Quick Coloring Practice

I want to practice more coloring, so I started quick coloring practices with the hope of improving my painting skills. I spent 3 sessions, around 30 minutes each for this painting. Let me know what you think! :)

Masha and the Bear

On the weekend my wife and I discovered this gem "Masha and the Bear". Masha, the main character, is rather unique considering this is a series for kids. We laughed at the gags too. Take a look at this particular episode that we happened to catch:


The long series of gags from the start of the episode until 2 minute mark is really good. Notice how the wolves and the rooster communicated their idea via gestures and supporting images rather than via words. I thought the characters had enough appeal to support the show, the acting was especially good, the rendering was good, and the writing was great--at least for this particular episode.

So has anyone else seen this animated series? What are your thoughts about it?

Post Infinity War

I just updated the Infinity War project page. Apologies for taking two weeks to update that.

Right now I am taking a semi-break after using up so much time on the project. I am still going to spend even more time on it--to paint the spread. I will post my progress either here or on social media.

Meanwhile, I have been wondering the next project to work on. I thought of a few:

• tabling at artist alley on a local event in Singapore,
• making my art website online,
• drawing silly 2- or 3- or 4-panel web comics.

I am really considering tabling at artist alley. Let us see where this takes me to :)

Small Update

Marvel Studios released another trailer and poster for Avengers: Infinity War on Friday. (See the official announcement here.) I felt I saw almost too much in the trailer. At one point I was considering to close my eyes (and quickly realized it was dumb). I am certainly looking forward to this film :)

Now, related to the large drawing I am working on, I was surprised to see so many Guardians of the Galaxy characters appear in the trailer (because I am not going to include them in the drawing) and to see the absence of Hawkeye (because I have drawn him). I plan to draw Ant-Man as well, but he will not be in the film. I may change my mind and include another character. We will see.

Painting Chris Hemsworth

Final painting

Last year I wanted to prove to myself that I could still paint digitally and to finish a mini project at the same time. Then I saw this poster for "Thor Ragnarok"...

The bold color scheme real inspired me to start a painting. If I could capture some feel of this poster, I would be happy. I wanted to focus on the painting process, the subject should be something I was familiar with. So I decided to paint a portrait of Chris Hemsworth as Thor. 

I followed a tried and tested work process; in this respect I did not do anything radical. I just wanted to get back to digital painting after a long hiatus. I constantly checked and rechecked proportions to make sure I got the likeness.

   

In addition, I took my time and painted values as a first pass. Only after I was satisfied enough with the values that I painted the colors.

The first color pass was hard: I got so used to the look of the value painting that the first color pass looked hopelessly bad. Plus, I realized quite late into the color painting that the screen I was working on was abnormally desaturated. The result was an overly saturated painting. Well, good thing it was easy to fix in a digital painting.

   

For this painting I created a custom Photoshop brush. (It was an okay brush, but I felt the need for a better one.) I was pleasantly surprised that adjusting settings of the custom brush was good enough to paint the base of facial hair. I then developed facial hair volume by layering individual strokes.

For the polish layers, I felt I benefited a lot from my experience with compositing. I realized that painting digitally had a lot in common with compositing. For example, I could make the shadows brighter by applying Levels adjustment. Long time ago I would have been unwilling to do this because "everything must be hand painted". Now I could see that this was the flexibility of working digitally. It was something to embrace, not to avoid.

Well, I think I have said what I wanted to say about this painting and my process. Now I am interested to hear your thoughts about them. Is it too safe? Should I have taken more risk? Let me know in the comments below :)