Last week’s homework was to create two images that were hybrids of two objects that were randomly assigned to us. Each image needed to have one of the objects stand out as more dominant than the other.
Here are my attempts. Can you tell what the objects are, and which is supposed to be the dominant one in each image?
Does this one give things away too much?
In the famous Monkey story, the Monk spends most of his time travelling on a white (okay, grey for you horse enthusiasts) horse. This horse was actually a dragon – Yu Long, the third son of the Dragon King of the West. He was sentenced to death for burning his father’s pearl and saved by the Goddess of Mercy in order to fulfil the role of the Monk’s steed. (Which was actually quite unnecessary until he accidentally ate the Monk’s horse on their first encounter).
Anyhow, Yu Long then earns a bit of a beating from Monkey and joins the group, after which he spends most of his time stuck as a horse and devoid of personality. I’ve always held an interest in the White Dragon Horse. There’s such potential there that I’d love to see explored. I think in the original story he only gets a couple of opportunities to shed the horse disguise during crises and although he gets to pull some neat tricks I don’t think he actually has much success with his contributions.
Now that you know all about him, maybe you’ve got an idea of why I wanted to draw him.
The latter stages of thumbnailing:
Post it notes were kind of handy for seeing through to the previous sketch layer
And a more developed sketch. I wanted to add more things to hint at his involvement in the story (however limited that involvement was). The orb in the sky with his tail wrapped around it is supposed to represent the great pearl. I was thinking of putting in some birds to represent where he was found (Eagle Sorrow River), and his brief stint disguised as a princess during which he sang and sword danced for the amusement of a demon lord (and as an attempt to assassinate him). However I think the top left where I’d planned to put them is better left open.
Water manipulation is easy for a dragon.
An in-class exercise. Wouldn’t really call it that successful but hey, it was fun to do!
The idea was to use textures to help sell the idea of depth. Making all the textures was super fun!
So hey I was putting this off until I got a chance to write a bit about it and then I remembered I liberated myself from having to write things to go with my posts. But now oops I’m writing something to go with this post.
From my mum's garden 🙂
What on earth possessed me to put the horizon line on a slant? It just looks rather odd.
Anyone know whether it’s possible to mark points outside the drawing area in Photoshop? I had to work on the image quite small as I was concerned about memory and wanted my vanishing points to remain visible. I ended up using grid lines to mark my vanishing points but because I had the canvas on a rotation it was quite awkward.
Obviously the answer is just that I should have a perfectly horizontal horizon line…
Anyway, here’s the draft. Might go back again and rethink yet…
Pink buildings? Yeargh, I'm getting out of here!
Y’know I think I’ve attempted something like this a few times before but this time I was a bit more persistent and I’m pleased with the result so far.
Here’s the “thumbnail”.
I had fun with the scratchy shading.
Next: to work out the background! While I’m in a persistent mood I’ll tackle that important element I always avoid…
Here’s the finished-for-now Juri:
Now with added stripe!
Kind of hurried it towards the end, I always have a tendency to do that! I’ll probably have a few more tweaks to make later, but I think I ought to get my ideas moving for my next picture.
On my monitor this looks more subdued and less pink than it does in real life. I will have to play around with the colour balance in Photoshop and check it out on some other monitors… I’ll probably also do some other digital tweaks like clean up the fuzzy edges of the circles. I’ll learn to paint more tidily with practice, I swear!
It's coming together now!
This was why I was redrawing the image with pencils – it’s going to be a watercolour painting. Here’s most of the flat colours down and some areas in a near complete state – I will probably leave those until the image is closer to completion. Uncompleted bits include most of the purples and pinks. These will get deepened with progressive layers of pigment. I’ve also yet to start trying to detail her face.
It’s kind of interesting to note that when I work digitally I feel as though I should start the image with some pencil scratchings to get into the groove. Similarly, when I want to do a painting or drawing I often want to play around digitally to get a feel for the image. Really I think it’s all about finding a happy medium 🙂
Wait, pencils now? What’s going on here?
Sketched out again.
One from a series of images.
