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 :)

Welcoming 2018

It has been 18 months since I started this blog. In this post I would like to note down what have happened so far and finish with my plan for the near future.

The Story So Far...

When I started in June 2016, I did not have a clear direction. I felt the need to draw and I thought posting on a blog will be a motivation to draw regularly. This did not work so well. Only 4 drawings in (see "Cyclist Girl", "Cap Girl", "Girl with Gun", "Captain America + Rockman") I found myself not knowing what to do.

At the same time, I learned that I should build an audience. What a concept! It is simple, yet I never thought of it as an explicit goal. So I started an Instagram account for my drawings. Not long after that, I also create a Facebook page. So far Instagram proved to be more effective in reaching new audience, so I spent more time and effort there. Even now I am not totally sure what different roles a Facebook page and an Instagram account play. Blogging is definitely for something more text heavy, like this post, for reflections and thoughts.

On the drawing side, I took part in Inktober 2016 to draw pictures based on my idea about a girl named Maggie and a boy named Faito. I knew I could not draw 31 full page images in 31 days, so I focused on quality instead of quantity. (See "Noisy", "Collect", "Hungry", "Sad", "Hidden", and "Lost") All in all, Inktober gave me confidence that I could produce more drawings than I previously thought, assuming I am familiar with the subject.

After Inktober I thought adding colors would help me getting noticed. I drew a few pieces with color pencils. (See "Dr Strange", "Welcoming the Year the Rooster", and "Mount Pine Cone") I quickly learned that the main difficulty with color pencil, or any physical media, is the necessity to think about colors and values at the same time. To make matters even more complex, color pencil requires blending. I knew that it was time for me to revisit painting digitally.

For some reason, however, I kept delaying it. Instead, I experimented more with drawings pens. I drew in ink portraits (see "Ink Portrait Study", "Elon Musk Portrait"), cars (see "Car Drawings", "Tesla Model S and Mitsubishi Minica"), and Dragon Ball characters as robots (see "Robot Gohan", "Robot Trunks"). (It was around this time I noticed that Instagram was more effective in reaching new audience, so I posted less frequently here.)

I had fun drawing these, but I let the complexity took the fun out of drawing. Only around August 2017 I rekindled the fun of drawing when I returned to drawing kids. These drawings made me want to add more characters to the "Maggie and Faito" concept, but I decided against it. I think I should focus on Maggie and Faito.

I finally got to digital painting in October, clashing with Inktober. I decided to not participate in Inktober 2017. It was a difficult decision to make, especially with what Jake Parker did for his Inktober 2017 (more on this later). I was inspired by the bold colors in "Thor: Ragnarok" trailer. By the time the posters were released, I wanted to paint a portrait of Chris Hemsworth. I promised myself to paint 3 paintings for 3 films ("Thor: Ragnarok", "Justice League", "Star Wars: The Last Jedi") and I did (see "Chris Hemsworth", "Henry Cavill", and "Daisy Ridley"). I will probably wrote another post to reflect on what I learned from painting these.

Next Episode Preview

So far, it looks like colored paintings reached more new audience than inked drawings. My plan is to have another small project in which I will draw characters in "Maggie and Faito" proportions, and then paint them digitally.

Before elaborating on my plan, let us take a look at what Jake Parker worked on for his Inktober. He started with a large piece of paper. Each day, he drew a character inspired by the prompt word for that day. Thus, after 31 days, he finished a large piece with 31 characters!

I cannot describe what an insight this was. I knew a large piece with many characters would take a long time to plan, draw, and color. Just thinking of the amount of work required overwhelmed me. The way Jake approached the problem gave me the confidence to even think about drawing a large piece with many characters.

And so, my plan in 2018 is to draw a spread of Marvel Cinematic Universe characters in anticipation for "Avengers: Infinity War". The goal is to draw and ink 16 characters (at least) by 4 May 2018.

I am excited about this project. I have already practiced with "Maggie and Faito" drawings in which I drew them separately, but planned in such a way that the drawing can be combined. Let us see where this will lead me to :)