Finally completed, and it was as much of a battle creating him as he looks like he’s a veteran of. I used lots of new techniques which I’ve learned from professional illustrators, and incorporated into my own arsenal of digital and painting techniques. This is as far as I could take the image with my…
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#21 – Dr. Cataract #21 is the twenty-fifth portrait in a series of 31 self-portraits as other versions of myself in different lives. This one took a sci-fi direction. The result is a unique, surrealist, sci-fi, mutrant man, perhaps a victim of his own medical or scientific experiments gone awry. I made this one shortly…
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More thoughts after days of ruminating on this topic, and various challenges to my arguments on my blog and elsewhere. Note that if you disagree with me, or have in the past, that’s perfectly fine. I’m more interested in understanding reality than I am in being right. If I were to suddenly switch my pro-free…
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What a difference rim lighting can make in a hyper-realist image. This is the first time I’ve really attempted this technique, and it took a lot of tinkering to get a result I was satisfied with. Rim lighting is a technique illustrators and other artists borrow from cinema. You have your main light source —…
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#22 – The End Came Swiftly A sci-fi digital impasto painting reinterpreting the end of The War of the Worlds, when the Martian ships fall because of exposure to the bacteria in the Earth’s atmosphere. The image falls between representation, traditional oil painting, and abstraction. The atmosphere, textures, composition, and feel are more important…
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In the continued creation of a hyper-realistic monster, I reached the stage where one overlays textures onto the body. For my fellow Photoshop nerds, you take a picture of a texture, put it on its own layer, lower the opacity to around 30%, and tweak out the exposure so the texture looks like it’s on…
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It’s over 10 days since my last update on this piece in progress, and it might not look like it’s that different, but I logged in over 20 hours of work on small changes. The deal is that I’m improving my skills at realism while executing this, so there are areas I keep working over…
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Some people make their digital paintings in very logical stages. That has tended to not be me, except on some occasion. I’m, or have been, much more the artist that just starts experimenting, sees what happens, and rides the wave in. But, uh, to get to some next level shit, sometimes an artist has to…
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Can you guess which one is my version? Have a look, and you can find out if you were right down below. If you don’t know already, I have a contemporary art / fine art background, and have been making digital art starting around 20 years ago. I’ve given up on the contemporary art world,…
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In digital imaging, there’s always a way. All the rain drops in the pic above are fakes, courtesy of yours truly. I could have been more persnickity about it, but this was for a tutorital. I tried to figure this out last night, but there was a sticking point I couldn’t get past. After sleeping…
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If you know how to use brushes in Photoshop, this one’s ready to go. It’s just something I stumbled on while experimenting with all the different options and capacities of Photoshop’s extremely powerful brush machine. Making custom brushes is now part of my arsenal of available techniques, and it’s phenomenal what you can do with…
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Some of you know I’ve been doing a lot of study over the last several months, and now it’s paying off. I’m working on portrait #32 in my SFAU series, and I decided to put in an earring from a photo. [Decided to do another portrait to practice some of the techniques I’ve learned.] There…
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#23 – Bare Knuckle Brawl A bloody outdoor boxing match without gloves or fanfare. This is one of the rare images where I used references [stills from a YouTube video] and ordinary people to create a tableaux. Why I chose it: It has a traditional painterly feel reminiscent of Hopper, and the subject matter and…
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The only artist I’m aware of who has received any recognition for digital painting in the contemporary fine art world is David Hockney, and that’s just because anything and everything he creates is automatically reviewed. Gerhardt Richter has the same kind of status, and some of his threadbare digital art is taken seriously, but it’s…
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Each entry in my Top 25 will have: a descriptive paragraph. a sentence or two about why I chose it. one or more close-up details. a link to my original post about the work. thumbnail gallery with all artworks included so far. prints for sale. Links for all previous entries. a poll for picking your…
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Each entry in my Top 25 will have: a descriptive paragraph. a sentence or two about why I chose it. one or more close-up details. a link to my original post about the work. thumbnail gallery with all artworks included so far. prints for sale. Links for all previous entries. a poll for picking your…
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Above is the final demo in the class, and all credits go to Andrew Hou for the digital painting, which I recreated as part of learning his process. As my regular readers know, I’m a trained “fine artist” working in digital media, and currently learning the industry standard digital painting techniques from illustrators in order…
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More fun things you can do with digital painting that would be quite difficult in traditional mediums. This was just a quickie exercise to see if I could create some sort of fire entity using a couple custom fire brushes I made. I didn’t even bother making it bigger than you see it here. Just…
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In my last post I boasted that an advantage of digital painting over traditional painting is I could knock out a swarm of bees in 15 minutes, but it could take days and days to do it with physical mediums. I did say it would take hours if I made more custom brushes, and I…
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Just some experimental clouds I knocked out in a few minutes after creating a couple cloud brushes, which also took just a few minutes. This was my first breezy attempt. I know they aren’t magnificent. I only used black and white, and they need to be blended better, etc… The point is how much one…
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I haven’t been writing or sharing anything lately because I’m in one of my training periods. This involves a lot of knuckling down and plowing through tutorials and exercises to fine tune my skills, and that requires a bit of a humble and honest mindset. It’s not fun compared to creating, but it’s essential to…
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The apple above illustrates a typical digital approach to painting (which I do not typically use myself). This is just an exercise I did as part of a digital painting course I’m going through [I’ll explain why], but take note that it was done from scratch and achieves a high level of realism with a…
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[Usually I call these impromptu writings “runaway rants”, but that implies a certain combativeness or railing against something, which is sometimes true. “Reflections” is probably more fair, at least when I’m not objecting to something offensively stupid.] Sometimes something is so goddamned obvious we don’t see it, and I would not think this about myself…
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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.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. I…
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This is the 2nd piece in my new series. If you are one of my perspicacious fans, you’ll have seen this before, but it’s a larger, revised, impasto version, which will be more evident in the close-ups. The original is below: I could have probably done with just touching up the original, but I wanted…
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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.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. This…
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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.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. There…
Read More
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.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. With…
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