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.

First Tutorial

This is a breakdown of the 1st two hours of my first tutorial. It is hosted at:
http://hannsaki.deviantart.com/art/digital-painting-tutorial-pt-1-90347578 and was created by an artist known as hannsaki.

The following are several layers, although the original is done on two layers, I feel that more would provide a less stressfull envionment and more control over the piece. It also allows me to create a breakdown for future use.

Starting off with a little sketch of the character.

Blocking out the background.

Planning the lighting.

Working out the background composition.

Adding details here and there.

Early Vision Statement

Over the course of the semester I will be hoping to complete several of the tutorials hosted at
http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/articles/20-tutorials-for-learning-digital-painting-techniques.
I will be completing these in order to advance my digital painting skills, in particular painting colour and texture techniques. As of right now, my goal is to use these tutorials and others like them to create a large scale piece of art, or several pieces, utilising the process of established commercial artists.

In my work I have found that I am very good at creating small characters with little or no context. These characters may look good but without the skill to create the world around them I feel that they appear very flat and, forgive the pun, 2 Dimensional.

With this in mind I will be studying, along with Photoshop techniques, the process artists use when creating a commercialised work. From the thumbnail to the £200 print on the wall, and the iterative nature of artistic progression.