Week 8: Enough cutesy stuff!

It's time to shift gears away from Seven Bear Itch in this blog. Back in my January 29 post, I made a commitment to improve and polish some work that I started in a previous class. Well, this week I did just that, and below are the "before and after."

Before.

After.

I'm happy with the progress that I've made on this piece. It's slow going because this is the furthest I've taken a full-color digital painting. I'm still defining my process. I'll be working on this more next week and hope to have it finished at the next blog post.

Some things I learned from my work this week:

• Some kind of background is important for both presentation and seeing color/value relationships. 
• I benefit from a "painterly" process. I can't treat concept art the same way as photo compositing.
• Custom brushes are amazing once you know the brush engine. I would rather use a custom brush made from a texture photo than said texture photo as a layer. With enough time, I'd rather build my own textures using brush strokes.

Cheers!