One Big Blog Dumpage...

What I've been working on the last few weeks and my initial sketches and thumbnails, color studies before I did the final painting in Photoshop. It could use more tweaking but for now this is fine. I will probably be working on this during the summer time and getting my work polished before submitting my portfolio.

Before I do a final black and white drawing, I draw smaller thumbnails to work out the composition and to make sure all the foreground, middle-ground, and perspective are all working together. You don't want to invest too much time and effort on a concept that may not work, so drawing the smaller thumbnails either 2x3s or 3x5s will help with quickly coming up with concepts. If one doesn't work, you can do a few more from a different view to get a more dynamic scene. For this establishing shot, I probably re drew the thumbnails more than twice. Then I drew the black and white rendering in col-erase Tuscan Prismacolor animation pencils (so that it doesn't smear or you can use graphite, whatever your preference) on a 9x12 drawing pad Strathmore 400 series. You want to use better paper so that when you are doing the shading and values, its easier to render. The actual drawing is 7x10 and after I scanned it I desaturated the color in Photoshop to get a more penciled look. Then I was ready to paint.