New Painting

I recently finished the first painting on canvas that I’ve completed in years.

“Zool”

Oil on Canvas

24” x 48”

Overall, I’m pretty happy with it, in that I feel like I am getting some of my skills back after such a long hiatus.  I am finally painting again, seriously and for a prolonged period of time, and it feels really good.

There are always things that can use improvement though.  I’m going to focus on using a more limited color palette for my next couple of paintings.  I felt the color scheme getting a little out of control on this one, I don’t know if maybe it’s the green of the fridge, but I feel like I’m using a little too much of the color wheel.

The piece is also little saturated overall.  I like using bold color, but I think I overdid it a bit on this one.  I could get a better effect by using more muted colors to set off the bolder color.  Plus, I feel that more mutes would make the wacky subject matter a little more sophisticated.

Either way, this piece represents an important personal milestone.  I’m back baby!

Humpback Whale Part 1

I am starting a new personal project.  I recently watched the BBC series “Life”, which was made by the same people that made “Planet Earth”.  It’s just as good, it’s absolutely amazing the footage that their photographers are able to capture. 

One word of warning though, if you watch it be sure to get the British version that has David Attenborough’s narration.  Not just because he’s great, but for some reason they chose to have Oprah narrate the American version, and it’s beyond awful.

Anyway, they had a segment on humpback whales.  I’ve always thought of them as one of the ugliest animals on earth.  However, there were some really incredible shots, and I saw them as I had never seen them before.  They have an amazing variety of textures across the surface of their skin.  You couldn’t ask for a better reference for a real-world monster/creature design.

I decided that it would be a great subject for ZBrush practice.

This is a screenshot from ZBrush.  The model is about 70%-80% complete.

I want to push myself to emulate the detailed textures of the whale’s battered hide.  So rather than render her out as a standard turntable, I want to move a camera around her and get very close at times to highlight the detail. 

I also want to place the model in an underwater scene.  For me the beauty of these creatures is their contrast, the way a 40 ton creature can move with an almost unnatural grace, and I want to try to capture that feeling.

Before I finish the last details on the model, I want to get her posed in a scene, so that I can block out my shot and see which areas I want to highlight with the camera.  There is no point in spending hours detailing areas of the model that won’t even be seen.

So I began creating a scene in Maya-

I roughed out some lighting and volumetric fog to give an underwater look to the scene.  I also spent some time creating a particle system to emulate the bubbles from the air trapped underneath the whale when it returns to the water after breaching.

The next step is to bring the whale model into the Maya scene and pose it, then block out the camera move before returning to ZBrush to finish the detailing of the model.