Life After Art School!

Last night I had the opportunity to be a guest, along with three of my former classmates from UVU, on Will Terry's youtube vlog. We were interviewed about life before, during, after art school and what we are currently doing professionally.  It was great to catch up with my old friends and talk about the awesome experiences we all had in school! check it out!

Lincoln Day-Lewis

This is my final painting for Advanced Illustration and I must say that I have had an absolute blast in this semester! For those new to my blog in the Advanced Illustration class, taught at Utah Valley University, we get to choose our own projects for the semester. I chose to paint caricatures from Hollywood movies.

For my last Illustration I chose to paint Daniel Day-Lewis from the new movie Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg. I saw this movie a few weeks ago, it is fantastic go see it!

I have always had a great admiration for President Lincoln and jumped at the opportunity to paint him, or at least a version of him. Hope you like this painting as much as I did creating it. Oh and here is a trailer for Lincoln...

Demo Painting...

Last night I had the opportunity to do a quick demo for the Illustration Club at UVU. For this demo I wanted to show my initial steps for creating digital paintings in Photoshop CS5. I had about 30-45 minutes to work so I had to work faster than I usually like to. This isn't meant to be a full tutorial but quick guide into my process.

Step one: I open a previously scanned image in photoshop.
Step two: I separate the line art from the white background.
Step three: I create new layer and fill it with 50-70%  gray. I place this layer underneath the line art.  Step four: I create a new layer and sandwich it in between the gray layer and my line art.This is the layer that I will start to block in my ruff values. When I'm blocking in the values I stay zoomed out and use a large brush. This step should only a couple of minutes.
Step five: Starts after I'm finished blocking in ruff values. For this step I create a layer above all of my art work, I call this my overpaint layer. On this layer I will paint out the line art. Also I start varying my brush size and start to zoom in and out to get a little more detailed. This is the layer where I start to blend the brush strokes.
Step six: When I am happy with my grayscale painting I start glazing color over the grayscale image. I do this by using multiply and color layers. After I have the colors blocked in I flatten my image and continue to refine the painting.