Final and reflections

At the start of this class, all I really wanted to do was take my time and get better day by day. Now that im done with the final, I feel like I accomplished that goal. At midterm i was very happy with my progress and wanted to push myself further and be able to do more in less time while still learning something every day.

I do wish that near the end of the semester I was able to maintain the blog more.

Overall I am really happy with my progress and hope to continue painting after I graduate.

Thank you everyone for the encouragement. I think I learned just as much, if not more, from the classmates most of the time than I did from actually going and painting.

Bulk Update 4: Last in class painting

This was the last painting I did for this class. I missed the last actual class because I had to drive in to have my computer worked on and then the other class periods were spent touching up paintings and photographing them for the blog and the final presentation.

I like this painting. The tree next to the administration building had this weird yellow to red gradient effect and i think this painting captures that somewhat well. This was also the first time that the landscape size i had been working with became a problem. I ended up cutting off about 4 inches from the left side of this painting before getting to this point. Somewhere in the sketching point of the painting I just kinda left out that part of the panel.

Bulk Update 3: Traintracks and downtown

I have started to notice that some days I am just having a better painting day than others. These two days are a really good example of it. I really enjoy that first painting of the train tracks, however the other painting of downtown seems kinda like I just stumbled through it.

Eventually the traintracks were the subject matter for my homework assignment:


This is one of my favoite paintings from this class. It still needs some more touching up but i think with probably another hour or two it could be a really really good painting.

Bulk Update 2: Return to the farm

I dont remember why, but I ended up having to leave early when painting that second image. It was the first day on the larger canvas size which I started to like more because it would force me to try and get more done in less time. I think i was having issues with my easel and needed to go get new bolts. I took reference images for that day, however I didnt get to touching up that painting.

Bulk Update 1: The rest of marr park

I was pretty happy with how these were going, I would have liked more time to work on the first one on location. At a later point I got around to working more on that painting, I am much happier now that i have foliage at the top of the trees and it looks more finished.

Updated Image:

wow, i havent updated in a long time

I just realized its been a long time since i updated this thing. I will post one big update tomorrow. Ive been crazy busy with senior show and a project in my personal communications class that i completely forgot about this.

Same location, second try

I like this attempt more. If I could design the space a little better it would be a really strong painting.

Tomorrow I will scout the area before deciding if I want to take another try at this composition or not.

(the picture isnt all that amazing, my camera didn't want to cooperate)

Marr Park

I am pretty happy with this one. The tree on the right could use some work and the hay bails could be designed within the space a little better. I am going to try this painting again tomorrow, hopefully a second try will result with a painting im even happier with.

Updates

I thought I had added this stuff but this morning when I checked it wasn't here. My camera didn't even have pictures of my master study...so I guess I didn't add it.

Master Study-


The master I worked from was Bruce Morrison, the original image can be seen here:
http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/high-summer-bruce-morrison.jpg

I kinda overshot how much I could do in an hour, and I explained in my midterm that doing more in less time is something i want to work on over the course of the next half of the semester. The image is pretty fitting for my current interest in heavy sky images.

Progress on large painting-


I need to go in and redo the left half of the sky. I was thinking more along the lines of individual clouds instead of designing the space and in general clouds are more of a large blob instead of a bunch of little ones.

I feel like I am making alot of progress...and in comparison to my first few paintings I do think I am getting much better

UCM Farm update

Day 1:






It was a pretty windy day...Not my best painting but this one has alot of potential. I need to push my contrast in this one and apply some light colors ontop of my middles.

Day 2:



Within the first 10 minutes of painting, the center bolt of my easel shattered...so I stopped, put the easel in my trunk for time out and then used my backup folding chair. After having a standing easel I dont think i can get used to sitting and painting again. I really like this painting...I think I just need more time on it

Cow Reference photo:

clark and mitchell update

This is just me going back and reworking my old painting since I didnt know we were supposed to bring a larger canvas to work on. Instead I decided to take a painting I liked the concept of but didnt really like my execution of and reworked its color and value. This is the end result.

