Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu

So here's what I've been up to lately! A couple of weeks ago I started an online digital painting course with the Imaginism School of Art. They run quite a few courses there with different artists, each specialising in different areas. People like Stephen Silver and Cheeks have got courses running there.

So anyway, I've enrolled in the digital painting class with Bobby Chiu. Although I've been working in Photoshop for over 4 years now I still don't feel totally at home with it, so I'm hoping this course will help with that. It's looking good so far! We've been given a couple of really good exercises for practicing painting techniques and I've also learnt a few new things about Photoshop too, like what blend modes actually do (no they're not just totally random like we thought)!

Below is my assignment from week one. Bobby gave us one of his character drawings and we had to paint him up in grayscale. In the image below, I've used the techniques that I learnt from week two to colour him in.

Portsmouth

Watching the boats go by...

London

Sketching

Went to London sketching today with Tim and Iain. After a bit of a slow start at the British Museum we moved out onto the streets to get away from all the people (half term see), and it turned out to be a really good day. Had really good fun doing the long ones over two pages! It's good to see the Chinatown one scanned in actually, because it was a bit hard to see if it was working in my sketchbook, but digital it actually looks alright! Was good fun playing with markers for the London skyline too.

Teaching

Yesterday I went to my old art college to teach the first year students background painting for animation. Here are some of the examples I did for them in our lesson on textures.










I did this one for myself before the lessons to remind myself how to paint! I took one of Marcelo Vignali's development sketches for Lilo and Stich and just painted a small colour key of it.

I've gotten so much out of preparing and teaching these sessions, it's been really great. I'm really looking forward trying to take across some of the things I learnt, (and re-learnt!) into my digital painting. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy real painting! I can't wait to do some more!

Mini crawl

Did my own mini sketch crawl today round Guildford this afternoon :-) It was a bit chilly!

SketchCrawl

Iain and I joined the SketchCrawl this weekend. We went round a couple of museums, it being too cold to draw outside. It was really good. It's been a long time since I've sketched! I was trying to copy some sketching styles I'd seen from other peoples blog, but it didn't really work, this is pretty much just how I sketch! It's going to take some practice. Good to have made a start though.