This morning I decided to spend an hour or so dedicated to inking practice. I’m practicing inking with various brushes (kolinsky sable, red sable, squirrel etc.) using Higgins Black Magic ink on bristol board (or maybe it’s bristol paper?).
Here’s part two of my two part post of early 2013 digital speed paintings. If you missed part one, you can view it here. In part one I mention that I had just gotten a drawing tablet at the beginning of 2013 so digitally painting has been a big learning experience. These are five other digital speed paintings that I made in early 2013 while learning the ropes of the digital world (still struggling).
Enough of my talking, here are the “paintings”:
Have a great day!
Here’s my quick review of Drawing and Painting Fantasy Figures by Finlay Cowan. I wrote this review a couple of months ago and forgot to post it. Don’t buy this book unless you have no idea that wizards are in the fantasy genre, or if you want to learn how to draw badly. I don’t have any personal grudges against Finlay Cowan (he has good ideas and his design work is nice but he definitely isn’t known for his draughtsmanship) but wow, this book is bad (Although it’s not so bad that it should be burned–it’s just a bad art book in my opinion). Most of the drawings seem amateurish (or maybe all of the twelve-year-olds that I see draw are trying to copy his style), and unless somebody can draw well, I don’t think they should teach anyone else how to draw. The 3d modeled images in this book are terrible. However, I have to remind myself that this book was published in 2003 (so the 3d modeling obviously won’t hold up to the 2013 3d standards).
I have to give Finlay Cowan kudos for including so many topics in one book (perspective, anatomy, painting, storyboarding etc.), but the reader would be better off if they learned perspective, anatomy, painting, and storyboarding from other books dedicated to those subjects.
One of the only things I found interesting in this book were the designs that Finlay Cowan drew for Pink Floyd album art (seen below).
Image from Amazon.com
If you really want this book, you can buy the book here. I don’t understand how, but at the time of writing this review, Drawing and Painting Fantasy Figures has an average 3.8 rating (out of 5 stars) on Amazon. Maybe the reviewers are much younger than me. Maybe they can’t draw very well or haven’t read very many art books. Whatever the case, some people enjoyed this book so you might too (though I hope you have higher standards for art books than those reviewers on Amazon).
Today you get the pleasure of seeing 5 digital speed paintings I made in early 2013 (and an animated GIF of one of the speed paintings, showing the different layers!). I had just gotten a drawing tablet so it was a big learning experience. I’m still not completely comfortable digitally painting but I’m much better now than I was then (of course). All of the digital speed paintings were made in Adobe Photoshop CS5.
Keep your eyes peeled for part two, featuring 5 more digital speed paintings from early 2013! This also marks the first time I split up a blog post into 2 parts! Everybody celebrate! Also on the topic of digital painting, I will have my long awaited review of the Monoprice Tablet ready in the very near future (meaning that I actually started writing it and I just need to revise it).
Animated GIF showing the different layers of this speed painting
And my favorite of the batch (perfect for Halloween because it’s spooky):
As always, I love to hear your questions or comments (if you’re not too busy preparing your Halloween costume).
It’s been a while since I’ve shown some process shots of my art so let’s take a look at an older gouache painting. The painting assignment restricted my palette to just black and white.
Here’s the painting:
Now you may be asking yourself “who or what is Surtur?” or “what the heck is Amon Amarth?”
Surtur (also known as Surtr) is a jötunn (aka a giant) from Norse mythology (aka Scandinavian mythology). He also has a fiery sword. That’s pretty much all you need to know. Amon Amarth is a band that doesn’t like to be labelled “viking metal”. They sing (or growl or whatever you want to call it) about vikings. They have viking themed albums. They love norse mythology. Whatever. They are a melodic death metal band. One of their albums is Surtur Rising.
Now onto the process:
Instead of doing a grisly and dark illustration that is typically associated with bands like Amon Amarth, I decided to do a “comicy” style illustration. Side note: this painting is probably the first gouache painting I did since I took the color theory class years ago.
To begin, here are the 50 thumbnails I did prior to deciding on a composition (each thumbnail is about 1.375″ x 1.875″). Because the illustration was going to be a poster I had to also think about text placement when designing my composition.
Sometimes I’m kind of undecided about things, maybe (see what I did there?). I chose some thumbnails that I especially liked from the 50 above and drew some larger refined thumbnail drawings. Each thumbnail is 2.25″ x 3″. I drew them on gray paper because I had some gray paper left over from when I operated an offset printer in high school and I figured “why not?” (don’t answer that).
I decided on the design and composition and drew up a larger drawing for the “pencils” stage. Not pictured are the reference photos I took for this illustration. The final pencil drawing is 7.5″ x 10″ (by the way, pretty much all of my art is for sale. If you want some original art, all you need to do is contact me). The pencil drawing is drawn on some horrible shiny paper. I don’t even know why this paper was manufactured. It’s very difficult to make revisions to the drawing because of the slick surface of the paper (also included are creases that I accidentally added to the paper).
To figure out how the ships would look I downloaded a Google SketchUp model and used that as reference. When I made this painting I hated SketchUp. That’s mainly because I was only using the trackpad on my laptop instead of a mouse. Tip for anyone using SketchUp: use a mouse (the computer peripheral not the rodent).
Next up I painted a value study for the painting. I find these to be more fun than the actual painting and often times I like them more than the final painting. They have a lot of energy and painterly marks. I scanned the drawing and printed it out on my B&W laser printer. I glued it to cardboard (probably the back of an oatmeal box because I recycle [you should recycle too]). This value study is 6″ x 8″.
I only remembered to take a couple of photos of the illustration in progress.
The pencil drawing is transferred to the illustration board.
The painting is almost finished.
And the painting before text was added.
And that’s it for this episode of my creative process. What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment. Speaking of comments: It has come to my attention that some of the older less-computer-literate readers don’t know how to leave comments. If you are reading my blog on my homepage then you just simply click the gray word bubble next to the title of the blog post (see image below).
If you have clicked on the blog post title, or you are only seeing one blog post with no other posts on the page then you can probably just scroll down the page and you should see a comment box. Congratulations! You now know how to comment! If you want more John VanHouten in your life between blog posts you can follow me on Twitter.
Here’s a little Wolverine watercolor and gouache painting. It’s watercolor and gouache (and some watercolor pencils) on some cheap watercolor paper that I’m trying to use up (it’s very thin and flimsy). It’s about 4.5″ x 5″. If you want to commission something like this from me, you can! Contact me for pricing and more information.
I was messing around with pens, marker, and colored pencil. It’s the INCREDIBLE HULK (featuring Hulk Nipple). If you want a comic-con type sketch from me, it might look something like this (do you want a sketch of your favorite character? Contact me for details and pricing). This picture is about 3.875″ x 3.5″.
Here’s a sneak peak of me sketching a creepy dentist for an upcoming digital painting. Look at all of those tools in his evil teeth-cleaning hand (do you recognize any of those tools?). I posted this on Twitter (I encourage you to follow me on Twitter if you like art, or just crazy shenanigans–but mostly art) first but in case you missed it, here it is:
And yes, that’s how I hold my pencil. I never said I was normal.
Here’s another speed painting! This time I painted a blue guy instead of a landscape.
Here’s an odd “speed painting” I did a while ago (which I’m just going to call “Psychedelic Floating Skull”) in Adobe Photoshop CS5. I’m not sure what else to say about it. It’s weird but there’s something about it that I like (I can’t quite figure out what it is). Just for kicks, I made this image available in my Society6 store as a print.