Art: Medusa Snake Fish Thing
While I was hanging out Sunday, waiting for Last Blast and trying not to melt in the heat, I started going through the things I've scanned onto my computer. Which is basically what used to be my favorite artwork from 2003 to 2005 (so probably grades 7 through 9). I'm torn between being pleased with how good some of the things are, either in execution or in concept, and cringing at how terrible I was back then (and worse, still am ... ugh). Sometimes, looking over at what I've done, I feel like I'm seeing all this potential and then seeing it not going anywhere. It's frustrating. Other times, I look at everything and I'm really genuinely pleased. Often, these two feelings occur simultaneously.
But that aside, I decided to try coloring something, largely because I felt like painting something whole (not just a sketch of an eye or a chest) and didn't really feel inspired to bother doing a new lineart. So I chose one of my old sketches that I never did anything with, and I have to say I'm rather pleased by how it turned out. It's not really finished, but I'm sick of working on it and I think it looks fine now, so I'm going to leave it. If it bugs me enough, I'll work on it some more.
Close up at 50% original size:
Close up at 90%:
Painted over this original sketch, which was "last modified" in March of 2004 (8th grade) and thus must have been drawn sometime before that:
It wasn't what I had originally intended--at all. My original idea was to have her on a dark green/blue/black background, with her entire body and snake-hair solid black and glittering with pale blue and green highlights, fangs gleaming white, body possibly decorated with gold/white/silver jewelry and body paint and the snakes perhaps with glowing red eyes. I decided that black-on-black would be hard to pull off and I was in a mood for more color, so my second thought was to keep the black-green-blue background, but make her skin very pale skin-colored, slightly on the green-ish side and with a light blue cast, give her a black/green tail, again white fangs, and green/gold snakes around her head with either red or gold eyes. This second image is actually the color pallet I started with, but somehow everything turned red and orange. She also lost her wings and left arm in the process. I had a great time drawing it, and spent a while playing with different brushes--something I rarely do in Photoshop.
Techniques:
*I mostly used the basic circular brush like I usually do: 100% hardness, 50% flow, varying opacity and size--either set to pressure or manipulated directly, most often both.
*The second-most used brush was a spotty brush (found under wet media I think? but basically a bunch of different sized spots), set to: 100% hardness, 50% flow, varying opacity, size, spacing, and scatter.
*I made my own brush, which was just a bunch of horizontal lines, but I couldn't find anything like it in the presets: similar settings as above, but with "angle" set to "direction". I mostly used that for the tail a bit, and maybe for the background--I forget.
*I was also experimenting with creating a custom pallet specifically for the painting. Usually in Photoshop, I just paint the colors I'm using directly onto an empty layer, but I've found that's sort of annoying if I'm zooming in to paint different areas. So I had the stroke of genius to *gasp* actually use the pallet Photoshop provides as my pallet. The only problem is that I can't figure out how to get an empty pallet short of deleting all the color swatches (Is there a way? Does anyone know?), so I picked the photofilter pallet because it didn't have too many colors already and ended up using a bunch of those colors as well as my own. It wasn't perfect: if you click wrong it keeps trying to add new color swatches, which can get annoying, and I have a deeply ingrained habit of pressing ALT whenever I want a new color, which messes things up if I'm picking colors this way. But overall, I like it.
But that aside, I decided to try coloring something, largely because I felt like painting something whole (not just a sketch of an eye or a chest) and didn't really feel inspired to bother doing a new lineart. So I chose one of my old sketches that I never did anything with, and I have to say I'm rather pleased by how it turned out. It's not really finished, but I'm sick of working on it and I think it looks fine now, so I'm going to leave it. If it bugs me enough, I'll work on it some more.
Close up at 50% original size:
Close up at 90%:
Painted over this original sketch, which was "last modified" in March of 2004 (8th grade) and thus must have been drawn sometime before that:
It wasn't what I had originally intended--at all. My original idea was to have her on a dark green/blue/black background, with her entire body and snake-hair solid black and glittering with pale blue and green highlights, fangs gleaming white, body possibly decorated with gold/white/silver jewelry and body paint and the snakes perhaps with glowing red eyes. I decided that black-on-black would be hard to pull off and I was in a mood for more color, so my second thought was to keep the black-green-blue background, but make her skin very pale skin-colored, slightly on the green-ish side and with a light blue cast, give her a black/green tail, again white fangs, and green/gold snakes around her head with either red or gold eyes. This second image is actually the color pallet I started with, but somehow everything turned red and orange. She also lost her wings and left arm in the process. I had a great time drawing it, and spent a while playing with different brushes--something I rarely do in Photoshop.
Techniques:
*I mostly used the basic circular brush like I usually do: 100% hardness, 50% flow, varying opacity and size--either set to pressure or manipulated directly, most often both.
*The second-most used brush was a spotty brush (found under wet media I think? but basically a bunch of different sized spots), set to: 100% hardness, 50% flow, varying opacity, size, spacing, and scatter.
*I made my own brush, which was just a bunch of horizontal lines, but I couldn't find anything like it in the presets: similar settings as above, but with "angle" set to "direction". I mostly used that for the tail a bit, and maybe for the background--I forget.
*I was also experimenting with creating a custom pallet specifically for the painting. Usually in Photoshop, I just paint the colors I'm using directly onto an empty layer, but I've found that's sort of annoying if I'm zooming in to paint different areas. So I had the stroke of genius to *gasp* actually use the pallet Photoshop provides as my pallet. The only problem is that I can't figure out how to get an empty pallet short of deleting all the color swatches (Is there a way? Does anyone know?), so I picked the photofilter pallet because it didn't have too many colors already and ended up using a bunch of those colors as well as my own. It wasn't perfect: if you click wrong it keeps trying to add new color swatches, which can get annoying, and I have a deeply ingrained habit of pressing ALT whenever I want a new color, which messes things up if I'm picking colors this way. But overall, I like it.