BATTLE READY; Digital Painting

Digital painting of a warrior in battle. In CS2, I like using gritty brushes to block everything in and then build up the areas of light with more refined brushes—this keeps me from painting too slick and smooth. Anyway, I suppose my detailing of the eyes are too sharp in terms of capturing a true rendering of nature but I wanted the attention focused in that area—so much emotional impact is expressed in the eyes.

As for the indication of gritting teeth, it's just two brush strokes but I re-painted those two strokes over and over to get just the right look. When you look at John Singer Sargent or Anders Zorn it's not just about rendering an image—it's about putting energy into each and every stroke. I think that's what makes painting fun and hard at the same time. The whole process is deciding what to leave in and what to leave out and making sure that everything that remains is there for a reason.

WARRIOR BEHIND SHIELDS; Digital

I painted a series of digital paintings to serve as inspirational bluesky development. The over all look and feel of the series was very intense so painting the images allowed me to explore some very interesting emotions. I wish I had more time to make the painting perfect but deadlines are deadlines. I could keep refining it but there are more paintings to do. Anyway, the emotional impact was really exciting to develop. The program I used was Photoshop CS2 with all sorts of custom brushes. I worked it just like an oil painting except I got the added bonus of using command z.

WARRIOR; Digital Painting

This digital painting was a blast to work on in CS2. Talk about primal therapy. I blocked everything in using a custom brush that was ugly grainy—I mean just plain ugly. I used this to work out the big shapes. Then I started to define forms—basically light and shadow using cross hatching. After that, I blended the hatching with my larger grainy brush. The background was ambigouis so the entire head would be the over all focal point.

The detail close-up shows how free the brush work was—just indications of detail in the right places. This painting is really a study of edges. The frontal face edges (although they vary) are sharper than the backside of the head and helmet. I've been studying Velázquez lately for edge work and shadow patterns. Simply amazing. Anyway, this painting gave me the opportunity to have a lot of fun playing around with the shapes and edges.