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| Have a Blacksmith doodle, as an apology for skipping last week. |
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This is the normal process that you have to go through for art school before executing the Final Finished Image for a project.
First, always, you do research and thumbnails, then the rough sketch, then value comps. Sometimes (as in this case after doing value comps you're able to recognize parts of the composition that will be troublesome, so you go back and fix a couple things in your second sketch. Then you do Value comps again, Value Comps are almost the most important part of the process after Research. It determines where the darks are going to be and where your true whites will be, it's like your rosetta stone when you start working in color.
Then theres the Color Comps, where you're laying down color schemes such as Analogous, Split Compliment, Complimentary, Tetradic etc. Then you refine the color comp, adding the compliment to shadows and really laying out where things are going to be.
Finally you do your final line art, the part most people try to skip to. Then you do flatting, which means your making individual layers of color for each layer of space, and object. You don't pay attention to color at this point, you're just establishing your layers.
After all of that, you finally get to work on the finished image, which is laying in all the shadows and highlights and pretty colors you worked on in the color comps. This step is the longest but also the most gratifying, because you've made all your decisions already, you're just doing the busy work and last minute color fixes. |
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| Here's an example of the Research/Thumbnails stage of a Bluegrass Project I'm doing for Visual Vocabulary right now. You can see how I've taken notes, and kind of doodled what things popped into my brain while doing the research about that genre of music. Then I made a few composition thumbnails sketches, keeping in mind the rule of the thirds, and making sure the boxes your working in are the same ratio as the final size you'll be working in. |
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| Here's a look at what the final Line Art looks like for this piece. Note: Line width variation is your friend!! Thicker lines= areas of shadow, Thinner lines are areas that are facing the light source. |
Next week, I'll show you the finished pieces for both of these projects, and kind of explain the compositions and how I colored them.
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| Here's some pages out of my sketchbook for Visual Vocabulary. Prompts were "No Where" , "Now Here", and "Zen Pop Mission" - for the last two. |
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My Parent's came for a visit!
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| We got to explore the very beautiful Japanese Garden. |
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| We also made an excursion to the very exciting Portland Meadows Racetrack. It took us a couple tries to figure out the betting machines, but once we did Daddy made $60! It was great because on Sundays they have Family Fun Days, so it's free to get in, parking is free, and they have races every 15 min. |
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| The last magical thing we did together before they left, was make a trip to the Portland Zoo. |
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| Then on Sunday, Sean, Patrick and took an adventure to Mount St. Helens (more pictures next week) |
