Environment practice.

Murderous Portrait

Self Portrait assignment using upper right lighting and an expression with murderous intent. The assignment was to do a gray scale portrait of specified lighting, by which it took me give or take 6 hours to this point of completion.

Experimenting with the affects of a gradient layer over all others, what you see are two gradient layers, one a light gray going to near white, the other a dark gray to near white, one in subtract mode and the other in soft light mode.
I did a lot of experimenting on this one, switching modes of several layers to come to this, though I did particularly enjoy the look of the difference mode, this combination had the best outcome. Used combination of photo and mirror reference, reminder, get a desk mirror, it will make life 100% easier.

Film Stills

 Colored Film Stills Assignment Best Ofs.
Each still took between 30-60 minutes, these four I considered the best I made out of 20.
All stills were taken from Doctor Who © BBC

Process

 

Final run with it. I don't consider it done, there's more polish, tidbits and such that could be tweaked, but I'm done working on it. Added cooler colors to the foreground, further desaturated the background, cast light on the creature and butterfly also put in a cool green into the mist in the background. This is as far as I'm going to get on this unless I do a revisit, on to other works!

 

Critique is your friend! It may sting some times and more oft than not will open your eyes. Here is after more in class critique, slapped on a saturation mask and did some selective selecting. I'm trying to push/pull your eye to a specific area, namely the deer's head, between it and the butterfly and then a nice travel through to land back at the head. Awaiting further critique...also slapped on that butterfly I was talking about earlier, in case I didn't mention.

 

And here's what I came up with after a small critique in class. Saturation central! Bad Habit 1: Over saturation, need to tone down on it or else we're gonna have a bad case of rainbows and circuses... circi? Got rid of the bird, thinking of putting in a butterfly? Working on it...also this is insanely dark, I hope and fear it is my screen...

Creature in environment project for school starting off in grayscale, learning the ropes of photoshop, helps to have been working in GIMP for so long, gives me a little more experience in the digital medium but still fiddling with the art. Getting good line quality with digital media is difficult, but thats what practice is for!