Reflection #43 – July 21

Hello again!

July was a month that didn’t fly by that easily at least. For once, the weather extremes unfolded in a quite catastrophic flooding of some areas in Germany, events that I followed with concerned affection while luckily being completely unharmed personally. However, I was much more occupied with my exams, taking up most of my days for learning. During the first 20 days, focus travelled from exam to exam unable to do much else like if wearing blinders.

At least the first two weeks were pretty manageable but then the pressure really started to build up and they left me pretty much unable to do anything productive. Regardless, I have an overall good feeling on my work on the exams and the second semester has been confirmed to be less theoretical, which I surely welcome.

While I have quite the selection to talk about comparing to the last couple of months, I do want to talk a little about them all as I certainly have something to talk about… So let’s talk about it >v>

The first piece took up some time to get finished. I don’t exactly remember how long it took me to exit concept phase but I spent most time managing colours and texture. The shading kinda played in my hands when I went for the lazy approach. The background colour on multiply helped a lot bringing the hues together and I could focus my light on selective spots to ease the focal points.

It goes without saying that I’m happy with the piece, the materials give off a magical vibe and I was finally able to implement my acquired speedpainting skills to give a figure drawing its backdrop :3

Number two took about as long as the first one. The biggest problem to solve was the actual pose I wanted them to be in. My initial concept was that of a kneeling cuddle and I would’ve gone with it if I wasn’t so displeased with the look. So I went with a more relaxed approach, days went by and the right pose just didn’t come up. I went ahead and posed myself and took some photos, meshed them together and it worked out finally. I think from the lines to the finished piece 3 days went by and one of which was spent entirely fiddling around with minor details and polishing.

Anyway, I love this one and I was very happy to hear how much people and especially the owner liked it as well ^v^

So after my final exam was over, I went ahead, trying to do a different project at first, which didn’t work out saldy, just couldn’t find a right pose / expression / setting. Well hopefully next year that one. I’ve had always this next project in the back of my head and just went with it. The more energetic theme quickly resulted in a nice pose that I could use and expand upon. It did take some time though but I also managed to lay down a more refined background and even design a little soda cover.

But I can’t help but be somewhat uncertain how to feel about this. Surely the colours are a tad washed out and too many hues are clashing for attention. I’ll try not to use too much different shading methods in one piece as there’s just too much going on, it loses its clarity. But I’m not exactly bummed out about it, as I merely adapted this workflow last year.

This one is my experimental piece this year. While you probably don’t see much of it on canvas, I modelled the head previously in Blender… or I tried at least, because hard surface modelling is still super hard for me to handle and this would have demanded a clean mix of hard and soft surfaces. Well at least it stood as a nice little reference for the colours. Regardless of that hiccup, I managed to fully paint this piece without any sketch underlying it, making it my first official figure painting.

And lastly, I finished this one pretty quick. While the pose and the drapery definitely poses a challenge, The result definitely shows off a nice foundation of my grown skillset.

I think I have come a long way with my rendering and composition. I like this one especially because of its simplicity. Maybe I should continue to do simple lit figure scenes.

Ah well. But for now I have quite a lot of time to do more experiments. I’ll get my second shot of vaccine next week and after that I’ll have 3 weeks of ‘vacation’ with my family and friends. And I’ll try to get more into 3d stuff then, in preparation to some of my future pieces and maybe more…

Also animation will be the next big thing upcoming semester, so working towards that sector more soon…

I wish you all a lovely time until we see each other again.

~Souvillaine