A Discombobulated Sunday

Yes indeed...

As you can read and figure out from the title, this passing Sunday was a fairly discombobulated one. As some of you may know, the Australian Open was on today with the men's singles finals in the grand world of tennis.. So that was definitely a must watch, which took up about half of my day cheering on for the injured Rafael Nadal. Spoiler alert - he lost. Such a bummer  I was really rooting for that poor fella... I very much disliked Stan Wawrinka and his distasteful actions towards the umpire during the game. Phew... Anyway, this blog ain't about tennis so I'll just be done with that topic from now on, don't worry. The next tournament is in a few months so no more tennis talk until then.

 I did however utilize the rest of my Sunday staring at a empty 'canvas' on the computer screen after sort of finishing my Totem Pole exercise, which was pretty awesome indeed until I decided to do another of my old favorites on the real life paper which is the robot man that has featured in one of my previous canvases, if you remember the metallic one a few months ago or if you don't then feel free to go check it out I do think it is in one of the first posts I have done. 

Yes, to business. Just to remind you of where I was left off last Sunday, here it is. The cat is still in need of a face and overall animation as well as the bird head and a background is still boring..

After contemplating on this for awhile, I felt as though it was a bit too light and popped out too much to be an 'old' totem pole. This inspired the decision to add a new layer and set the opacity of the layer to more or less half of the full setting and add some darkness to it with a Digital Soft Pressure Air Brush or a Digital Soft Flat Airbrush depending on the texture that is needed. To demonstrate, I'll just show you the looks of this layer just on it's own.

As you can see, I've only selected a few spots to add some darkness or in case of the bird's head, lightness. I wanted the totem pole to have a rugged and messy feel to it but I just can't seem to master the techniques quite yet to do so. Anyway, after doing this if I'd feel like it, I could set the opacity higher in order to intensify the colors I just set on top of the color and detail layer or lower the opacity in order to bring out more of the original colors which will also brighten up the object. Any case, I thought the opacity I set was suitable for me so I continued to add detail on the lower detail layer and started on my background with the Soft Airbrushes, which worked somehow out I guess. 

I also decided to add a little bird on top of the wing of the totem pole - supposing to portray a crow... I didn't want to detail the little bird too much on the wing or in the back too much so that they wouldn't take up too much attention from the actual object as with the sky - which consequently is kinda blurred up on purpose and by the discovery of the Pressure Airbrush.  

So, here is my final piece.. Sort of, if you can really call it that. One of the perks which I read of also is that with digital art, it is difficult to know when you really are finished with your piece, because you really don't want to overdo it. Even though in my opinion after merging all the layers I've been working on it does feel like it's completed and no more editing is needed or possible. To reflect on my now finished piece and looking at it staring at me on this page, I feel as though the totem pole doesn't feel 'woody' enough and to be honest, a bit too shiny I really don't know how I managed to pull that off... But, as usual, I lost the patience to discover how to do it after countless painting overs and all that comes with it. I do believe it does put out the idea that I was going for if not in a perfect manner. 

Now, just for fun, I'm gonna set up the picture of my previous canvas before digitizing for comparing and contrasting. Looks pretty different huh, even with the bad lighting that I've got going on there. I do remember being quite frustrated with this totem pole too, the colors weren't cooperating just like in the one above. I've definitely got to revise my color eye. I do have to say, the one on the right is a lot more flat than the one above which is kinda funny, you can also see how much more I can edit the one above as compared to the real life totem pole drawing has a lot of mistakes that can't really be fixed anymore concerning shape etc. I do have to admit that making the canvas was a lot more fun anyway than doing it on the computer, like it really felt like something had been accomplished and could be put on top of my bookcase and never look at it again until someone pulls it out. Ha, almost exactly what will happen to that picture up there. 

Now that the Totem Pole was just finished, I was left off at square one again. What to draw? What indeed... Probably needless to say, I contemplated for a while on numerous things like life, death, school and whatnot. Then I just had put on some cool and inspirational music like Bob Dylan or Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros (you should definitely check out this band if you don't already know it in which case I admire your musical taste - amazing stuff) to get me back into the groove. It did work and I thought I'd keep going on something that is pretty much familiar to me and going on the same track of building characters and getting them onto my computer and into my library of digital pictures. I dug through my various sketchbooks and found my old friend, the 'Robo Man' (he is lacking a better name for the moment) and I thought he would be perfect to draw into my library. 

I didn't get too far due to running out of time because I had to start on this blog right here on time. Anyway, I managed to sketch out the pose and face etc which is pretty good and productive for today which I can build on for the rest of the week when I get a free moment. 

I thought it would be pretty cool to attempt to form some kind of a metallic texture to Robo Man that was more difficult to achieve on the real life canvas due to a lack of shades of gray - ahem, not an excuse at all.. Anywhoozles, to wrap things up neatly, I'm starting to think that this will be a interesting project for me to tackle and I'm looking forward to showing ya's the results next week if all goes well.