studying the medieval inn

Exploring a few different configurations as a study . I'm going to do some rough thumbs to play with different shapes and silhouettes  and then tackle the final piece.

13 heads

I have 12 inch army action figure and i was thinking it would be fun to modify it and put a new head on it and paint it .you know kinda one of those classic GI Joes. I'm pretty sure in my last post i said i need to focus but i this is flexing the drawing muscle so its all related :) I don't think any of these are going to work but i learned some stuff so that's cool .More to come in the quest for the action figure head winner!

playing with /making brushes

some oddness .i made a weird bush that makes a sort of texture oil paint brush .not super controllable but seems nice for quick under paint stuff.

Gradient Map Tutorial

I discovered this about 2 years ago  and its a nice Little thing to have in your Digital tool box .I often find my self trying to explain the process to people but i feel like words alone fall Short with out some example.This  illustrates the steps involve but it definitely takes some individual experimentation to get it to work for you.

Lets Dig in!

this will be our test subject .hovering sphere .make a selection of the sphere

1. At the bottoms of the layers panel select the create new fill/ adjustment layer icon and select gradient map. It will look  immediately odd because it uses the first preset by default.
2. In the presets select the 3rd preset in .this will make everything look normal again .This is because it is a gradient that goes from dark on the left to light on the right.this is important to remember in order to work with gradient maps.The color on the far left will be applied to the darkest value and the far right color will be applied to the lightest value.
3. You are ready to start messing with colors!
4. You can create or select the existing" tabs" along the gradient and adjust their color using the color swatch below the gradient.you will notice that each tab has adjustable points on ether side to clamp the color closer to the original point. You can also delete with the delete button or select one and repeat it elsewhere just by touching the gradient. A big part of using these effectively is sliding the tabs along the gradient so you get the right color matching the right value range . Try it out and see what you get.

 So you can see at the bottom you can get some nice smooth color transitions really quickly and i think it ends up looking much better than a simple overlay.Using multiple selections you can quickly color an image even if its only to get some base colors in .

A nice use for these in games is also matching colors between several textures by just dragging and dropping gradient map layers into other image files and then tweaking.

 I hope this is helpful ! If you catch any mistakes(which i am sure you will)  or can see places to make this tutorial better please let me know and i will edit .thanks!

Recon car/hatch studies

 Loading up the brain library again .I found my self drawing hinges and hatches all the same and when i started looking at reference i found that there were many cool solutions the the concept of a hinged panel . 

WW 2 fighter plane engine studies

I was Doing some plane concepts the other day and realized i kept falling back on certain things .A hinge works like this .A vent looks like this. A pipe attaches like this.I was finding it wasn't looking very convincing to me and it didn't give me allot of variety to" jam" with in whence to  kick forth.

 My idea at that point was to try and add to my Brain library .I gather up a heap of reference and just redraw what was there in front of me .I found  the shapes can look like a big mess but allot of the times your forcing your brain to conjugate what your looking at which  was pretty cool .The more you understand how something works the better you can twist it and still have it look good. The vocabulary of an engine tends to be intake /exhaust /thrust and if you can describe these in a new way  or  specify  how it works better in your image than you will probably have something people will like and relate to .

Since i did this study i have not yet gone back and tried more plane concepts  but i do know i put a few more things   in my brain Library  and this is a good thing.

the Pook rough layout and color wip

this is just to figure out composition and to play with color .Im going to transfer it onto a 18x 20 board to do the final clean version.

tree study

so were doing these art lunches at work .We started just talking about projects we were doing or books we like or what ever.Its amazing how fast an hour goes.Last week we talked about trees and what we like about other artists techniques .Here's my own study