Some Practice with my Painting Program

So I have been working on my computer painting program. This is a just a little portrait I did. The first picture is what I did outside the picture on my sketchbook. The Picture below is what I did on my painting program inside the computer.

Studying the Environment

I have been trying to do something I really hate doing and that is studying landscape. I thought I might as well post a few of my better drawings, of curtain objects I have been studying, such as bushes and trees.

I try to start with basic shapes and work my way from there

It is hard to create the feel of something without spending a HUGE amount of time drawing it. With trees, the difference has a lot to do with the shading and shape. I am trying to make different scribbles mean different things. I think first you need to closely and slowly study a curtain object and then figure out a quick way to do it.

No doubt, human made objects are the hardest to draw for me. They all have a curtain structure and we know when they look off. This I am afraid is a sad attempt to draw a few of my house hold items.

The Character INTRODUCTION!!!

Unlike real life (as you can see above), the introduction of a character in film is very important. I just watched a commentary on the Pixar movie Ratatouille where Brad Bird went into detail on what he was thinking through out the film making process of Ratatouille. I have come across very few who are as good at explaining their process and philosophy on film making as Brad Bird. In the Ratatouille commentary Brad emphasized the importance of introducing a Character. It is a art that seems to have been lost with this generation of filmmakers.

Every main character in Ratatouille has a very unique and telling way of being introduced. The main Character Remy, a rat obsessed about becoming a cook, is introduced to us crashing through a window with a cook book in his hands. This introduction is very telling of who Remy is as a Character. The breaking of glass represents the kayos that is going on in Remy’s life, the book represents his passion for cooking, the two are together because they are directly related to each other, the kayos Remy finds himself in is because of his weird obsession on fine cooking. There is also Emile who is Remy’s brother, he is a very soft spoken rat who will eat absolutely anything, naturally he is introduced to the audience sitting down in a very relaxed position eating garbage. Skinner the villain of the picture is introduced so we can see only his hat hovering over the counter like a shark before it attacks.

I look at some of my favorite movies of all time, such as Schindler’s List and I see some very clever introductions that express exactly who the characters are. With Oskar Schindler we are introduced through him getting ready to go to an expensive dinner, immediately we can tell that he wants to look richer then he really is, he scrambles to find the money he will need for the dinner, very prudently he puts on his cloths and the last thing he puts is his small Nazi badge, telling us who his allegiance is with. We do not hear Schindler speak before we know exactly what he is about. Within the first five minutes of meeting Schindler we see his eye for woman, his way with handling money to get what he wants, and his hospitable charm he uses to gain reconnection.

You can look at many of Steven Spielberg’s movies and see his genius with introducing his characters. Whether it is Indiana Jones and his very stylized intro where we hear the hero theme and we have a extreme close up revealing our hero’s face or the subtle into of Tom Hanks’ character John Miller in Saving Private Ryan, where we see a bunch of solders getting ready to storm Omaha Beach and we are introduced to the shaking hand of John Miller looking just like the rest of the people he is with, trying to throw off the idea that he is a “hero” and making him just a solder like the rest of the people he is with. You can tell that Steven puts thought in what we see first and how it represents who the character is as a whole.

A good filmmaker will take the extra time to find the perfect way to introduce a character to the audience. The first impression means a lot, we build opinions right away, the filmmaker needs to make sure they are the right opinions. I am not saying that we should always have huge introductions, they can often be very subtle you do not want to consciously draw attention. The question you want to ask yourself is, am I expressing who this character is?

Depressed

This is a drawing I did about a year ago. It was a quick sketch but I ended up liking it quite a bit. Just lines from a Precise V5 pen that created a sort of mood and feeling that has the potential to impact a person.

Mourning Woman

Sense I finished putting up my Portrait Watercolor series, I thought I would put up some of my other work . This was done about a year and a half ago. I was trying to experiment with watercolor and ink. If you like doing watercolor in detail, like I do,it takes extremily long to finish a project, because it is so unforgiving and you often need to wait and let the paint is dry.  This peice of work took about a hour and a half. I could go in with ink and do the detail and then get the color tones done with watercolor. I hope you find it interesting and criticism is greatly appreciated.