Next class I will have my larger board ready to go and will be using this as a starting point for that painting. Willey suggested making the bigger painting even more about the sky by cutting out alot of the foreground and making the barn and treeline smaller. My only concern is the same as my first painting on pine street, I think this will only work if I can pull off the big sky...I am a little hesitant but willing to give it a try.

redemption

As I said a few posts ago, I went to my Aunt's house on friday to visit and paint with her in her garden. I wanted to get 2 paintings done however left my smaller masonite board at my dorm so I just decided to do one painting of the same size in the same time that I have been working.





The first picture was from inside my dorm, I am still experimenting with finding a good place near me to take decent pictures, and this is definitely an upgrade from my floor, however I think I am going to start taking the pictures of them outside because as seen here natural lighting seems to make the paintings look more accurate.

I am pretty happy with this painting, definately an improvement from how I did earlier in the week. I want to touch up the plum tree on the left and make it look more delicate and the right side of the house...I think its another small win in my favor and I did feel a little redemption at the end of that painting session

also one thing that really helped me out in this session with my greens was finally finding a dark green that wasnt pthalo...my aunt bought out some art store at one point, I told her i was having problems making dark greens for foliage and she suggested jenkins green. It really made a world of difference in mixing greens

rough week

Here are the paintings I was talking about earlier...I have little things I really like about both paintings however they have massive problems that probably cant be fixed.


The reference image got deleted or didnt stay on the camera or something, All my other images are fine so i wouldnt call it battery failure, probably user error of some sort

Monday 9/14:


This just had problems. I was really interested in the side of that building...and thought "if i can render the side of the building in the interesting manner, it can make up for not really using a whole lot of depth", well turns out I cant really render the side of the building and wish i didnt lose the reference image because its a really interesting building. One thing i really liked about this painting is the sky...as seen here:




Wednesday: 9/16




Nothing really special about this painting. The left side I didnt really know what to do with because I really wasnt all that interested in the cars, so I left it open to decide on later. I handled the buildings better this time around and probably next time around I will get better.

not my most sucessful week ive ever had...however thats not always a bad thing because ive always seemed to learn more from failures so I am not really going to dwell on these. I will set them aside for later work and move on.

Recently...

Last class I painted down on pine street. My friend owns a shop on there so I figured he wouldnt mind if I stood outside his place for a few hours (I kinda feel awkward just setting up somwhere like that without permission...just seems weird)

Class before that I was at the corner of houts and holden next to the wig shop...I really like architecture and buildings and usually take a strong interest in drawing them. Alot of my watercolor 1 paintings were based on European cathedrals using washes and ink so I thought using acrylics and buildings would work out pretty well in my favor...turns out I was wrong

Both paintings I would not call winners...the wig shop painting I kinda just forgot about depth and was completely interested in the side of this building so the composition is pretty awkward and linear..the one on pine street I got to encounter for the first time a variable area, where things are always changing...I didn't really know how to handle this and the painting obviously reflects this.

I know that with areas like that, you just work quick and leave things as they are, but its one of those things that when you are actually there and that comes up you just forget everything...it happens

Tomorrow since I don't have class on Fridays I am going to try and get some justice on painting and go out to my Aunt's garden in Independence. I haven't seen her for a while which is silly since its only a short drive down the road, however from what she says their garden is doing great this year. My plan is to get 2 paintings done in my afternoon there or atleast get a good start on both of them. From what I remember my Aunt used to teach art at a school for students with behavioral issues and she said she plans on digging out some paints and spending the afternoon out with me...so that should be fun.

I will post results from my day trip out there as well as from the last two classes either Saturday or Sunday.

Clark and Mitchell (day 2) as well as a short things to do list

Wednesday I stood at pretty much the same spot, however I turned about 45 degrees and aimed at this white shed that looked pretty run down. Today was also day 1 of using the new $16 easel my dad modified to have a shelf and cupholders (awesome), as well as day 1 of using gesso'ed Masonite panels. I like how inexpensive the Masonite is in comparison to canvas panels and I like how the paint goes on. It seems to be a smoother painting experience all around.

Reference Photo:


Painting:


I really like how the painting is coming along. I need to push the value in it more. The more it sits on my desk the more its starting to grow on me. The shed was painted on with a palette knife.

Things to do:
1. gesso more masonite
2. touch up painting
3. add lightbox or shadowbox to my blog. (these are neat little tools that I used on my final for digital illustration (highly recommended to me by Professor Babcock and Jessica Pine), and I like the ability to allow images to start as thumbnails, therefor viewers can still see the painting in a larger size without having to sacrifice space in the blog itself.)

