Chris Sears' Blog: September 2007

2007-09-29 night sketch

Painted this last night in my car. Cement factory in Tehachapi, CA in the moonlight. about 4000 feet up in the mountains. Lots of railroads and trains. Very peaceful.

2007-09-28 Lancelot du Lake

I drew a thumbnail or two for coposition and then set up some lights and posed for my own reference photographs... There are a few of us who are trying to do a monthly mythology-based illustration blog. A random letter was picked--"L"--and Lancelot was generated. Don't know if i will finish this on time, but at least I tried, right? Probbaly will finish it on my own anyway.

2007-09-27 brute profile

did this tonight while slightly buzzed or drunk. profile view of the prreviously postedd character design. unofficially dubbed the "brute" prototype. whatever. black prismacolor pencil on duralene 'cuz it has that super sexy feel to it.

2007-09-26 brute design

updated character design. refined the anatomy somewhat.

man, i'm tired.

2007-09-25 night sketch

did this in my car on the way home tonight from Edwards AFB in the Mojave Desert. intersection of 50th East and Avenue E. That's the eastern part of Palmdale out in the distance.

Acrylic in black scrapbook

(speaking of "eastern"... I saw Eastern Promises last Friday. Pretty good flick. Viggo Mortensen does a pretty good russian mobster. the bath house fight scene was pretty far out there--people will talk about it, i'm sure.)

2007-09-24 classwork and character design

This is the villain proportion counterpart to the hero-type in the last post.

In Nathan's class, we did floral still life studies today. lotta fun, but tough. easier than the animals because we had around 40-45 minutes per sketch. acryllic in scrapbook.

2007-09-23 Character Design

This is for an instructional DVD someone I know is working on. Low-res and all, but you know the story. It was very interesting to talk shop for an hour, and look at a few comic books. I generated these proportions in a thumbnail and then took the basic design up a notch to here.

Now we'll work on costume, accessories, etc. I probably have to do a profile view too.

Anyway, random non-copyrighted ideas for superpowers are welcome...

2007-09-23 Quickpaint

Did these this morning at LAAFA in van nuys. I'm learning more about my palette. Most of these colors were mixed with a variation of the primaries--pthalo blue, permanent rose (aka magenta, aka quinacridone red), cad yellow deep hue. i also used a little yellow ochre, burnt umber and ivory black, but not much. these colors are hyper-intense. just about as intense as they come. a very good combination to play with for really dynamic skin colors. cad yellow and quin red give some of the gnarliest oranges you'll ever see.

The head was first, the figure sketch second. Photographs never come out right. Photoshopping doesn't help much either unless i feel like spending an hour or two fooling with all the curves (which i don't). And to make it worse, they look better on my mac than they do on most pc's because of the different color maps.

anyway. i had a good time. i think i'm kind of scaring away the usual customers with these color schemes. i don't get how people want to spend 3 years of their life painting the same damn lighting conditions--zeroing in on the perfect mixture to capture what it looks like in a drab studio. this has been a lot more fun. very challenging and not easy by any means, but a nice way to get some color angst out.

2007-09-16 quickpaint

I showed up early for the long pose session, so I was able to get a good seat and convince the regulars to try something new and use a red color gel on the light and a white backdrop. Made it a lot more fun than usual, starting to explore my colors more with less hesitation. Much credit for this goes to Nathan Fowkes for pushing us in his class and inspiring us withhis work.

palette:
cad red light hue (napthol)
ultramarine
alizarin crimson
burnt umber
ivory black
titanium white
cad yellow deep
yellow ochre.

finished the first one before noon, finished this by 1:30pm.
same palette, still trying to see how much cad red i can use and still pull off a decent read.
still a lot of fun. had a good day.

2007-09-15 Quickpaint at Edwards AFB

YA-10B parked in front of the base museum

Concrete munitions bunkers as seen from my parking lot. Really big firecrackers.

2007-09-09 quickpaint, etc.

5-10 minute figure quickpaints in acrylic are pretty nerve-wracking. this was done at a long-pose session at LAAFA in Los Angeles today. The session was 5 hours long. It was pretty productive--I did the acrylic painting, drew another red conte and white portrait (not shown), did two quick head drawing demos for a friend on her newsprint pad, and did another quick pencil portrait lay-in. The big suck of it all is that most of the other painters grab most of the spots for the whole five hours, so I can't switch seats as soon as I finish something.

(And some of the old-timers can be pretty cranky, territorial and uptight about really minor things.)

the drawing, likeness, and finish are nothing special. what makes me happy is just experimenting with new colors and learning how far i can push certain combinations. today was the first time i used permanent rose (magenta or quinacridone red) and cad orange in a figure painting. just having an excuse to screw around on the disposable palette and figure out new ways to make skin tones, modulate them warm and cool, turn them into shadows, etc. is a lot of fun right now. when i finally get back to doing more finished paintings in oil, I think I will have more confidence with color, react more spontaneously to my first impressions, and be able to pull off some more subtle effects than i can with normal drawing.

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These are just crappy superhero/supervillain proportion studies a friend of mine asked me to do for something. Based on feedback on the proportions, I'll redo them and turn them into something finished.