Sorry, just had to save this here since my computer is giving me trouble again. Stupid thing, right when I need it so badly. Anyway, I managed to make this a nice reminder. Doesn't this look cool?! I love it! I put it up on my desktop too, I just have to keep looking at it. Was a bit of a bother to get it up, but glad I finally downloaded it from yousendit



Original is here by the way, had to resize it:
http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm202/blue-in-willow/Q01HSkhabWdubHpIRGc9PQ.jpg

Also! Remember the red lady from downstairs.

Been listening too much to Karmacoma, so had to draw.

Damn... another post?

Yes. Well.. more like an update of yesterdays speedy. Day version, this time.

Weeks pass continued

I forgot to mention that my C drive collapsed between all of this, rendering me quite helpless and panicked for quite a bit. I'm running windows off a cd at the moment, and backed all my things up on a different drive. Just in time, as it turned out, since windows at the moment does not agree with;
a) photoshop
b) music
c) internet
d) ventrilo
e) games

Since I have mostly at least two of these on at the same time, quite some files have become corrupted or just lost because I would be in an amazing drawing flow and going all nuts on a drawing and didn't want to save every 5 minutes. It's bit me in the ass, though, since I've only managed to salvage a tiny tiny portion of what I've drawn.

This is a small one, more a thumbnail practice, really.











And here comes the really, really strange part. The last file I'd been working on before the whole crash became so corrupted that I've been unable to work on it since. It doesn't matter how heavy the file, photoshop on it's own can handle it, albeit with a bit of oompf in there. But this file.... this file crashes everything. Music stutters, internet shuts down, photoshop shuts down.. No matter how small in size or file I make it, it'll crash down everything around it. By now it's been nicknamed the Cursed File by my friends, and I can hardly do a brushstroke untill everything comes to a standstill. It won't fully crash photoshop on just painting, but when one stroke takes at least a few seconds to be actually put down on the canvas, it's not really helping either.

Well, here it is. I was quite proud of it, and it was a wonderful journey to get to it and it was all set to go through the utter last stage of rendering untill it all went to hell.

This first stage, just about 20 minutes in. I can't honestly tell you why I did things.

























And this is where I ended..

The dinosaur had a master next to him, but he was lost in the crash. The sky is unfinished, and unfortunately the outlines of the molten metal gargoyles are still visible, because I was trying those out, and many other things aren't clean or clear yet. One thing was finished however, and I'm very happy with how that worked out; the big roof over the street and its lighting/shading. That worked well. Really well. (sorry.. it is quite big)

Weeks pass

And suddenly you find yourself a year older, with a lot more worry, someone dead, and a job.

My birthday came and went, with nothing special happening. Odd days.. these things. And for once I decided to take a day off and do anything I wanted to do (and was capable off) and for the first time in a couple of months, I found myself utterly bored. In the end I resorted to philosophy by staring out the window and thinking about things. (my mom did come over though, which was great :) )

Setbacks hit once again, just as it looked like things were picking up at a nice pace. I suppose that's the wheel of fate, but there's nothing much I can do about it except to keep going on what I've been doing all along. I have great sundowns and sunrises these days, and I've yet to be ill, so I'll work things out :) Tan worries a lot, though, in the meanwhile.

Silly as it sounds, but one of our cats passed away, and I was very saddened by it. She was the daughter of one of previous cats and I helped her being born, and tried to raise her when her mother didn't want her anymore. She just became part of this odd bunch of creatures in my family, and we all loved her very very much. Some people see pets just as animals, and nothing more, but it's as if I lost something of my close family and it hurts a lot. I hope she's fine now, and I'm glad she went quickly, when it was her time to go. I regret not being there when she left, but I was unable to be there, living far away and it being very late at night, but that's how it goes.

As for drawing, I've more been trying to put together a portfolio and a c.v. to send to people after Coded Illusions fell apart last month. All of us are sort of shipwrecked but many are being adopted by other companies, so it's time for me to join the fray. My job, a few migraine attacks and the loss of our cat, together with the work I had to do for graduation and my birthday and other appointments made it a bit hard to make very revolutionary things, but I dabbled on anyway. Here's a few things I've been working on;

This was more a sort of speedpainting, but the progress was kinda fun to see. In the end I stopped working on it because I was killing it. I have yet to learn when to stop, review, continue, stop/finish. Especially that last part is still awfully tricky.








































I thought that when I came here, it was so incredibly bright and shiny and light and blue and dominating that I tossed everything aside.
















Would I change things now? Oh yes.. I'm not pleased with the blue light at all. I may remake this into a daylight version where all the lights are switched off and it returns to my original idea for a place, which is in the middle of a humid hot mayan complex in a big big-foliaged jungle. It's far off as it is now, isn't it? Oh you bet...

I also didn't like the amount of bright light coming off the whole structure (it's a sort of old human/alien built structure around a well) and I wanted it to become more alien without it being less natural somewhat. So I covered the place up with rock and rather made it appear as if the wear and tear of the climate made the 'real' crystaline structure of the top half appear. Like bronze statues look different where they've been touched often. Or how you can scrape off paint to reveal the underlying color or texture, something like that.