Lightbox reference and shameless plug:
http://mikefreemanart.blogspot.com/

4. Go back and replace all my images with thumbnails and link them with shadowbox commands...also take new pictures in better light and at a better angle so I can actually get in and crop away from the painting.
5. If i get time this weekend, go paint outside somwhere...afterwords clean one of my palette boxes

A final thought and gameplan for class:
I am going into this class knowing that I didn't do too well in painting 1 and am not the best person at actually rendering things accurately away from my computer. this doesn't really concern me all too much because in the "real world" I will have access to my computer and my sketching abilities are average. However my plan here in this class is to not be concerned with having a successful or failed painting, but learning and getting better each class and with each painting. One of my friends is a huge poker buff...and at one point in time he said something that ive kinda kept with me...he said "getting frustrated and upset over losing doesn't do you any good, analyze why you lost and what happened so in a similar situation you don't make the same mistake." I think poker and art kinda do sit next to each other quite well...it takes skill, patience, practice and well..sometimes you just get lucky

Backtracking (paintings)

This is the first painting, pretty much all that went on here was I started to get used to acrylics again. It has been over 3 years since I last really used the medium to a large extent.



The main problems I had here was yet again unfamiliarity with acrylic as well as I noticed creating definition between trees and also getting colors to work right



This one I had a bunch of problems with composition...after completely restarting on the left half of the painting and kinda fibbing about what was actually there and pushing value, things started to work better for me. I think it still needs work but from where it came from to what it is, I am pretty happy with it



This is pretty much that exact same painting that every midwest artist has done...big blue sky, small little field and a little red barn hiding in the back...I really like how the sky came out...It could really use a big push in value in the sky and the ground

Backtracking (reference photos)

cave hollow park (day 1)



cave hollow park (day 2)



clark and mitchell (day 1)

Landscape painting

apparently this blog is going to be recycled for special projects:plein air painting....so thats kinda exciting

havent really been working on anything lately...I have really been wanting to make some wood toys that resemble the science fiction toy rush from when my dad was a kid (robots and whatnots)...When I go home for the weekend I am probably going to draw out some plans and hopefully use my dads woodworking shop to start on some of them while im home...

Following that theme I kinda wanted to turn my watch box from packaging design into a series...I will probably work on that during senior seminar

also finally to the younger kids who might be coming across this now that babcock is linking his intro to commercial art class to this:

hang on to these blogs, they are a little more useful than I first thought they would be. Even moreso that some of the other teachers are starting to toy with the idea. Using the links panel you can keep everything separated. Also the more you post ideas and suggestions on other peoples stuff...the more welcome they feel when posting on your stuff

good luck to everyone on the upcoming semester

Note

@Babcock: I downloaded fetch and uploaded everything to the server. Everything is in a folder under my name labeled "Digitalillustration". If there are any problems with these files let me know and I will fix them as soon as possible.

Website Progress

this is pretty much as far as im going to get tonight. Tomorrow I am going to upload everything to the server before I go to this wedding. From what I have found out...From what my dad said...it is jewish tradition to get married on sunday...who knew.....I didnt even know I had jewish family...I think my dad suffers from a mild case of the crazys so who knows how accurate that is.

I digress.....

http://mikefreemanart.blogspot.com/

The problem that was holding me back was if you adjust where the blog post starts, you have to tell blogger that you want the area where the post shows up to be wider. Once I figured out where to do that, everything sank into place really fast.

Since i figured I was running low on time, Instead of making different sections for all my old art and making thumbnails for everything, I took the thumbnails I had and crammed them all into one blog post named "older work". Once I get the site completely finished, that will just change to "other work".

I still have some things I want to do like add sections for everything, modify the type for the link list as well as the headlines, redraw the divot sorta things i had that created a dropshadow behind the images, I also wanted to move images to stay within the template but not always keep everything neatly in lines (i.e if i have 5 images, dont have a row of 3 and a row of 2...kinda keep some gaps in there)...Blogger is suprisingly completely customizeable once you figure out what you are doing. My misadventures with flash, interactive design and blogger have made me so glad I took all the web design and programming classes I could in high school. Learning visual basic made HTML, CSS and actionscript alot easier to learn than they probably should have been.

