Monday, January 9, 2012

Blood Mage

This was part of a set of badass women who are involved somehow with a dead body (or 2).  She came out particularly well which is why I'm sharing her here.  This one in particular is a blood mage, she can manipulate blood and is only limited in what she can do by her imagination.  As part of the process to obtain such magic she has inscribed herself with the white tattoo markings on her dark skin.  Her eyes also lost their irises, matching the tattoos, but they did not loose their sight.  Golden wavy hair perpetually floats due to the output of magical energy from her body.

I decided to draw all of them with mechanical pencil, though the blood was largely shaded with a woodless 4b to keep myself from going insane.  Shadows were all done with cross-hatching, and I did my best to pay attention to representing different textures from the thick fabric to the sheer fabric, from her skin to her hair to the leather straps.  It was an interesting challenge that took forever to complete but I'm glad I did it.

Incomming

Some concepts for a post-apocalyptic story I'm working on.  Due to pollution humanity has adapted in different ways.  One was to live in glass bubble-cities where large amounts of plants can create breathable air.  Another was to live in airships above the layers of pollution.  For this scenario, an airship has discovered the existence of the bubble cities and is descending to raid it for resources.

In all honesty though, I really just wanted an excuse to try painting a bunch of different things.  One was texture.  I had rather failed in that department in my last painting and wanted to redeem myself.  The clouds gave me the perfect opportunity, and I'm rather happy with the variety in the sky too.  I also wanted to paint something glowing.  That's where the ships lights came in.  The dome glows too to some extent, though that was purely for compositional purposes.  I ended up adding reflections to the dome because oh man, it looked like a planet for the longest time.

This took me about a month on and off around other schoolwork.  It's done in acrylic on illustration board.

Eavesdropping

A painting I did for class.  It's acrylic on illustration board.  The idea is that the guy at the bottom of the painting is on the roof of a tall building at night, listening to the man talk to the cat on the porch of the smaller building below.  Their shadows, cast by the light from inside, stretch out along the ground.

I worked on this on and off for about a month.  I'm rather fond of the strange, bird's eye perspective and how I improved with the working of paint and light.  Still have a lot of improving to do though, that's what it means to be an artist after all!