Joy of a Boy

After doing so many serious pictures, I decided to go with a fun one. Inspired a bit by Norman Rockwell’s style of painting, I did this watercolor. The shirt and the background are all cold colors, making the face and hair (worm colors) pop out really well. The eyes really seem to pop out as well because they are surrounded by worm colors. This painting is supposed to make you think of a childhood memory. It is a good representation of the joy of being a boy.

Looking Ahead

This is a Portrait of myself I did about two years ago. I made it for my mother. I created three other portraits for three other good friend’s mothers as a present for graduation. My mother of course likes this one the most. I think it is a good representation of where I was at that time and sort am still at now.

I like the way the eyes turned out.  The mouth was a bit disappointing. I for some reason have a hard time with mouths. I think the blues really balance the picture well.

Inspiration

As I hope you can see, I was trying to create a very inspiring look with this man. I show this most vividly in his eye. with this guy I really tried to create a shiny/glossy look, not like he is crying but like he sees something that is bigger than himself and that he won’t stop until he gets there. All the colors really push the audiences eyes to his eye, which is the main point of the picture. The orange shadow effect on his shirt worked out pretty well too.

It was done a few years ago. It is one of my favorite watercolor portraits I have done, even though I think the proportions of the face are slightly off.

Contrast

One of the keys to making good stories and good characters is contrast. You will not watch a good movie that does not have both goods and bads.

I am a big fan of movies that have good in them. I actually want the core of each of my films to be built out of something good. But my films would be very poor if all I had was good things happen.

Let me use my drawing as an example of a movie. If I only used dark shades and did not go any lighter then gray, my picture would not be as interesting. We would have hardly anything to contrast the black with and the dark would not stand out as being anything special. The same principle applies if I only had white through gray and no dark. The drawing would be hard to read, the shapes would lose their strength and nothing would be popping out toward the audience.

The point of the drawing is made through contrast. The drawing is trying to say something with one half of the face being light and the other dark. We see some powerful dark lines in the eyes and shadows that contrast the highlights of the hat and face, well.

The same thing applies to any character you make or story you create. Yes, I am a big believer in good winning out in the end, but I need to contrast the good with something evil. We do not know how special the good is until we are able to see what it overcame or what it is fighting.

If you want to make a good villain, do not just have him be completely evil. Give him some good qualities and let us see the light in him. Look at a villain like Darth Vader from Star Wars. Vader is a very evil man (some would call him a monster) who killed many people (Including children). The reason to why he was so interesting however, was the fact that there was some good in him. The idea that Vader was once a good man makes his crimes all the more horrible and interesting. The idea that Vader is not completely evil, gives us as an audience a reason to keep watching him and hoping that he might choose good one day.

Sometimes you might need to sacrifice an interesting villain for an interesting story. Take the Joker in Batman Dark Knight for example. I think that the Joker was played very well, and he was actually a perfect villain for the Batman movie. The only interesting thing about the Joker however was the ways he could test Batman and Gotham. The Joker by himself would not be interesting, he had shown that he was completely evil. The only reason to why the Joker was doing what he was doing, was to test people and blow things up.

The Dark Knight was interesting because of the contrast between the Joker and Batman. In the first Batman movie, we saw that Batman had shown that he was mostly good (light). So what if we tested that goodness with the evil (darkness) of the Joker? The extreme light that Batman was, and the extreme darkness that the Joker was, created a very powerful contrast. For me that contrast was what made the movie interesting.

So in any story contrast is key. The darker the story gets, the more clearly we see the light.

(The picture is a self Portrait I did of myself about 4 years ago. I touched it up a little on Photoshop, so that I could get a bit more contrast. I am very happy with how it turned out, it was one of those drawings that made me first begin to think I could be good at art)

Generations of Santa Clause

This is called Generations of Santa Clause because I used many different references of Santa Clause to make this painting. What I think it amounted to was a very mediocre watercolor. I think this painting turned out okay, but that is pretty much all I could say about it. There really was no big thing that made this Santa special to any of the others you see in other peoples work. I will do better next time. It was done a little more then two years ago for Christmas. My dad said that he would do a painting of Santa as well, but sadly never kept up his end of the bargain

I do hope you enjoy