Tuesday, May 15, 2007

My little purple man--third painting

I chose this thing from my sketchbook and tried to color it up with watercolor paints:

My idea was to take this guy, make him do something, and make a backgorund color. So I did this:

Its called "Feed the Meter". The color on the character and the meter were ok, but the scorching background was bad. I noticed that the gradient looked better against the meter than it did against the character's purples and greens:


Removing the background was an improvement:



Now I can experiment with several different bgs, pick the best one, then add some details. I want to do some more watercolorish stuff in the bgs. What do you guys think?

3 comments:

David said...

The shapes on the creature are strong--he has a nicely constructed head and arms. He exudes a schlubiness with his pose and anatomy. But they're too delineated--he's suffering from a mannequin syndrome because I can't sense the connection of the limbs to the torso.
Also, this is very difficult with watercolor, but in order to get more information about the creature you need to model with values beyond merely the border of each shape. This "filled shape" look is flattening the appearance of the creature, even though his volume has integrity. This is essentially what happens to all animation: the characters are drawn with beautiful volumes in pencil, and then rendered ("destroyed") with values at the borders of the shapes, giving them the puffy-vending-machine-sticker-for-50-cents-at-waldbaum's look.
I have never tried to model form in watercolor, so I cannot say how difficult it is. Probably very.

Definitely a good decision to cut them out from the background--I wouldn't have noticed until you pointed out the clash of the creature colors on the background. Nice color sensitivity.
The bending of the meter pole is not that satisfying to me. I think if it were straight, it would help bring out the bulginess of the creature.

David said...

Upon second examination:

I love the droplet at the top of his head.
The meter post bend is okay because the wrinkles are great. It looks like the meter is backing away.
You *did* do some modelling but the light source seems to be a fill light only.

Dimitri said...

good crit, I wasn't aware of the filled shape issue, I'll keep it in mind. The static relationship of the arms doesn't help the mannequin thing, either. Plus it obliterates the space between the guy and the meter...just a dumb box. I don't really have a light source, so my form modeling is superficial. I wish i hadmade the guy more designey and expressive...more of a bleeding watercolor look...to me he just looks like an overworked sketch with arbitrary values thrown on the receding planes(cheap trick). Good call on the pole--i definitely wanted a fast curve to contrast the guy's schlubbiness, but its not as whippy as it should be, pretty much just two 90 degree angles.