Reflection and Final Progress

final progress

I am having a ton of issues trying to get the images to go where i want them. In the meantime I have been making thumbnails for some work to drop in once I get that figured out. Jessica sent me another email about how to get the link system set up and that should go rather quickly once I get past this obnoxious hurdle of finding what the problem is.

Reflection

This class has been incredibly helpful to me. Being able to see how the other people have been rendering things probably helped just as much as doing the projects of my own. This class has taught me essentially how brushes work and how to abuse little things like paths and layer settings to do what i want them to do easily. Previously most of my "illustration" work has either been all illustrator or hand drawn and scanned. Those things worked for what i was doing however it is unknown if being able to do all of it with a combination of photoshop and illustrator would have made the final products better. Another thing was just the practice involved with the class; One of my weak points is just drawing things accurately and is something I am always trying to improve. The resources (delicious, blogger, picasa) have been wonderful tools in being able to help me do this class without being in Warrensburg and are really impressive tools in showing how far the internet has come since I saw it for the first time in the early 90s and in showing that the potential of the internet are becoming more and more limitless.

The skills learned in this class should help a lot in my future as a graphic designer. The two areas I would really like to focus my work on more is packaging and interactive things using flash. Being able to produce better looking illustrations faster seems like a skill that will help in either field. I feel like I have just become a better designer all around with my internship and now having some background in illustration as well.

Thanks Mr. Babcock for helping with your tutorials and advice all along the way and thanks to the other students for helping with advice and ideas.

As for the future of this blog. It will become a link on my portfolio site that I am working on and hopefully maintained with projects I am working on as well as other things.

I broked blogger

http://mikefreemanart.blogspot.com/

After pretty much destroying the template and trying to figure out how it worked. This is about how far I got in one days worth of work including distractions (breakfast and lunch with parents, getting forced into manual labor at my dads garden..and so on)

the links for the other pages are going to go in the bar on the right. Currently the images are just a piece of template code i wrote to make sure lightbox worked.

I am kinda having problems getting the images to fit within the squares I have on the background. I would like to have two of the pages working before the final is due.

Jessica Pine sent me this amazing email that is essentially a walkthrough of how she set up her blogger portfolio. It has been a great resource and i probably wouldnt have gotten this far in one day without it. Thanks again.

Process thus far:
step 1: create new blog
step 2: using photoshop take my sketch and template it out using the images i want
step 3: abuse the html command for "display:none" to figure out what all the little code bits do
step 4: insert lightbox onto blogger
step 5: get template images onto the blog to make sure lightbox works
step 6: using the margins and padding get the template images where I want them

Next steps:
step 7: figure out why i can only get 1 image to a column
step 8: create a second post and figure out how to link between the two
step 9: create thumbnails for my illustration projects
step 10: create thumbnails and jpgs for some other random projects
step 11: create a few pages as separators for my logo, advertising, and packaging work

I have a wedding to go to on sunday (i dont understand who gets married on a sunday....but then again, i havent been to church since i was 5 so what do i know) so on saturday I will post my most current progress, "final blog post" as well as upload everything to the servers

Website research findings and sketch

The kind of sites I have been looking at are heavily html based and are actually probably easier to pull off than they seem.

After looking at some of the sites I really liked from interactive design class and kinda sketched out what I want to do. I really liked the watercolor background that I used in the past so I think those will be recycled however to clean it up I dont think I am going to go as full blown with whatever style it was that I was going with.

Next step is to template all this out in html.

Final Proposal

I kinda jumped the gun on those can templates...they would have worked pretty well for a final...however this gives me a chance to do something else that should also be useful. So for my final I am proposing a new portfolio website. I have the shell of a flash portfolio website that I would like to finish before I graduate, however since I do not have flash at home I can't really work on it here for this.

Flash Site: http://www.grin3design.com/members/freeman/portfolio/portfolio.html

One of the problems that I started to notice with my flash website is some people are expecting a more "clean" and "traditional" website. However when making the site, I was (and still am) all about flash design and wanted to go to town with flash. When I applied for my internship I put on my resume that I understand concepts in web design as well as integrating photoshop, illustrator, indesign and flash elements with HTML. During the interview they asked if I had a website of any sort or even just the beginning of one. I showed them this flash site I had and the guy interviewing me said "I would have really liked to see this understanding of integrating other things with html in your website like you say you can do on your resume...The flash site is really cool and really shows you understand flash way more than I do, just not really what I was expecting."

