 9th:

This page, page 20, also existed before this day, but I made a few tweaks to it. Most of my tweaks involved the use of an opaque white marker to either lighten areas or cover up unwanted details that came through from the reverse page and muddled the already busy patterns that existed on this page. I basically just added some extra, much needed, contrast.

Daily Art: I Finally Finished This Page!

January 7th:

I finally finished this page of my Cut-Up Sketchbook. I've explained about my Cut-Up Sketchbook project before, right? Well, for anyone that doesn't know, my Cut-Up Sketchbook is a book that I bound myself using a combination of white drawing paper and sheets made of collages of handmade papers (for the record I made the collage sheets, not the handmade papers themselves). I have since proceeded to draw and paint in this book, as well as cut out pieces from it. In this book I use an x-acto knife as a drawing tool, letting the pages before and after each page influence the one on which I am currently focusing. I love this project. I think that this is some of the most honest artwork I've ever done: it comes straight from my soul. My greatest hope is that someday I can figure out how to incorporate this style into my more "professional" work, but for now I'll just keep creating my Cut-Up Sketchbook.

Daily Art: Feel like you're playing a game of "Spot the Difference" yet?

January 5th:

Ok, okay. So I know days 1-5 this year have not seen a whole lot of progress and these first five days of "Daily Art" must feel like a game of "Spot the Difference", but some progress is better than no progress. I wouldn't have had any artistic progress yet this year if I hadn't committed myself to making "Daily Art" again, so I'm going to go ahead and count this agonizingly slow progress as a personal win anyway. :)

Daily Art 2015

I've decided to bring back daily art: it's helpful to keep me motivated and moving forward with my portfolio. I continue to be creative and make new art when I'm not doing Daily Art, but I'm not entirely happy with the pace of my progress, and I certainly don't post portfolio updates nearly as often as I should. So, here it goes:

Daily Art 2015!

January 1st:

Daily Art: Cut-Outs and Character Sheets

Day 104:

Ok, so it's not really a character sheet yet, but I began sketching to create one. Unfortunately the sketching was slow because I was doing a bit of a redesign during it, but I feel like I'm going in the right direction. The subject of my character sheet will be the Mother Nature character that I posted on this blog in earlier Daily Art entries. I decided to change the "cloak" to something detachable. It's now connected to a bunch of birds that land on Mother Nature when she wants to wear it and fly away when she doesn't.

The bottom two images were sketched when I was considering that the character may be able to transform according to her environment, reflecting the flora and fauna of the location. I realize that there's not much to them, but they were just a couple of sketches while I was brainstorming...

 

Day 103:

I cut out some pieces of my cut-up sketchbook. They are difficult to see in this image without knowing where to look, but they're there:

Daily Art: Anicient Phoenix

Day 102:

I think that this page of the cut-up sketchbook may be finished now. I won't say that it's done for certain because I've gone back and revised a number of pages in this book already, but it's certainly where I want it to be for now.

Daily Art: Day 100

Day 100:

I spent the majority of my day painting the designs from yesterday's daily art on the faces of kids and a couple of adults. I never stopped to request any pictures of my paintings, so, unfortunately, I can't show any of my work on this blog, but I was quite happy with what I painted today.

Oddly, given my perfectionist nature, the face painting that I did today that I am most proud of was a half-mask of Spiderman on a kid who was probably about 2 years old and was constantly turning his head this way and that the whole time that I was painting. It was the fastest Spiderman mask that I've ever done, and it had numerous overwhelming flaws, but it got the gist of Spiderman across despite the challenges, and for that I'm proud. I was so afraid of accidentally poking that kid in the eye with my brush since every time I aimed my paintbrush toward one point of contact it was probably about a 50/50 shot of whether I'd get my brush on that spot before his head turned, and a half mask is all around the eye area. And then there was the chance that he'd turn his head and eye into the brush... But that risk was why I worked quickly and took shortcuts and managed to actually finish the mask, despite its obvious flaws. Before when I've encountered similar difficulties the parents have always given up and taken the kid away before I could finish, leaving a half painted area on their kid's face. They thank me politely and pay anyway, sometimes apologizing for their child's behavior, but I'm disappointed to see their kid go off half-done. I feel like I've failed at my job, because it's natural for a kid that small to move around a lot, especially when someone's tickling their face with a soft, wet brush tip. Today I assessed the situation and worked through it, and the thought of those chicken-scratch spider webs makes me smile...

Now, since it's day 100 and I have no imagery to show for my face painting, I made sure to do something else that I could show today. I did a bit more work on the ancient phoenix page of my cut-up sketchbook. I was trying to give the colored background a bit of a stained-glass feel. I think that it's working, but now I need to go through and darken up the outlines again since the watercolor pencil pigment dulled them a bit wherever it overlapped...

