Tuesday, January 7, 2014

  I think it's about time I've started blogging again.  I had to do some self-searching things.  With that aside now, I think it's time I become fully devoted to my work... even more so than before.  I've also made a pledge to myself, which is no fun at all until I get my career going.
  That being said, i have a couple new pieces that I would like to bring to this blog.  Pieces where I really tried to push my understanding of composition.

  This piece is called "Path of Enlightenment", not because of what the piece is depicting, but because it really led me to an "aha" moment.  On most of my past environment pieces I have done, I would just have a general idea of what I wanted, and went ape crazy with it.  I wouldn't toss down any thumbnails, I would just toss down some random foregorund/midground/background strokes and build from there, which isn't entirely a bad way to do things.  It's a great starting place for whenever I don't have one.  This piece was a bit different from all of my previous work.  Rather than starting right in on the piece as an image as a whole, I decided to place some random thumbnails down first.  It was a fun and rewarding experiment.  


  This experiment also started as a value study.  I would use 4 basic values that would get the image across and nothing else.  If your picture reads with only 3 values, then you have a successful image.  Also, just because your picture reads, doesn't mean the composition is there, that comes with time and practice.  Eventually, after spending an hour on the piece, I thought I was at something kinda cool.  As you will see in this next image, I had a starting point where I saw a lot of information and worked it up early on.  My plan was to finish the entire page like that, but I was so caught up in how awesome this smaller area was turning out, that I HAD to stick with it. 
  Then I had a random urge to play with some color.  So the piece took me on another adventurous tangent, which can be seen at the bottom left of the next image.  After the tangent subsided, I went back and added some detail, and tried to give the image more depth.  Essentially, I broke myself out of one of the original frames, and successfully found depth in the piece.
  I really wanted to develop the piece so it extended to the right side of the canvas, but at that point I realized that if I pushed the elements on the right side, I would lose my objective to lead the viewers eye, and the scene would become too cluttered.  I cropped the image and worked with it until I hit my final piece.
  There is also a story I'm working on in my spare time.  Eventually I want to turn it into a full fledged animation after I get a working script together, which is about 28 pages deep thus far, and much more to go.  It already needs to be re-written, but I think I'll just push through the entire first draft, while keeping expected changes in mind.  Enjoy!