Fishies

sketching

More quick ipad sketches. It's fun to be able to do a painted sketch anywhere, just as easily as drawing in a sketchbook. 

High school basketball game

  Out the plane window

Chairs in the sun

Thai restaurant corner

I was trying out the awesome brush tutorial for feathers on Paul Lasaine's blog, and ended up with this little penguin. I tend to paint digitally much the same way I would paint in acrylics, without taking advantage of all the cool custom brushes that make painting textures so much easier, so this was an interesting exercise. In retrospect I should have kept the white feathers darker; they flatten it a bit too much. Also, definitely need to study lots more rendering and light effects!

Acrylic Painting

I'm back in Santa Cruz for Christmas vacation, and I found a little painting I did last summer on the beach. It was overlooking a little creek/river thing that runs into the sea, and the water ripples there were very interesting. Sorry the photo is a bit blurry.

I also found a few studies I did that same day. It really helps to do a quick tonal thumbnail before starting a painting.

Ipad paintings

I'm gearing up for Christmas vacation, so to get in the spirit, here are a few Ipad paintings I did the last time I flew to Wyoming. A painting of the plane wing en route, and a few REALLY quick ones I did each in about 30 seconds on a drive through Wyoming.

The scenery was changing at a ridiculous pace, from rolling foothills to rocky canyons to big hills with large green bushes. As a kid I thought Wyoming was kind of ugly, but now I'm starting to see the appeal. Big, bleak windswept areas have a certain charm after living in cities for a few years.

Color Sketches

I've been trying something new lately, painting 30 minute digital paintings from random photos, just trying to capture the overall light effect and color as quickly as possible. I don't know a lot of the tricks to speedpainting, so I'm just using a round or a square brush for everything. Here are a few of them:

They're nothing much to look at; more of a learning tool. I'm hoping these will help me in getting more accurate light effects when I'm trying to paint from my imagination later. 

First Post!

Well, I finally found the motivation to start up my new art blog, Lambunctious! Hopefully I'll be posting at least once a week from now on.

This is the scan from an acrylic painting I did last week for my dad's birthday. The style was inspired by a combination of Tadahiro Uesugi's digital paintings, and the sponge-and-stencil techniques of old Hanna-Barbera backgrounds.

I did a little digital color sketch before I started, to get the look planned out:

It was interesting to see the differences between painting the same thing digitally and traditionally. The value range was a lot smaller for the acrylic painting and some of the effects were too hard to achieve, but it definitely did help doing a digital sketch first to get the gist of what I wanted. Although I think next time I'll use a much smaller paintbrush to paint the final lines on the trees; it looks too sloppy and rushed as is.

Here is another digital color sketch I painted in the same style for this project. I chose the bear idea in the end because it looked more cheerful.

All in all, although none of the paintings are especially polished, I learned a lot and it was fun to experiment!