I’ve been adding a bunch of little lights. It hasn’t been easy, at all. I won’t bore you with the process, but there’s gotta’ be a better way of doing it than the two methods I use. Nevertheless it’s good practice doing it the crude way. The main disc is DONE! All the little lights,…
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OK, it was a day and a half. Enough to burn my skin on one day — despite applying a generous amount of thick, white, sunscreen — and wear a baseball cap in the Andaman sea the next to protect my delicate nose. By some inexplicable miracle, Thailand has been spared the worse of COVID-19,…
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Making the star ship Enterprise in Blender.
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Taking a break from my tutorials and practicing the fledgling skills I’ve picked up so far. Can I pull off the enterprise? I THINK I can. Worth a try. First thing was finding some blueprints. I cut them out in Photoshop, and then arranged them in Blender. They form a hollow rectangle, but it doesn’t…
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Above is a mech I made in Blender (v2.83.3). This was fun and compulsive, much like playing a mech war computer game I got into recently, before cutting myself off for wasting too much time on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the program, and this creation was my version of a beginner tutorial…
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Everything I was taught as a child was good is now bad.
America is bad. The pilgrims are bad. The founding fathers are bad. Cowboys are bad. Christianity is bad. Christopher Columbus is bad. The police are bad. The free market is bad. White people are bad. Men are bad. The nuclear family is bad. Heterosexuality is bad. Individuality is bad. Independence is bad. Rational thought is bad.
In the art world painting is bad. Originality is bad. The old masters are bad. Skill is bad. Beauty is bad.
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The alien required a flying saucer in the background. If you missed my last post, I’m just doing some practice using beginner techniques in Blender. I do a tutorial or two, take a break, and apply what I’ve learned. It’s a good combo. Instead of getting sick of doing tuts, after messing around on my…
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Took a break from the rank beginner tutorials to have some fun being creative with the basic building blocks. I’m always going to make aliens, and I’ve been doing it for more than a quarter century. Aliens, robots, cyborgs, and monsters. Green is also my favorite color. I’ve always loved ’em. This one’s greeting us,…
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Blender is a completely FREE powerhouse of a digital sculpting and animating program. It downloads and installs so fast it’s a miracle. That lets you know that somehow, this software that can do so much — you can even make animated movies with it — is lean and clean. For me the biggest blessing is…
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We live in a time of extraordinary moralizing. You may have noticed a no-holds-barred competition to see who is the most morally pure, and who isn’t, either by birthright or by belief. There’s always some of that going on. When I was growing up it issued from the religious right. Nancy Reagan famously advised to…
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And that’s about as far as I could take her. if you’ve followed the development of this piece on my blog you know it was an exercise in technique, and based loosely on a tutorial. It’s evolved into something a bit more, and I’d consider it part of my portfolio. Along the way I discovered…
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These days everything is controversial and there’s little certainty about anything. Take for example the endless battles over what constitutes a healthy diet [consider Jordan Peterson and his daughter only consume beef, salt, and water]. A big part of this is, I suspect, because somewhere along the line people stopped believing that it is essential…
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Museum Curator forced to resign
over “toxic white supremacist beliefs”!
I’m not that big of a fan of photo-bashing. That’s a technique where you take photos and superimpose them on your digital painting in order to achieve textural effects. It can be a cheap cheat that looks cheesy, or it can be a sophisticated process that when done right can really add something. Here I’ve…
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Last month I made a pact with myself to not write or comment publicly about things which are happening in the world right now. Part of my rationale was to spare myself getting involved in the toxic miasma, both in terms of time, energy, and mental well-being. But there’s something darker lurking. It is not…
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She’s coming along. Since my last post I’ve painted some large branches in the middle background, and some lighting and shading. There’s lots more to do, including adding texture to the branches to make them more convincing. Near the end I paint over whatever I want, and however I want, but right now I’m working…
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It’s a bit muted right now because I haven’t added any lighting or shading. There’s only a line drawing, with flat color under it. I made it more complex by varying the colors of the sticks that make up our stick figure. That helps to delineate which sticks or branches are which. Incidentally, the ability…
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This is another exercise in lighting, shading, modeling, anatomy, perspective, work-flow, and when working from the imagination. I also intended it as a work of art, but working within certain parameters, and with a given objective in mind. My followers know I like to compare digital painting to MMA, in which case in order to…
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Quietly, and virtually unrecognized by the art world at large, there’s a renaissance of figurative artwork being created on the computer. Rather unexpectedly, digital painting has revitalized the practice of traditional drawing and painting skills. It’s a bit like how people started writing letters again after the arrival of email, and subsequent to letter writing…
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This started out as an exercise in lighting, shading, and workflow, but it ended up being an artwork I’m proud of. A lot of the techniques and procedures I employed I got from a digital painting course by veteran Disney animator, Aaron Blaise. The initial drawing and the character design are all my own. If…
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Almost finished. It finally occurred to me to look at the image in B&W to see how my lighting and modeling is without the distraction of color. Not bad. It looks more like a digital sculpture than a drawing, which is what it is. I’ve still got some detailing to do, and other modifications. Should…
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The eyes have been really difficult. I changed the colors, the shape, added veins, a highlight, and ridges on the bottom lids. What makes them so hard is largely the ornate bat nose which bisects one eye. I want partially obscured eye’s pupil to show, but getting it to line up with the other eye…
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The rim lighting is difficult for me, and almost seems perfunctory. It’s a sort of cheap trick often used in comics. But it is also a really effective way to articulate form in shadow, which works for this sort of subject. Note that I’m not an expert at this, I’m learning it as an exercise,…
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This stage is all Photoshop. I’d almost consider it cheating if it weren’t such a pain in the ass to pull off; if I weren’t going to paint over it; if I hadn’t done everything by hand under it; and if this weren’t an exercise using professional digital painting for illustration techniques. Here, one has…
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The much more clever way to do shading is to make a 3D model, and then move the light around to find the perfect angle. But doing it the clumsy, old fashioned way is good practice, and this piece is just about honing my skills. The shading made the bat lady more 3D, but it…
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Think I’m gonna’ go for blue skin with pink details, yellow-orange irises, and a dark red/purple ball of the eye. It’s a bit saturated right now, but after I add modeling, lighting, shading, and texture, it should be pretty cool. The gif animation has nothing to do with it. It’s just a snappy way of…
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After taking nearly two months off this piece in order to finally finish my SFAU series of 36 images, I finished the line drawing stage. I used my orignal, front on, concept sketch to create a 3D version. The hardest part was the weird, ornate nose. Very difficult to place it so it comes out…
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If you missed SFAU#35, see below: If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.) — the popular app, FaceApp — then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually…
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