Outdoor Sketching Day 7

Today I did my first color study from life. This painting was done at the Vijayawada railway station. There's this place in the station where all the train engines and compartments stop by, probably for repairs and maintenance I guess. The place itself is just a 5 minutes walk from where I live. I really liked the colors of this one engine, so I painted it. It took more time than I had expected. By the time I almost finished the painting, the light has gone down and I was surrounded by mosquitoes. But I was happy with the result considering the fact that it was my first painting on location, and I enjoyed the process very much.  Unfortunately, the scan on my painting doesn't match the original very much. I should learn how to make my scans look closer to the original paintings.

Outdoor Sketching Day 1-6

Okay, it has been a while since my last post. But recently I started doing outdoor sketching and I intend to do it daily for as long as I can. Let's see for how long I can keep this up. I will upload one sketch for each day, and here are the sketches of the first 6 days.

Day 1:

I have decided to do sketches of the city I currently live in, Vijayawada. Its a city in Andhra Pradesh, India. This particular sketch was drawn at Wagon Workshop Colony, the place I grew up in for most of my childhood. Its a peaceful place, far from the hustle and bustle of the city. Lots of trees all around. Now this place is almost deserted. Most people moved closer to the city for various reasons. Some people still live here, but there aren't many compared to the time I grew up here. And since not many live here, the maintenance of the place is not very good. All the buildings have cracks, peeled off paint, weeds and other plants growing around them. And this adds an unique character to the place and I love it. I visit this place as often as possible so that I can capture as many locations as possible in this place. This particular building is some maintenance related building. 

Day 2:

This is the seating gallery of a playground. Its a small ground, but the largest among the two playgrounds in this colony.

Day 3:

This is a clock tower at the Vijayawada Railway Station. I believe this is the largest railway station in the entire state.

Day 4:

This is the institute in the colony I mentioned above. Its kinda like a community center. It has a small library, a gymnasium, few indoor sports, and a hall for special events and screening movies. I don't think they screen movies here anymore. They used to screen a movie every weekend when I was a kid.

Day 5:

This was at the Annual Vijayawada Book Exhibition. Saw this guy, Raju, making these huge Papads(an Indian snack) at a snack booth. I liked how he handles those huge disc shaped snacks and so I made a sketch of it.

Day 6:

There's a playground across the Vijayawada Railway Station. This is one of the main playgrounds of the city. Small level sports tournaments happen here, and apart from that people generally come here in the mornings and evenings for walks or to play badminton. This place has a basketball court and I drew one of its backboards. The basketball court is not that great and lack of maintenance is obvious. But that's probably because barely anyone plays basketball over here.

Hope you enjoyed these sketches :)

Doctor Strange

I have made this painting a while back, but I was too lazy to make a blog post about it. I still am. Actually, I don't know if I'm lazy or just too busy with multiple things that I'm trying to do at the moment. Either way, it doesn't matter. I decided to write this post, while I figure out today's plan in the back of my mind. I'm not thinking too much about what I'm typing. A byproduct of not sleeping the whole night. Anyway, I'll get right into the post.

This painting is based on a poster of Doctor Strange movie. Actually it's not a poster. It's one of the first images that was officially released by Marvel. Just google 'Doctor Strange' and you'll find profile shot of Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange outfit. I liked the silhouette of his face. I decided to make few drawings to see if there's a possibility of a painting. Here they're:

The first sketch didn't feel right. So I tried to push the design and make it as simple as possible and I really liked what I did in the second sketch. So I decided to go with it. Actually this is one of those images I drew long back, left it aside, and one day decided to make a painting out of it. So I brought it into Photoshop and refine the design and figure out all details. I like doing clean line art before I start painting because I don't have to worry about various details or contours and just focus on painting.  But lately I'm finding that process very time consuming. I have to learn to paint without clean line art. Here's the line art of the painting:

