Friday, December 30, 2016

Princess Leia

Princess Leia


Just 'cuz 2016 needed to get in one more knee to the groin of my childhood...

The year 2016 on my Blog started with a painting of Luke Skywalker, looking pensively off into the future, and ends with a drawing of Princess Leia (nee the late Carrie Fisher).  

It is a fearful symmetry that I find strangely fitting: My Blog started the year with "A New Hope", and ended with a loss of "Hope" (with an intentional nod to "Rogue One").

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STEP ONE:  I roughed in a line drawing with a charcoal pencil on an 8-1/2" x 11" gray, toned cardstock.

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STEP TWO:  Here is the (mostly) finished charcoal portion of the drawing, showing the shading and modelling the features.  

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STEP THREE:  I used a white chalk pencil to create highlights and the white areas.  Here is a secret: do your black-and-white drawings on a toned paper to give it an extra "pop".  It gives you three values (dark, medium tone, light) for the price of two (black-and-white).  It's almost like cheating!

Also, the right-eye was a little off, so I re-drew it.  It's still not perfect, but vastly improved.

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STEP FOUR:  In Photoshop, I created a MULTIPLY Layer to colorize the drawing; on a NORMAL Layer, I did final highlights over top.  I decided keep the colors muted and let most of the grain from the charcoal to show through, and just keep the background as is.

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This was done in charcoal and colorized in Photoshop.

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Friday, December 16, 2016

Digital Quick Paint - K-2SO

K-2SO


In honor of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", here's a digital quick paint of one of my favorite characters from the movie: K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial Droid.  His deadpan delivery and steady sarcasm made him one of my favorite characters in the movie.

I won't give any spoilers, but "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" really put the "War" in "Star Wars".  There are quite a few Easter Eggs and surprise cameos scattered throughout the movie, and the last 5-10 minutes of the movie will bring an excited glee of recognition to the hearts of any "Star Wars: A New Hope" fan.  I'll give it 4-1/2 out of 5 Kyber Crystals.

I suppose "quick paint" is a relative term, as this was done over the course of 2-1/2 hours or so.

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STEP ONE:  Here is the quick digital pencils and color layout on a 900px x 900px canvas.

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STEP TWO:  Well, I guess I could have put in a few more in-between steps...  Oh, well.  In the background, I just used a textured brush to to give the illusion of a sandstone type surface.  From there, I built up the colors on K-2SO, trying to make him look like a matte, gun-metal surface with light and shaded areas, and built toward refining the details.  I would have liked to run another pass over the drawing to fix his collar area and fill in a few more details, but unfortunately ran out of time and so had to call it "Good 'nuff".  

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Done digitally in Photoshop.

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