Rabbit Heart

New Art Challenge with friends! (I promise I'll manage to post something else soon). This time the topic was: Rabbit Heart. Based on Florence + the Machine song. Interpreted as we want. So here's my quicky thing. I actually had another one started, something bigger, but later did this sketch and thought it'll be nicer to finish first. So expect another rabbit soon.  I just missed those kind of pieces in my gallery.

Here's sort of a wip / tutorial picture, maybe it'll be useful for someone:

*edit*: ok, this pic got scaled down for some reason, here's a bigger version. Pen sketch, scanned, colours in Photoshop. Usual stuff :)

Day and Night

Another Art Challenge piece with friends. "Day and Night", we were supposed to depict day and night as a man and woman. At first I wanted to go with the Sandman look for the Night, making him a guy (I just recently re-read the series again, love it as always), but thought it'd be too cliche. Then it turned out everybody else made Night a woman, which - I guess - makes me even more cliche. Oh, well ;)

I wanted to make a proper tutorial out of this one, but no time for that, hence just few wip shots in a gif file (a bit big, so wait for it to load):




What you can see here is my usual workflow: first a rushed, dirty sketch. Some flat colours to get a general colour scheme. Then detailing the faces too much, which I always do, even though I know it would be better to work on everything at once. But somehow if I don't get the faces right at first, I quickly lose the interest with the rest. And after that, it's just lots of regular brushwork. One thing you can see here that works wonders in pictures is: adding shadows. Even if the picture has a diffused light and no big contrasts, just small hints of shadows (see last steps) really add to the depth of the whole thing.

Making of a face?

Just a small thingy I wanted to post few months ago. An animated gif showing the making of the face. Some things you can notice: at the end, when touching up the whole thing, I'm usually adjusting contrast and blocking in some bold shapes of colours. In this case it was blue on her cheeks (second light source) and some details in warm tones so the face seems more vivid. I do it, honestly, because when detailing I often lose the balance of colours, so whatever I had in mind at the beginning is usually lost at this point, and I have to fix it later anyway. I also repainted her eyes a few times, as at first the whole piece was supposed to be monochrome, but in the end I put more colour everywhere, so needed to adjust the face as well. Nothing that special but looks fun, I think :)



Final image still not finished. Oh, and this is not an animation, just WIP screenshots put together in one file, so don't tell me it looks like some frames are missing (I wouldn't write it if I didn't actually have people asking this before).

Albino kid

It was supposed to be a quickie, as lately I've been doing some quick face studies, mostly based on references to practice skintones and such, but I kinda got carried away in this case. So it's half quickie half finished I guess, too much fun experimenting with colours in this one. As for the ref, though it was more an inspiration as I didn't really follow it in the end, see here, don't know who the author is, I was just looking up albino people on Google. Don't know if I ever mentioned it, but I was always really interested in this topic. Anyway. As for tech info: few evenings in Photoshop CS2, basic hard brush, textured.


And a gif showing an animation of a progress from the very beginning as the concept changed a lot (I think I repainted her nose 3 or 4 times). Wait a bit for it to load, it's pretty big (500kb).