After doing the line art I left it aside and got back to it several days later. Rather than painting just the character, I wanted to have some kind of background. If you want to paint a whole image rather than just a character, it helps to have some kind of background. So I painted this as my background for this painting:

The process of painting character is pretty straightforward. I start with choosing local colors(solid base colors when not affected by light), then I add shadows, followed by highlights, and then any special light effects if necessary. Here's the final result:

As always, I see areas I could improve on. But I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out. Hope you like it as well. :)

Sherlock

So, I'm guessing that you like BBC's T.V. show Sherlock. I certainly do. The characters are very interesting, especially Sherlock. So, I wanted to do some kind of art based on Sherlock. I find doing fan art relaxing and energizing, and I do it in between my regular work.

Back in March this year, I did some sketches trying to find a design that interests me. Sometimes I do lots and lots of sketches, sometimes I do just a few. In this case, I found the design I like just after a few trials. The design I liked is basically based on a poster of The Abominable Bride episode. Here are some of the initial sketches...

These are some alternate designs...

And the one I finally chose...

Just like most of my initial sketches, I did them traditionally using 2B pencil and regular printer paper. And typically I just draw whatever I feel like drawing, and I may or may not use those drawings for anything. Sometimes the drawings I make won't be useful for anything and just serves as practice. Other times they'll be useful for another project. I tend to save all my drawings because you never know when they'll come in handy. When I decided to finish the Sherlock painting in May, I pulled out these sketches you see above and used them rather than trying to draw again.

I took the final design into Photoshop, made some changes, cleaned it up, and the painting process that followed was kind of interesting. It took quite some time to paint this. I tried to paint this in a painterly style, with visible strokes and smooth transitions between colors. But it just wasn't working. After several hours, I decided to start again from scratch! And this time I wanted to try cel-shading, which basically is painting with hard light and shadows without no or very little soft transitions between colors. There are lot of different ways to paint any image. Even if you're painting in a particular style, every artist approaches it in a different way. It all boils down to what you like as artist, what you're comfortable with, and what is working for that particular piece. You just have to keep painting, trying different techniques until you find what you like.

So I went ahead with cel-shading and it was working. I particularly like this style of painting a lot. It's simple, and if done right, it's very beautiful. After few more hours of work, I came up with this...

I feel like this turned out pretty good. Although now that I look at it, I feel that I should have used cleaner black lines for the outlines. I thought that rough lines would provide an interesting texture, but it feels a bit distracting to me. Still, I love the way it is. At the end of the day, there's no such thing as a perfect painting. You could work on a single painting for your entire life and it still won't be perfect. It's about doing the best work possible in the limitations you set for yourself. And I feel like I did the best I could with this particular piece, so I'm happy. :)

Hawkeye

My first blog post!!! And I choose you, Hawkeye. Sounds like I'm choosing a Poke'mon. Anyway, I made this painting roughly around two months back. But the origins of this painting started more than an year ago. I had an idea for an animated short featuring Hawkeye. So I decided to do some sketches while watching the first Avengers film. Basically I was trying to stylize the pose and character, and finding a design that is suitable for animation. These are some of the sketches I did back then...

I did quite a lot of sketches and these are some of them. I always do my sketching traditionally using a 2B pencil and normal printer paper or any sketchbook. Sketching traditionally feels more natural to me, so I prefer drawing this way when I'm trying to figure out the design.

But I decided not to make the animation because it's very time consuming. And spending a lot of time and energy into a fan animation didn't feel like the right thing to do. So I dropped the idea and after an year later, when I'm making some paintings, I decided to use some of my favorite sketches from this lot. Initially I chose 5 poses, but it was taking too much time, so I picked just this one...

Then I took this image into Photoshop, cleaned it up, added colors, and several hours later it all turned into this.

Actually, this is not the final image. This image has some perspective mistakes. And the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on his shirt is also missing. I corrected all those mistakes but I forgot to save it, and somehow I lost it. It was a long day and I decided to just go ahead and post this version. Either way, I'm happy with the way it is. :)