FIlm Studies (13 Assassins)

This is another assignment from my digital painting class. We were to watch a film (or many) and get screen caps to do full color studies from. There was a previous assignment doing the same thing but in black and white.... but those are just terrible so I'll keep them to myself.

I was doing these pretty quick, trying to get better at conveying a visual message rather quickly (speed-painting?). Really, I was looking mainly at the composition used in the shots and trying to get better at seeing color/ value without using the color-picker in Photoshop.

Also: Watch this movie if you have not, it is awesome and full of beautiful cinematography.

"Finished" illustration

Here is the Sniper illustration after some fixes were made (the original was posted to facebook for critique). Not much was tweaked, really... tried to knock back the background, silhouette the city against the moon and got rid of the bi-pod on the gun (just wasn't working). Mostly doing what I could to bring further distinction to fore, mid and back ground.

Process work for a digital painting

The goal of the project was to adapt a figure drawing into a storytelling illustraion.

Step 1: The drawing

Here is the drawing I chose (from a group of my 5 best at the time). Unfortunately all the best storytelling poses that models will do tend to be short ones (2 minutes or less). More unfortunately I still had been struggling a lot with figure drawing so the list of 'good' drawings was a short one.

 Step 2: Fixing what's broke

 Once I had decided on a drawing I had to make sure everything was working anatomically. The drawing was scanned into photoshop and drawn all over.

Step 3: The Underdrawing

 On top of all of that is the underdrawing upon which my painting would have gone. I couldn't figure out a good, simple, straightforward story that could be told with this pose so it was modified.

Step 4: More fixifying

Making the figure stand left more room for my brain to think of stories. The model was sitting in a kind of contrapassto so it was relatively easy to adapt into a convincing standing position. I threw the knee up because I felt like she had a little captain in her.

Step 5: The story(ies)

We were tasked with making 5 story ideas with the pose, place the figure in a setting and create lighting (keeping it monochromatic, for simplification). I sat and brainstormed some quick and dirty stories and jumped onto the internet to find some photos that I could cheat in for setting. That also turned out to be a great tool for figuring out the lighting.

Step 6: Color Comps

We then had to pick out the ideas to take to color comps. I liked the sniper, but more importantly, so did everyone else I showed it to (as an artist going to the entertainment industry I had better get used to making stuff that everyone else wants to see).

The Final(ish) step: To finish

This was such a huge learning experience for me it is hard to sum up what the process was on this. As soon as my brain has had more time to digest everything I will get to writing it down.

I can not sufficiently thank my partner in class, along with my instructor the TA and the rest of my classmates. This really was a team effort and I don't know if I would have been able to get this quality without all the help from everyone.