Pre-flight Battle Prep

Colors painting based on a drawing out of my sketchbook:

Robot Tank

Doodled this while I was waiting for the IT Department to install some software on my machine:



Pretty much one of those stream-of-consciousness sketches, where I wasn't quite sure where I was going with it at first. There are a couple things I like about the final piece, particularly the earthy subdued tones.

New robot noggin

Doodled while waiting for a midnight showing of the newest Harry Potter movie...



Btw, the movie was really good. Not as much action as the previous films I thought, this one was more about character development, with nice bits of quirk and nuance everywhere. Also loved the cinematography; there were a couple scenes where, in the way they were shot, I was like hey, that's fun! All in all a good time, but now after not having gotten to sleep last night 'til 4 in the morning, I'm quite zombified...

Freelance finished (hopefully)

Here are the finished paintings, albeit scaled down considerably:



I ended up editing the panther quite a bit; the others stayed pretty much the same, relatively speaking. It's a shame these are going to be printed on umbrella panels, a lot of the art is going to wind up being cropped out... C'est la vie. At least it's done, unless the client requests some changes, which usually ends up being the case.

At any rate, I'm going to go sleep now.

Freelance Numero Cuatro

Last one! Mr. Sea Otter:



So most of the heavy lifting is done, it should be pretty downhill from here...

Freelance number three

Polar bear:



One more and then I can move on to the final step...

Freelance Woof

Here's another piece of the freelance project, this one's a gray wolf:



In order to bump up the colors, I superimposed the layer with a copy, and set the copied layer to "Hard Light" mode... that has the effect of increasing the color saturation, while tightening up the contrast, for a bit more pop.

It's kind of reminiscent of some old gouache and acrylic illustration from a 50's textbook...

Freelance project work-in-progress

Here's one of the pieces I'm currently working on, of a Florida panther:



I had to pop the saturation a little in Photoshop; one of the things I find about working in Colors is that I tend to misjudge the color levels while I'm painting, and when I transfer the final pic to computer it looks flatter than I intended. But that's okay for this project, since I'm just laying down the foundation to paint over in PS...

Freelance this weekend

This weekend I've got a freelance project to work on, the client is a wildlife preservation group that wanted some painterly pieces done for a promo umbrella. I did mockup color roughs using Colors! for DS. For the final pieces I'm taking those roughs, polishing them up some more in Colors, and then I'll upsize them in Photoshop and add the finishing touches. It's an experiment, but one I suspect should work well.

Here's an unused color rough of a dolphin, I think I dashed this out in about 15-20 minutes:

More robot dev sketches

These are pretty rough, I'm still feeling my way 'round for a style I'm confident about...