Finished Sleepy Dog Among Other Things

This week I finally finished the notorious Sleepy Dog and incidentally I also embarked upon another subject to be heard about more later on. I've had some extra time this week and I thought I would use it to my advantage since for the next few weeks I will be utterly swamped with other work meaning that I may make slow progress from then onward. Well, I guess there's no change there to the usual. 

Just to start things up below you will see where I was left off last week and whereabouts I will begin explaining this week. 

Here we go. The first thing I conquered was the table top, this time with a fierce attitude of 'I want to be done with this' and so, finally I had some progress made. Not to say I'm too happy with it but to be honest, I was getting a little antsy to start something new. Anyway, to do the table top again I took up a new layer and decreased the opacity of the layer to about half and brought up the opacity of my Airbrush to about 20-30%, which gave me nice sharp lines which would indicate the surface texture of the table. After doing this, I dropped my layer and opened a new one, again decreasing my layer as well as my brush opacity to about 20% and 5% respectively this time and added some depth to the whites and the darker grays to give a little punch and a glare effect. Below you can see the difference of the two table tops. 

I'm not too happy with the tabletop but I just couldn't continue this project anymore and I thought that it would not be the focal point which means that after a while, I won't pay too much attention to it any longer. Hopefully. Anyway, after finishing the last 'major' point in the image, I began working on some details like the coffee pouring out of the pot and some other minor aspects around the dogs face and paws until I felt that the last thing needed on this image was my signature. And so, I present to you my final work...

And la-de-da! A finished work. I feel almost embarrassed showing you the original sketch of this project again... I did not put too much effort in that one, that's for sure. Anyway, all in all I liked this project since it was nice and simple with a little edge to it. I do have to say that I'm particularly happy with the background if not with the table or the dog. I still struggled with the paws for awhile, trying to make them look authentic but now as I look at it, I guess it works just like that with a painterly touch to it. 

Now, that the Sleepy Dog as over with, we can begin on something new and exciting. I've been searching around for the past few days for inspiration and I got caught between two pictures of famous contributors to the music industry: Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. I'm a huge admirer of both men and I thought I could find some interesting images on both of them - which indeed I did. On the left you can see Bob Dylan on a tractor, which is the image I went with eventually and not because of Dylan; because of the tractor. I got this idea that I will color in the tractor with a greenish-blue color giving it a nostalgic look with a little color splash if you will. 

I started up with re-sizing my image to 2000 x 2500 pixels and my DPI (dots per inch) value to 300 (doubled from the standard), enabling a good resolution. Again, keeping it simple I sketch the outline of the figure to get a rough idea for the blocking in part of the process. 

Here I have blocked in a rough set of values, ready to add some color to the tractor body. I've set my Airbrush to opacity of  32% to get a nice rounded end and size to around 25. By doing this, I can make a rough estimate of my work and fill in the necessary detail for this phase.

 I admit, I didn't get much further than this due to a shortage of time and it was coming to a time that I had to do my weekly update for you guys so that left me to the point that I got some coloring done and a few larger details here and there. 

Here I've just added a bit of color, rust and wear to the body of the tractor. Now, just to let you guys know I am not going to copy the image strait off as you can see with the coloring, just because I don't really enjoy doing that sort of thing. I've just used the image as a reference, I also use other images to get some parts correct like glares or parts of the tractor I'm not too sure about. In the original picture you can't really tell that the tractor would be a rusty old machine and I really wanted to have that effect in this picture, which I've started doing by adding browns and grays onto the greenish-blue color.

At the end, I don't really want the color to pop out like it does now but instead I've visioned it to shine through with a subtle grace between the shades of grey. However, that must be it for now - this week was a exceptionally long post I suppose - tune in next week to see more progress with Bob & the Tractor.