The Electric Pen

Flowers

2007-08-03T00:29:00.001-07:00

Thought I would try something a little different. When I was a kid I used to draw flowers on holiday cards I would inevitably be drafted into making every year. I remember one time I was somewhat sad that the best flowers I ever drew I gave away and thus could not show people my awesome flowers. These turned out better than those so I guess that makes me happy.

Island Sunset

2007-08-02T06:36:00.001-07:00

About 60 min, this is the view outside my window at around 6:30 am when I am posting this... I wish. It probably looks like this somewhere though at this hour!

More Mordor

2007-07-27T02:12:00.001-07:00

More LOTR speedpaints, this one took 60 min.

Mordor

2007-07-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

45 min speedpaint, based on a shot from LOTR.

Red Rock

2007-07-25T02:41:00.001-07:00

This speedpaint took about 70 minutes. First landscape speedpaint with more modeling of form and less cheesy rimlighting. Always good to learn new things.

Dark Cave

2007-07-24T03:12:00.000-07:00

Monday speedpaint, went a bit over, about 80 min but I liked the image and kept fiddling a little bit past time. I was trying to texture a bit more which slowed me down because I am texturing the old fashioned way (by painting the texture by hand as opposed to using texture brushes or overlays). Anyways hope you all like it.

Sunday Group Speedpaint

2007-07-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

This was a one hour speedpaint from a photo that polina picked out for all of us. My other speedpaints were crippled by a laptop that kept crashing. I think the khang brushes were crashing me so this painting was painted using only the default photoshop round brush.

Head Study

2007-07-22T04:41:00.001-07:00

This started out as a speedpaint but I kind of kept working on it a bit past the normal time limit because I felt I wasn't really going to learn anything (and be very embarassed posting it) at the 60 min mark. I guess I empathize more with Gary's comment that he can't show work that is half done because it looks terrible. I tried to start with a line drawing and then color it. After about 40 minutes I realized it was terrible and I started over but used the more painterly approach of blocking in rough shapes and refining with smaller shapes as I went along. That worked a lot better but since I burned 40 min already it ended up taking close to 2 hrs in the end. Sorry about that.

Friday group speedy

2007-07-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

One hour speedpaint from imagination in the friday photoshop workshop. The theme words we had to work with were blimp, river, shack, and black guy. It was fun, more group speedpainting silliness to come on Sunday.

Room with a view

2007-07-20T02:22:00.001-07:00

This speedpaint took about an hour and I am pretty unhappy with it overall. It seemed like it would be easy to do but I guess the devil is in the details. And I failed to finish (hah failed to start even) before midnight. Oh well better luck next time.

Seing Red

2007-07-18T23:56:00.001-07:00

I made it in before midnight, small miracles and all. This is my least speedy speedpaint thus far weighing in at just over 90 min but I really liked the image so I spent a little longer polishing it up a bit. Hopefully I am learning something from all this.

Thinking cool

2007-07-18T02:17:00.001-07:00

The desire to continue noodling is high on these types of paintings with very low value contrast, its hard to just let it stand. Not entirely happy with this one but decided it wasn't going to get better so stopped it around 40 min.

Sunset pic

2007-07-16T22:29:00.001-07:00

Well After seeing Polina and Alejandro raise the bar for the speedpaintings I felt kinda bad about the last batch so I spent a solid hour on this one and tried to refine my process a little. I feel it has a nice feeling to it without having spent too much time rendering or "noodling" it.

Color Roughs

2007-07-16T02:53:00.001-07:00

These things were harder that I thought they would be and I'm not really happy with the way they came out but they are only roughs for paintings and I felt they had gotten to the point where they would convey what I had in mind compositionally and color wise even if they aren't very pretty paintings.

Transformers

2007-07-15T18:54:00.001-07:00

This Sunday four of us got together to do a little speedpainting. Unfortunately the theme was transformers, a movie I haven't seen and I am not naturally a gifted mecha style designer. Oh well. My attempt to hide this fact by silhouetting the transformer resulted in a very lame Godzilla-like composition. Hopefully if I do one of these every day sometime next summer I can look back and see how much I improved?

Saturday...

2007-07-15T02:01:00.001-07:00

Just watched Ratatouille and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected I would based on the previews I saw last year. This speedpaint has nothing to do with the movie but more on the harry potter movie I plan on seeing next. This one took about 45 min.

First Post

2007-07-14T17:06:00.001-07:00

In an attempt to work on my digital painting speed and technique I am starting this daily blog to try to do a speedpaint a day. This one was done in about 30 minutes.