What do I like about it? The process. I loved just going nuts on the painting of it, and I mean the painting and not just the rational colorpicking and static perfection I tend to go for. Just rough colours, rough brush strokes, and see where we end up. Good fun :)

Mountains

I like mountains. I need to practice how light colours rocks though.. and it's unfinished.

On another note, started posting in CA.org. First comments:
- finish stuff
- fully render stuff
- dare more

Am planning again to do one painting a day, so this is todays. Unfinished once more ;)

More stories and pictures to come later on. I went castle hunting.

Trees, Carpets... and Fish

Yeah, that's it, kinda about it.


Some days, good. Some days, bad. I started out with a sketch that I grew quite fond off. But when I coloured it, everything went awry. I called it quits after an hour or two, for it seemed a damned waste to keep screwing up like that. Later I made a.. well, what is it, really? ;) Something strange, that was. I've also never used colours like these. It's a bit odd, but somehow I like it.













This is actually the only part I liked about the colour version, but just because the energy is still there, and the green is so nice and thick next to the cloth.
















Spent too much time on it, probably. And I could spend many more hours on it too. It's unsketched and spawned just from doodling. I made a second blog where I'll keep my 'official' things, like a sort of portfolio, and this was intended to be backdrop for the header. But whaddaya know, everything went from there. No restrictions, no rules for practice, just quickly go wild on things (also partly because I wasn't really supposed to be drawing at all, but writing) and this is what I ended up with after a little over an hour. What it is? Whelp, I've found out that that's different for everyone.



On a sidenote, music plug of today: DeVotchKa.
It's a mix between mexican Mariachi, Spinvis, V.a.s.t, Muse, a bit of Unkle, and then some polish polka and old european folk. It's a wonderful blend, although you may want to see past the Johnny Cash like drunken voice of the singer.

Mountain Bridge

Red yesterday, blue today. Darkness yesterday, brightness today. More atmospheric training, which resulted today in the making of a cold canyon, barren save for two scouting vehicles to make the contrast of the place bigger. I think I need more work on textures.



Sketch.


















Sketch with the light added in.



















Refined the sketch and added the colour.

















The final bit, for now. I still want more textures, but I don't want to kill the drawing.

Firepool

I've never been very good with titles..

Today I wanted to train in thumbnail environments. I'd make a very tiny but clear B&W drawing, and then several, to train lighting, composition etc. But once I'd penned down the first one in a minute, it became interesting enough (for me) to continue. Added more black, more white, more rocks, more light, and so on. Still was basic. Now I've been having some trouble converting a black and white drawing into colour. In fact, I had a huge amount of trouble converting things over. So when I was doing this one, I figured I'd have to have a go at it sometime and do it well enough for once so I could 'flow' from sketch to a basic environment in full colour.

Anyway.. here's what I did. Kinda. I lost a few steps because.. well.. I'm using just one layer in photoshop :) So some things got lost because I keep removing and painting new things.


This is the black and white version. It's already quite elaborate at this point, but it basically shows where I wanted the light to be, and what would be causing that light. A teensy crater.. or something.







Funky, innit? I figured I'd try this for my missing key to go from black and white into colour. I decided the middle main color for the light and simply adjusted the black and white into that. With it, I kinda removed the light, so I had to rebuild that into there, but now I had a colour base so it would make things easier rather than to plunk a color down on a greyscale. Whoo! I should have thought of this before. I know it's probably a bit of cheating, and there must be more noble and sophisticated ways, but heck... argh, I can only do so much..



Woops.. different, eh? Nyeah.. this is where I skipped many steps to show it. I added more space to the right, added the light I wanted, removed and changed the rocks in front. In all, it went from tiny crater to a lake with something hot and a mountain range in the back. At this point, I'm only going to dink around with the details..




And this is what I ended up with. About... 6 hours later. Still a bit rough here and there, but I have to put it away now. So, how is it?

That dreaded first post

Thanks to a certain Swedish dj, who reminds me time and time again to bloody start posting, I figured I just should. I don't like posting unfinished things. I don't like posting scribbles. I know I've made this blog to get rid of that stupid habit and to just.. post.

All these files are training.. Short sketches, quick doodles and tests, and they all have just one layer, and a 4-step-brush-history to work with. Thats because that if I screw up, I have to fix it by hand instead of going easy by doing many 'undo's'.

So, this is what I doodled today. It's a quick sketch, for some sort of technological futuristic research center/energy base/core. Very sketchy. Am not at all pleased with the spikes up top. Am trying to train in more toned down colors..






One of the experiments of yesterday, went too far on the layer adjusting..
This one is also unfinished, I wanted to make a big rocky wall on the right with a horseman in silhouette in front, but failed at the composition. I'll probably go back to this one soon.




This one I call Dragoon, heh. I have a strange method of naming.. I wanted to make a dragon made of clouds and dreams, sleeping away in an endless landscape. It's a nice thought, and started as a monochrome colour practive. Perhaps I'm going to refine this one too, were it not for my total lack of ability to draw dragons. (unfortunately, since I quite like them)







edit:: Bigger version of the blue research one: http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y79/Anduir/interstellarcopy.jpg

Here we go

A long time ago, many artists made blogs and blogged all their scribbles, doodles, tests and excercises, as well as full and complete works of art.

I'm going to leave it at just the doodles, scribbles, excercises and tests and perhaps in the end, works in progress.

./wave