The other major problem was the style of artwork I was using. It was very hit or miss...either the viewer fell in love with its personality or thought that it was too childish and did not look like a "professional" artist drew it which made the entire site seem less impressive to the viewer.

So having a more "traditional" site should be worth the time putting together to display these things. I am going to look into resources again that were looked into previously for interactive design (shadowbox, blogspot...). I am really curious about this deviant art portfolio thing and really like where Jessica Pine is going with her site. Both of those will be looked at to see how well they can save time without compromising what I want in my portfolio site. I mainly want a way to be able to separate my work in categories while also having a spot to blog and keep updates in but I do not want the site to look like it was just one of the site's default templates.

I don't plan on finishing this before the end of the week. However I plan on giving myself a good head start.

Templating

I did a lot of sketching in the car during my recent vacation and once I got home last night I started flipping through looking for something that would work with the style of spiffy the dog. I felt kinda burnt out on random figures, objects and landscapes and was starting to struggle for an idea when I reread my old post and saw I had previously mentioned something about packaging. So I started to make some templates that could be useable in the future based off the techniques used in the spiffy the dog image.

The only completed one I have is a Can. I do however have a glass bottle and a generic box also started. My progress on them will be posted later in the week as I try to recover time lost from the vacation.

Working Can Template:

It looks kinda boring on its own but templates are not usually incredibly exciting. Just like in the illustration of spiffy the dog. Step 1 was to trace an image of a can in illustrator and all its shadows, highlights and low lights. Step 2 was to bring all that into photoshop. Step 3 was to use the paths, brushes and gaussian blurs to my advantage to replicate the can's highlights and lowlights. One of the neat little things hiding inside the working photoshop file is a gradient layer that when turned on and adjusted, it will change the color of the can with almost no difficulties.

While not as creative or adorable as spiffy the dog (and pretty lackluster), This group of templates I am working on should hopefully come in handy. Packaging and labels have always kinda been something I have been interested in and played around with. Having these little tools should be great. I think this is what those teachers have been calling "integrating ideas from other classes into your personal work".

Also what exactly should be in our "final project" I know we have to upload stuff to a picasa account and on the server. But I am kinda lost in what all should be involved. Is it a independent project that uses the skills that we have learned from this class and a summary on how we plan on integrating this (skills, resources, websites....) into our careers?

Spiffy the Dog

My copy is on the right.

the fur in the face could use a little more work however I think this study shows the concept. I pretty much followed the video that Babcock made on how to do this. The study took a little more than 3 or 4 hours but once I figured out the method and got into a rhythm, everything worked together. I really enjoyed the technique used here and definitely plan on working with it in the future. It is not a difficult technique and renders itself fairly nicely. If I get around to doing a interpretation of this I would probably do a rendering of bottles or some sort of packaging because I think this technique would lend itself well to making digital mockups of packaging quite nicely.

I will be disappearing for a few days. My parents decided to bump up this visit with family to this week instead of the week after class. Hopefully I have some time in there to post on blogs or update delicious or something to try and keep up.

After being able to view it on the webpage instead of photoshop, the lighter fur to the right of his eye needs to be touched up. But besides that I am pretty happy with my results

Batman's night off or Josh Agle Interpretation

I am still working with the background. The texture is really stubborn to work with but right now the image is at a place where I am happy with it. The image was sketched out in photoshop then taken to illustrator and completely drawn with the pen tool then brought back into photoshop to add the background texture. Everything went really smoothly, the only thing i had any trouble with was his bunny slippers and the texture, and the bunny slippers kinda just made themselves out of the remnants of these swanky shoes I was trying to draw. His right arm also seems a little awkward but I don't think it is really a big enough problem to adjust.

