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New Paintings - Color Experimenting

I've been practicing more color. Today I tried four times to add color to this painting and each attempt it came out looking really awful. I can't get things to look unified and I even found myself just painting over everything I just painted with a new color when I decided I no longer liked the old color. However, I accidentally stumbled upon these colors seen below and it started to look pretty nice so I kept it. I feel like I'm making very little progress with color. But that's better than none.

 

Here are a few speed paints of batman - 45 minutes each. There were three in all but I didn't think one was worth posting. I'm happy with the one on the left. That was the last one I painted. I'm trying to just mess around and throw color down just to see what happens and if I can get used to it. It is intimidating because I've always struggled seeing color and judging colors. I'd like to use color in my work but I've grown up dismissing color because I can never seem to point out colors unless they're highly saturated and obvious.

Here, I sampled some color from a photograph and made a color palette that you can see in the bottom right. Then I just painted... something. I guess that crashed space ship on the right.

Some Works in Progress Continued

Some Works In Progress

Started with Color - Ended with Sadness

After much hesitation, I readdressed this painting. I did plenty of anatomy studies in my sketchbook and this is where I got. Next, I'll apply color in several different ways in hopes of finding an understanding of how to use color. It is something I constantly struggle with.

This painting frustrated me. I tried slapping colors down from the get go like I had done with the sci fi character but something wasn't meshing very well and it did not come together. I gave up after 2 hours of endlessly painting with no progress. Meh!

Just Some Practice

Painted this in one hour. I googled some reference to help me with the expression. I've been getting back to basics some since I tried drawing an eye the other day and it looked awful. I struggle with the nuances of the face. I'm happy enough with the result here but mouth is not entirely proportionate to the reference. I'm planning on doing a painting tutorial in the near future and I want to paint some type of brawl between a tough female character and some thugs or something.

Realistic Character Concept Art v2.0

This idea has under gone several renditions. Here are a few of the looks that I liked while coming up with this idea. This is a second attempt at the sci fi character from earlier in this blog (scroll down). This time around I hit my original idea head on. I'm happy with it and most of the time I invested in this was not painting or fixing mistakes, but deciding which ideas I wanted to make sure I added. For example, the led lights, the super shiny clean finish metallic material, plenty of light effects, and a very clean hi-tech appearance.

Right now, I don't know what the do with the right arm. Should he be holding a gun or some kind of weapon? Maybe hes reaching out to the viewer with one arm and holding the data cube (just made that up) in the other hand? So far, I've spent about 8 hours time painting this.

 

Here is a material test shot I made with the mental ray car paint shader. I wanted to create a shader that would match the metallic qualities of the suit in the painting.

Let me know your thoughts, if you have any. Thanks.

Sneak Peak - Started with Color

Started with color this time, no overlay layers or black and white. It's been working out amazingly so far and I'm liking the way its turning out.

New Years Update - Time Lapse Painting

I'm quite happy with this, it was a total time of 8 hours as I found out when I compiled all the video files. After I started this little speed painting, I couldn't stop thinking about what it had the potential to be, so I've been working a little bit on it for a few weeks and recorded as I worked each time. The subject was just something I came with while painting. You'll notice that the bats in the background and the mask are revised several times and just appear, I didn't record those parts because I was being so indecisive about the look and kept starting over. Once I settled on something I liked, I started recording again. I'm not sure if it is apparent from the footage but my strength cuts off when I start adding color. I have so much trouble separating colors from each other that I just see general warms and cools. I can't judge for myself if I have 3 different tints or shades of blue... they all just look blue to me. Thats what red-green color blindness does I guess. It makes things pretty tough as an artist but as a handicap, I have a few techniques I can make use of. I actually wound up going to a website and selecting an analogous color scheme to assist me. This is what I sampled while adding the color. It definitely helped me!