Saturday, February 7, 2009

Day/Night Painting 2

Well the painting project is getting quite complex, but here goes:

Made a new 'rough' (gosh how I wish I could just make it rough!) for the day scene, same in concept but quite different in colour and composition. Well it has sort of the same palette, but it's brighter overall. The line-work on the ship in the foreground won't be in the actual painting, at least that's the current plan...

Just an FYI, the ship in foreground is roughly battleship sized. The ships in the background... well as you can see there's nebulas crossing in front of two of them. Nebulas with stars (those little specks of white, hopefully that was obvious enough) in them. Yes, the background ships dwarf the stars that lay between the ships and the viewer. Think I'll communicate that better by making a few larger, more noticeable stars (note to self, vary the star colours too), but they'll still just be points of light. Anyways, I like how this new composition works, even if the ships don't really look quite as big as intended, they look bigger than they did in the last rough, partially due to atmospheric perspective as well as the smaller size and positioning of the foreground ship.
I've also started the rough for the night scene, it's not even half finished, but it has the basic elements, which may or may not change. Hoping to not go nutz with detail and have a finished rough before I go to bed, then I can spend all day tomorrow painting the two of them.
For at least part of this project we're supposed to put down an underlayer of acrylic paint, the colour should be complimentary to the colour we are going to put on top of it. Because the night scene will have much stronger colour contrasts, I decided to use this technique on this one. Even though the rough isn't finished, I know it will have this composition and basic colour layout, so I've already put down the acrylic underlay, so I won't have to worry about it being dry or not later. I simulated this in photoshop, the rough you see actually has a layer of red under the green part, and green under the red. Not as important in photoshop where there is no texture to the painting surface, and colour transparency+mixing is mathematically precise, but I figured it was a good idea to simulate the technique anyways.
Lots of work ahead still, not just on this but in every other class as well. Don't turn that knob! (oh, that is almost out of context in this day and age)

2 comments:

Lisa Wang said...

hehe you should post your final 2 pieces, they came out really good! :)

Stephen Good said...

Thanks!
I'll have to wait to get the paintings back to put those up (didn't get a chance to scan them, especially sincethe 2nd one was finished just before class), but I can put up the digital version of the second painting.