The new semester started last week and again I can’t decide which projects I should pick. There are just too many interesting ones! But before discussing how my 5th semester will look like I still need to upload some traditional paintings from last semester’s seminar in Painting Classes:
Of course there are more paintings but I only wished to share my personal favorites 😉 You might recognize some of the techniques as I actually used them for some of my Illustration course’s final exam artwork.
Summer semester 2012 was full of landscape painting for me! I tried out traditional media and digital painting as well as all shades of mixed in-betweens.
For our final exam in Illustration we had to work on the theme “Weather, climate, environment” and I decided to keep the concept simple while searching for interesting artistic output at the same time! I wanted to see how far I can mix traditional and digital paintings – using both media’s advantages in combination. Some images are almost purely digitally while others are almost hand-painted only. More on the conceptual idea under the following paintings:
I did some graphic design work for college 🙂 The first two examples are simply practice for A3 magazine facing pages. The third one is the cover (left page = back, right page = front) for a magazine I designed for the course. It got printed and was part of the final exam for the 4th semester (non-commercial and for personal use only). I won’t upload the whole issue because of the personal data it includes.
All creature concepts are very rough (but I kind of like that about them). By the way, *Chann* is my favorite 🙂 There’s a reason for the name but it’s hard to explain with text only. Let’s just say it’s a sound it makes *chann*
In our third painting session in class we were supposed to paint objects of the “same” color.
My group picked the color “blue” 🙂
Acrylics. I couldn't finish this one in class, so I took a photograph and finished it at home.
The “Painting” class is all about traditional painting with gouache and acrylics. I painted a few times with gouache some time ago (for my application portfolio) but I wanted to get more used to the material. In my opinion painting and learning to see colors and experimenting with them is really beneficial for artists, even for digital paintings!
Here’s a short description covering some details:
But enough talking, here are my first results painted during class one and two only (I haven’t touched them at home BUT my scanner let out some soft color shades I couldn’t really recover digitally):
Gouache on watercolor paper. It's not as opaque as expected from the prof... I'm still thinking the watercolor-way 🙂
Gouache on toned cardboard. The blue rectangle was my cooling pad for the fish 😀 I actually ate this exact same fish a few hours later. It was a strange feeling but I didn't want it to go to waste 🙁
Three days ago I had my last exam! We had to present everything we did during the last semester and the presentation was extremely important itself by the way! We had ONLY 10-15 mins. I had my brand new laser-pointer so I was happy no matter what 🙂
Here’s the short summary PART I
Illustration Basics (reminder) (grade 1,3 / A):
If you’re interested you can find the rest of the characters for the Character Design task here.
Well I didn’t upload all of my work but I think you get the idea for the Illustration Basics classes: a lot of variety!
In my next posts I’ll sum up the rest of the semester for you 🙂
Perhaps some of you remember my older post about training composing your images with the “compo-game”. Well I have to admit it can get boring after a while, so here’s an alternative from which your skills can profit double!
The next time you paint something simply scan it (or take a picture and print it out, if you don’t have access to a scanner). Now open it with any program that can process images and zoom in (you could use a magnifying glass for the printed pic, I guess). Now scroll around and search for interesting parts. If something catches your eye don’t hesitate and copy just what you see on the monitor in that very moment (the zoomed-in part). Gather all parts in a different file and when you feel like there’s nothing more to add start freely moving them around. Your aim is to create a good balance between the parts themselves AND in regard to the negative space.
Here’s an example:
At the end of the day you’ve created a painting, used it as a basis for a second image and you improved your composing skills. WIN! WIN! WIN!