Color Study: Arabian Nights

Occasionally I do these when I need a break from design and ideation. It's not a brainless activity, but it's more analytical than creative, requiring the ability to make comparisons between what you see and what you paint.

Below is a copy of a shot from Arabian Nights (1942).

Background Design Process: The Comedy Club

This is another post focusing on my professional work at CrowdStar. I'm going to take you through my background design process.

First I started with a small marker sketch using iPad proportions (below). I also blocked in some values with a gray marker. Simply planning ahead will make my Photoshop job easier.

Scan it. Open it in Photoshop. And starting painting in a layer right on top. Watch the nifty 2 minute screen recording below! 

 

Check out the rough painting below. 

And the final vector illustration (below). This is what it would look like in the game with the HUD and the Funny Fish and some props.

iPhone Painting

Using the Radio Shack stylus with my iPhone 4. Nothing too complicated. One layer. Free Brushes app. And Sketchbook Mobile X.

Clay Theater and Sutro Tower from Noe Valley, and a classic car parked in front of my office.

Tahoe Sketches

Observing the different types of trees at Lake Tahoe and one 20 min iPhone painting.

Drawing from Photos

I saved a step in my process to demonstrate how I work. Because the wall is green and bouncing a lot of green light on the figure, I started this piece by painting everything green (on the right). Then I slowly built up the contrasting colors on the figure, and added some of the fleshy color to the green wall to unify the piece. That's what differentiates a painting from reality I think.

Painting Realistic Hair

Hair practice. A copy from a shampoo ad in a magazine. I like to copy from magazines because it forces me to choose/mix my own color, rather than color pick from the actual photo.

Rooflines of Burlingame Ave.

Quick digital sketch from my desk at work in August. We're up on the third floor so we have a great view of downtown Burlingame. I turned my Cintiq towards the window after everybody on that side of the room went home and sketched this right before sunset. It's a rough sketch but it will always remind me of that time of year when the days are long.

Costa Rica Afternoon Painting

The sun was just about to set over the hill directly in front of me. It was mostly blocked by the tree, but I was sort of blinded for 20 minutes. I did a little touch up afterwards. Darkening everything and then adding highlights. Anyhow, for a quick painting it captures mostly all of the forms and the lighting pretty accurately.

Costa Rica Jungle Painting

Hey Followers. Here's some new jungle action from Costa Rica. It's a preeeety quick painting. About an hour and a half. It's a real life study. And only the essential information. Not a very interesting composition though. What do you think?

Drawing from Photos

These were drawn while I was working on a fashion themed game. I like to explore themes by doing a lot of sketches from life and photos. These weren't for a particular piece. It's just a way to practice drawing and brainstorm. Can you guess the celebrity?

Blonde Hair Digital Painting

This is something I created to assist me with work. Digitally painting Blonde hair is hard. I don't want the roots too look too green. Or the highlights to look too yellow.

Digital Painting: Tahoe Cabin

Digitally painted at my friend's cabin in Tahoe using only the selection tool. I wasn't trying to be clever. I just forgot my Wacom tablet.

My goal with this was to build up the color palette accurately using only shapes. Could be developed into a more "realistic" painting with time.

Downton Abbey Color Study

Sketched this out pretty quickly before work this morning. Just a little color study from a screenshot of Downton Abbey. Such great characters. I plan to paint more of them.

It's a nice example of low chroma limited palette comp with lighting from below. I added the red on her blouse to liven up the darkest areas and make it more like a painting. Knowing that there was no white in the comp, I laid down an underpainting of muted digital ochre. This is only about 600px wide. Just used one square brush, and changed the angle manually.

Still Life: Glass Study

Two bottles on my desk. Hidden light source is a warm incandescent light bulb from a task lamp. An understanding of light on glass like this – for me – is only achieved through real-life observation.

Celebrity Paintings

 I've been distorting the proportions and exaggerating facial features using the free transform tool to see how it changes the likeness. 

Still Life Painting: Ivy and Roses

Doesn't look like 2 hours of work but it is. Painted from life. No photos.

Costa Rica Digital Plein Air Painting

I started with a sketch this time. Spent a bit more time on the initial sketch than usual. It resulted in a much tighter painting, which I like, with more accurate perspective and clearly overlapping shapes.

I spent about 1 hour on the painting–trying to capture the light before it changed–then spent about another hour touching up gaps and stuff.

Costa Rica: Study of Mountains and Clouds

A couple of hours spent outside watching the mountains and clouds. The clouds were big and puffy when I sat down like this.

This is about a half hour later. A little different.

I took a break and came back to the same painting. The puffy clouds turned into thin strips.

Still Life Painting: Skull with Vases

I felt like I needed a refresher on still life painting so I set this up after work.

Copy of Portrait of a Gentlemen

This is something that we saw at the Legion of Honor. Upon looking at this now, I think it's a little overworked. Probably would have been better to spend about 20 minutes on a rough copy to study the color palette and composition, and then just paint something new from life. But check out my process below to see how I work.