At first I thought to write about this piece but there's not much behind the thought-process:
Called pez-ajolote... which means axolotl-fish
I just started to move the hand, throw colors here and there thinking in a sky and maybe water or sea...
I actually have some process pics... I'll make a gif... here it is:
I usually use photoshop for drawing/painting. All last year I used the photochops. But this one was made in another application called Artrage. I made it in that app because I wanted to re-try the tools it has. I practically just used one... the knife tool for this... sketch.
This artrage app is supposed to emulate traditional tools like:
When I started to take seriously to make digital art, I bought a wacom tablet (which I still use today) and that app (which is cheap like ~50 bucks the latest version), although the vision of the art I wanted to make was not really clear.
I like a lot anime, but I was exposed to some digital paintings and concept art and those also inspired me.
My first "digital painting" with a wacom (although I have a few made like 10 years earlier with an app called open canvas and with mouse! But dunno where the files are) was this thingy:
Lolz made this in jun-2012
I wanted to make something but I didn't know how to, I had the vision in my head but lacked skills, I've never practiced, I had no mileage nor any kind of theory or knowledge of colors, value, contrast. I used to draw until 14 or 15, I was not bad but dropped it and I just hit frustration-wall when re-taking drawing digitally many years later. How can one recover years wasted?... One can not. I had to cope with it and start from practically zero.
At that time I was also involved in making electronic music, I wanted to illustrate those tracks and the art was heavily influenced by the music I was creating... very weird musix.
That idea above a year later turned into this:
I left it unfinished
Throughout this year I made these:
Jul-2012
Aug-2012
Jun-2013
In 2013 I started to make tee-shirts with a friend, that period of my life spawned the following (all made in same artrage app) designs:
Batman fan-art
Zelda's
Resident evil's
And this one that came up pretty cool and was supposed to illustrate our brand haha. It was called 'OldMecha'
OldMecha
It was a word-game in spanglish: Old Mecha sounds a bit like Olmeca (the ancient civilization of Olmecs). That's why the head is like an Olmec head and the rest is an old... mecha.
A zoom to the OldMecha head
After that I retake the making of illustrations for my tracks, I had five tracks I wanted to depict visually and I made an effort to do 'finished' pieces. In chronological order:
The thing with these pieces is that I feel they're so uptight, I enjoyed painting them but it took me too much time and struggle to made them, partially because I had no mileage and partially because I was aiming for a 'finished' look. That struggle and tension I think is transmitted to the viewer.
Now, I like and enjoy doing much more sketchy, painterly, 'unfinished', expressive 2D art. Drawings that hint instead of resolving any bit of information to the viewer. Art where you can see brushstrokes that seem fun to make. Paintings that left something to imagination rather than being super crispy and polished. Is kind of contradictory in a sense because I also made 3D art and when sculpting/modelling I tend to do lot of details, but that stuff will be for another post.
That's why I returned to the app artrage, now that I have a couple of EXP points up and a vision of the art I want to make, I think it could be a valuable and refreshing tool.
This is a recent painting I did for @loreshapergames:
Is way more relaxed and enjoyable I think.
I'll try to make future posts more relaxed and enjoyable too haha -_- ...
PS If you know any tag I could use other than art, artzone, drawing and animation please suggest to me some. I also used games in this one...