I went ahead and did another attempt at diffuse lighting, and I'm much more satisfied with this version. Also, painting pretty girls is fun. I can see why Vargas did it.

Still playing around with the qualities of light, this time I tried a more diffused light than yesterdays image. I think I still overdid the highlights, and I got away from my initial color ramp during the piece.

However, I am happy with how quickly I was able to produce this image, as well as starting directly with color instead of my usual greyscale to color technique.

Playing around with painting again, this time trying to pay extra close attention to the tonal differences between light and shade in direct sunlight with cast shadows and reflected light. I'm quite happy with this piece so far.

I'm also trying to limit myself from excessively saturated color palettes, as well as limiting the harshness of highlights and speculars for a more diffused, uniform look.

I've been trying to work with applying blocks of color directly to the canvas, rather than my more methodical (and often wooden) method of slow sketching followed by blocking in color and renders. I need to tighten up the creature's face, but I'm actually quite happy how the gentleman turned out. I don't know if I'll make this into a finalized version, but I feel it would be fun to do something with these two again.

-J

Here's one of the more comic style pieces that I've done using the template files I discussed earlier to help with color picking and quick renders. It's really proving to be quite useful, especially with quick concepting and colors. What would have taken me much longer originally can now be completed within half that time, with a nice sense of consistency between pieces. It's also proving to be very useful in painting quick good-looking skin-tones, which is one of my favorite things to paint.

Playing around with a few template files today that has all of my common layering techniques and time-savers all on one layered document. I'm testing it out with a few different styles that I use, and so far it's been pretty versatile. This one was created to test how well it handles grey-scale to color conversion. Normally when using color layers on grey-scales, the colors are muted and desaturated, but I'm pretty happy with the colors on this one.

For today's warm up sketch, I focused on using the technique mentioned previously about using the eraser to shape and shade the figure. I need to gain more confidence with using bigger brushes, especially in the rendering stage because the brush-strokes are pretty visible in this one. Regardless, I had a lot of fun with it today, and I think it made for a rather fun warm-up sketch. I think using the paper overlay for the BG helped too, but I'll play around with that and maybe scan in some images. A high-res scan of a toothy watercolor paper makes for a really good texture overlay that helps make digital pieces pop. More at 11.

-J