Saturday, December 19, 2009

Painterly? Stuff?

I just finished teaching my Drawing and Composition class and really loved it. The class was great, the critiques kept getting better and so did the artwork. Some of the final drawings were phenomenal. I'm getting a few of them scanned and I may post them here if I have permission from the students.
This winter semester I'm teaching Digital Painting again. So in preparation for teaching I did some painterly work, a couple very different from my "usual style" and a couple that are really close just with a painterly edge. Here are the illustrations.



This first one is a self portrait. I stole the color scheme from a painting that I saw recently and I got the photo by messing around with the camera on my wife's laptop. The photo I took was scary, but I fixed the gross neck thing and painted this. The texture is from an ink wash I scanned.



This second one was produced the same way as the first, except the color scheme came from a different setting (thermal imaging) on the camera thing.



So next I did a little drawing and colored it how I normally do, then used the same digital brush and texture I used on the other two digital paintings. I like the watercolor feel that it has. I decided to explore this a little more.

Middle School Basketball

I tried to make this next one look even more painted than the last. I really like some things about it.

And lastly I did a drawing for fun and made it into a t-shirt design. Here is the illustration:
Explosion Heart Shirt Design

You can vote for it HERE at lafraise.com

8 comments:

Michelle Kondirch said...

Love the style and it's so fun to see so many variations from one person with one tool!

paperbullet said...

love the varied work. it's so nice to experiment.

Courtney said...

I'm in love with the one on top! By the way, I gave a shout out to you in a recent post, and responded to your OSC query. Where is it that you're teaching? (Emo Link is also amazing.)

Mike Laughead said...

Thanks guys! Every once in a while I do something like the paintings I did in my Oil Painting class. I get it out of my system and remember why I didn't want to be an oil painter.

Courtney, I'm teaching at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. The art/animation/graphic design program is pretty nice. In the digital painting class I remember to stretch myself and be open to all styles. I tend to want to get all the students to do artwork like mine.

RAWLS said...

Merry Christmas my friend!!! These are awesome!

Todd M. said...

pretty darn swell, mike. Of all things, I love the clasped pointer fingers of the chap on the t-shirt design. it's the widdle things, eh?

jazzlamb said...

Are ALL of them done on computer? I'd kill to know how you managed to get the watercolor effect so beautifully! The stylization is nice. I saw some batman sketches on your Flickr account, they look awesome!

Mike Laughead said...

Yes, these are all done on the computer. The texture on the top ones are from an ink wash I did on some paper and then just scanned the paper in. I recommend making/finding your own textures and then putting them on a layer about the artwork. Lowering the opacity on the layer and setting the layer to "Multiply" or "Overlay" can produce some great effects.