Week 4 Project:











This is an image of Spiffy the dog from the recent re-release of "Secret of monkey Island"...an old VGA game that they have completely redrawn and painted for the Xbox...From what I can tell the art was done by Jeff Sangalli as he is the only one listed in the credits under "art director". I was looking around for a while before deciding on this image. I wanted to do something that was an actual rendering instead of these somewhat flat images I have been working with but did not want to go for something completely out of my league. For the study I plan on tracing paths in illustrator then bringing them into photoshop then using brushes to render them. There was also a few videos from earlier in the class that I will probably re watch a few times. I do not recall their names but it involved rendering the chestplate of a robot in photoshop...Those videos seem like the should be very helpful for this project. It seems fairly straight forward but I am probably getting in over my head and just dont realize it yet.

Updates

Josh Agle Study:

Update: I reshaped some of the objects to make them look "more correct" like the skeletons eyes and the womans swimsuit. I also recolored the bottom part of the water to make it look like it matches more.

Bear Wrestling:

Update: I added some paint texture to the flat bears and tweaked the wood texture to adapt to the paint texture.

Candies:

Update: I darkened the outlines of the candy wrappers and added a watercolor paper background to remove the "flatness" of the image.

butterscotch candies or interpretation #2

This is my original interpretation based off the watercolor study from a while back. I went a little scribble happy, however i felt that it reflected the crinkleness off the candy wrappers. I also tinted the centers of the candy because I felt that they looked like they were missing something...I am currently toying around with background textures however I wanted to update to show that I am actually working on things. Around sunday I want to have a post with all the little tweaks and fixes I have been making to things.

Originally I started with a study of some flowers that my dad pulled from his garden, but after a few hours of toying with it, I realized the flowers were way more detailed than they needed to be and the problem with the image was not the technique used it was the complexity of the subject matter. I might go back and give the flowers a try again at some point after more practice and experience under my belt.

RAR bear wrestling

RAR!....ok enough of that.

I enjoyed working with the style. The wrestling bears are a really fun subject matter. I used a stock photo of bears playing to work from. I am not incredibly happy with this final image and could probably spend days trying to tweak it to get it the way I want it. I think the heads could be redone to include a part of the other side of the face like done in the original image. I put the wood texture on pretty heavy this time around too, I am undecided on how much I like the texture, but for the time being I will let it sit. The bears kinda look like they are dancing in middle school to a Lionel Richie song and not fighting....and the brown bears arm looks pretty awkward. However problems and all, It was a good image to work with. I know I am a "newbie" in the illustration side of things so with that taken into consideration, having a "imperfect" image is fine when the experience is the important part. And if I want to go back and work on this, I know where to start.

Bear Study

This image was alot of fun to work with. Everything went together really fast too. The hardest part was probably recreating the brushstrokes for the hair. Next step is to take a shot at the style with a different image. The background did not come out as well as I would have liked and I should probably put a subtle texture within the bears body itself since it is not just a flat brown color. The technique will probably be refined in my interpretation project. As for the interpretation, I think I am going to stick with the theme of wrestling bears...It just seems like you can't really go wrong there.

The most amazing image in the history of images

probably not...however I love it




















This is probably the most amazing picture I've ever seen. While cleaning up my basement some I found a box from my childhood filled with what I thought was blank VHS tapes. It was actually a collection of early 90s professional wrestling that I at one point maintained. So logically Ive been watching old pro wrestling and wanted to get it out of my system so I went on google image search looking for some images of mexican wrestlers for some eventual art project and came across this image on the lonely robot blog.

The image actually seems like a logical next step for where I have been working. The image combines the flat drawing of the josh agle study, brings in some interesting brush strokes and textures. This little project should also work on my neverending task of getting better with accuracy in drawing.

Also who doesnt love a bear fishing in shallow water while wearing a mexican wrestler mask?

my plan is to recreate the entire image as efficiently as possible while just working on accuracy and improving newly learned techniques.

Plan of attack:
1. Draw vague outlines of the shapes with my pen and tablet in photoshop
2. Convert those outlines to vector images and color base colors in illustrator (upon a closer look, i dont think this step is necessary and could just be refined in photoshop)
3. Bring the image back into photoshop for detailing, little brush strokes and texture
4. probably pay too much money to have this printed on a t-shirt




















This was a different image of a character from the new street fighter game that i also happened to come across and really enjoy the ink work. I am considering recreating this image and then following it up with a origional image trying to mimic the style since it seems right up my alley with the heavy outlines and ink work.