I can't  believe that I've been doing this for 100 days already...

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 #12

Catching Up: Part 2.

 

Day 32:

Today I have spent a lot of time fixing photos.

I've been cropping, tweaking perspective, adjusting color balances, levels, and saturation, painting out random tiny artifacts, and much, much more. And after all of that, I did this:

This is an early stage of a painting. It was originally intended to be an acrylic painting, but after adding a quick layer of color to the cloak I'm considering switching it to a digital painting... We'll see how it goes I guess.

 

Day 31:

Yesterday I drew the sketch that was the beginning of the Red Riding Hood image:

By the end of the evening it looked like this:

 

Day 30:

I drew some thumbnail storyboard sketches. 

The heart image series is separate from the other images. I wasn't really going for full-on storyboarding here: I just wanted to get a few images that I hope to properly storyboard later out of my head for now before I bury them with other ideas and forget what they looked like. There are still more images related to this story that I need to get down, but this is all that I've gotten to for now. The first two images are crossed out because I simply wasn't pleased with how they turned out.

 

Day 29:

This day I just spent time drawing grids on paper to have a place to work on my storyboard thumbnail sketches.

 

Day 28:

Some work in my Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 27:

More Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 26:

Even more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 25:

The day that began this particular series of Cut-Up Sketchbook doodling:

 

Day 24:

Switching gears now to painting:

It's not much to look at - just the early stages of a painted project. I bought the wooden tree with the black outlines on it, but I'm going to paint it my own way. It'll still be owls and hearts in a tree, but it should end up fairly different from the original design.

 

Day 23:

This was quite a long day of art as I painted mailboxes for my niece and nephew for Valentine's Day.

They're quite simple, but I figured that I didn't need to make them masterpieces since they're playthings for a three and five year old...

Day 22: 

This day was the the day that I painted the base coats of color on the above mailboxes.

Day 21:
And this is the day that I completed the base coat of paint for the owl tree:
Whew! That was a lot in one post. Hopefully I'll keep this updated more regularly in the future. (I was doing so well for awhile there...) :)

Daily Art #11

I've been a bit distracted lately making progress on other projects followed by an out-of-town visit, so I'm going to catch up on posting my recent Daily Art projects in two blog installments today. The second post will be made much later in the day after I finish making the cell phone pictures that I've been taking lately to document my artwork quickly presentable. For now, I'll just be posting progress from days 17-20 until I get the rest of my images spruced up to my liking. (As always, I'll present the works from most recent to least. I do this because that is the same order in which my blog posts are presented and I would prefer to keep the images in some semblance of chronological order if one were to scroll through the posts - even if it is reverse chronology...)

Day 20:

The finished painted mirror that I posted my start on a few weeks ago (minus the finishing clear coat):

 

Day 19:

More work in my "Cut-Up Sketchbook" - this time with paint.

 

Day 18:

The in-between stage of the finished painted mirror that I completed on Day 20:

 

Day 17:

A blue ballpoint pen ink drawing of the character named "Felix" that I designed early in 2003. It's just a quick sketch that I did one day while I was bored. I'm not particularly happy with the position of the back leg and its foot.

Daily Art #10

I've continued work on my cut-up sketchbook for the past two days, but I've been working on different pages (somewhat...).

Day 16:

Today I worked on the page two pages past the page that I've been working on for the past few days. The facing page next to the one with the palm tree doodles has a semi-transparent vellum in the middle of it. Thus, when the page is turned the palm tree cave doodle shows through. I plan to leave the actual doodle black and white, but I colored the vellum with ink to "color" the drawing on the other page:

The image of the picture is a little blurred because the pages won't sit flat together, but you get the gist. This is just a start. I'm going to be refining this page a lot more after I get the other side of this page done. This beginning layer of color is really just a guideline for what I'm going to put on the page later.

Day 15:

Yesterday I did a little refinement to one of the pages that I've worked on (and previously thought finished) before. The very first page of the book has a semi-transparent piece of paper in it. I like the style and color of the paper, as well as its placement in the page, but, unfortunately, I wrote on the cover of the book awhile back and missed the fact that the writing went right across that piece of paper and showed through to the decorated inside of the book. I've been meaning to fix it for awhile, so yesterday I finally got a start on it:

I fixed the mishap by blacking out the back of the entire semi-transparent rectangle; that covered up the writing. But then, the black showing through looked bad against the other papers and designs on the page, so I made it blend in a bit more by painting glitter nail polish over most of the square. Now I need to refine it a bit more with paint, but I haven't really had opportunity to paint lately, so it may be awhile until I continue with this particular piece of the book.