I dunno… maybe 45-60 minutes…

Nice thing about this one is that gamma & contrast adjustment and bloom FX DIDN’T improve this painting, so maybe my sense for values improved a bit.

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A character/creature design for the sidekick in my personal comic book project.

What’s that silver ball, you ask? It’s my attempt at a “light probe”, which I used for environmental lighting reference.

Kind of tired of being stuck in a rut — that is, I can draw solid forms and perhaps even light them, but I want to be able to apply different materials and textures ’cause I want to be able to apply a layer of credibility to my work! I’d like to draw dirty, rusty, beaten-up stuff, to simulate multilayered shaders, and to develop a reliable, efficient, procedural process - ’cause one of the comic book projects I’m working on calls for a lot of it, so I’d better make myself into a lean, mean texturin’ machine…

So this doodle’s really not much of a “concept” — it’s an exercise ‘ cause I’d like to focus just on the problem of getting these materials to appear credibly lit. I’ve concentrated most of the paint damage on the edges and corners, and I tried adding very tiny bevel highlights and microshadows to the edges of the chipped paint.

Yes, I guess I could’ve used brush textures instead of a hard circle brush to speed things up - but I’d like to be able to do this stuff competently the old-fashioned way before I resort to any trickery. I did learn to use smaller-radiused brushes to “scumble” wherever the larger brush wouldn’t fit, and a footpedal control to adjust the brush size made this job a lot easier.

UPDATE: Okay, so I think I’m getting the hang of switching up the saturation and hue while staying in roughly the same value — and using detail as a way to add visual interest without destroying the large forms.

Draw moar backgrounds - and start figuring out how to draw detailed things without them all going to hell…

Here’s a speedpainting I did from photo reference (which I shot during a trip to Annecy, France).
You can watch the entire 40-minute process here, with commentary. (Link opens in a new window)

I really hate having to do super clean painting/colouring. It’s like this endless spiral of diminishing returns.

Another quick painting I made for a class demonstration, this one took 90 minutes.

Something I created while I was recording a video tutorial for my students to help them with their recent assignment.

A quick doodle from my imagination.

I’ve just discovered how to simulate the effect of “bloom” manually with a paintbrush. As with all recent discoveries, I always overdo it. Please forgive the artist for his indiscretion. He’s still learning.