Raygun enhancing

I've taken the raygun illo into Photoshop and am noodling around with things like adding texture, boosting saturation, and playing with lighting:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Trying not to get ahead of myself

 

This is a work-in-progress I've been doodling on and off during my morning and evening commute. I've been keeping it pretty loose and painterly, conditioning myself to work with larger textured brushes. I started to jump the gun a bit in terms of detail with the cockpit window, I'm going to leave it alone for now and try and get everything else in the scene up to snuff.

Pew-pew continued

Here's where the raygun rendering stands currently:

I added the little targeting sight thingy, and refined some of the detail in the grip. Next step is to take it into Photoshop and add some texture.

Here's what the underlying mesh looks like:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Raygun work-in-progress

Here's a new gradient mesh illustration I'm working on:

Pew-pew!

Still rough around the edges, but I'm liking the way meshes work with metallics...

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Anne Bonny, Pirate

I attended the September session of Aaron Miller's Figurative Illustration Workshop last night, and the model this month was dressed as Anne Bonny, the Pirate Queen. She wore a great costume with a ton of accessories, like sashes and pistols and swords. It was an overwhelming amount of detail; seriously, I could have spent days upon days trying to capture it all. As it was, I constantly had to fight with the tendency to linger on every little area, and instead concentrate on capturing the gesture and form. Hopefully there'll be good photorefs made available so I can go back in and give the paintings some more polish.

It's been a while since I've been to one of these workshops, and it was pretty evident to me how out-of-practice I was. I definitely felt very rusty, and slow. Still, it was a nice opportunity to use Colors!3D on the 3DS XL, and for the most part it worked out fairly well... I have to adjust to the XL's larger footprint; my hand cramped a couple times while holding it. But it sure was nice being able to paint on a (relatively) bigger touchscreen.

Overall, it was a great figure drawing/painting session, as per usual.

Works-in-progress

Gah, I've been so busy lately... Haven't had a lot of opportunities to work on my own stuff, but I didn't want too much time to go by without posting something here.

I've been working on this piece during my daily commute, re-working an older illustration into something a little more painterly, using Colors! 3D. Unfortunately, the file seems to have gotten corrupted, so I'm not able to output it at high resolution. I might take it into Photoshop and build it up more from there:

 

I'm also doing a paintover of another previous illo, a more dimensional version of the anime-style Tachikoma. I'm working out all the shading in Colors! 3D, and then I'll take it into Photoshop for a more finished polish: