Friday, February 22, 2013

Creature in acrylics

It's been a long time since I had the opportunity to so some good ol' fashion painting and I got a chance to do it this evening as a demonstration for the Visual Development class at my school. Whipped out the acrylics and my artillery of brushes and some watercolor board and got busy. Within an hour or perhaps 90 minutes I completed this composition.


I explained to my students that with today's digital illustration technology you can get something started traditionally and finish it off in Photoshop if it needs further touches or adjustments. I took advantage of my own advice and tinted the image to give it some further color sophistication and knock back some of the intensity and accentuate the highlights. Here's the final result.


While the demo was in progress one of my students took photos of the painting in different stages of completion. Here's what it looked like going backwards in time. Thanks Joel!



Before any rendering took place and prior to the commitment to paint I worked out my composition as a free form doodle on a notepad to be sure I knew what I was aiming for visually.


And that's the story behind today's entry! Hope this inspires other artists to get back to basics every once in a while and keep those analog chops up.

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