Noah Bradley's "How to Start a Painting"

Noah Bradley is a very successful artist who has worked with a myriad of large companies. His workshops cost anywhere between $200 and $2000, so when he releases a tutorial for free it's unmissable. I'll be going through this tutorial to learn about some of his techniques when initialising an idea.

http://www.noahbradley.com/blog/2012/how-to-start-a-painting/

Brush strokes

A little bit of practice in brush strokes and creating an environment in which to place a character. Conceptual artists have to capture ideas quickly and boldly to give the impression of their idea to a client. This environment was created in less than 20 minutes to reflect that. I tried to give more of an impression of mood more than anything else and all brush strokes are left apparent.

Creating an end Goal.

After working on a few images that will be posted shortly, I've found that it's all well and good to create pieces, but without a more specific end goal I find I have less of a focus on the challenges I should set myself. With this in mind I have decided to contextualise my final piece.

I will be reworking artwork found on a Magic the Gathering card. For example, the artwork for "Joven's Ferrets" is known throughout the magic community as being pretty "awful". The artwork itself isn't all that bad, but it doesn't inspire people to feel attached to the card or respect it. Magic the Gathering is very much centralised around its artwork, so good, striking artwork creates nostalgia and love for that card, regardless of it's individual strength. I would take such a card and recreate the artwork under the internal environment that Wizards of the Coast commissioned me to do such a thing.

This allows me to work more to the guidelines commercial artists would work through when creating a piece for a large company, and also allows me to inject more of my passions into my work in this module.