Study for today. Looks nice and warm. Opposite of what it's like outside. A cold front moved in this morning. I started sanding around 10am. By noon, it was too cold to hold the dremel.   But the weapon is looking good. It's been coated with resin and is nice and strong. 

Got back from Deathly Hallows last night. 3am is a wonderful time.
I was pleasently surprised at how well they adapted this last novel. Some little things were cut, but not as bad some of the other movies. They even animated the 'tale of the three brothers'. The style seems very familiar. I know I've seen it somewhere else.
Overall, I can't wait till the 2nd half next summer. I do have to admit, I teared up when Hedwig and Dobby died. Someone in the back was crying really hard. I wonder if they'd ever read the book, or just really loved the characters.

Only one landscape study to post today. The other decided not to work with me and I banished it to the abyss of my trashcan. That's what I get for trying to paint hundreds of square-shaped rocks in ten minutes.

Update on the commercial I filmed with my group for Art Direction: We finally got the footage off the tape. Took the teachers help to retrieve it. The group was depressed for a bit as we tried to figure out when and if we'd have time to re-film it. But it's all okay now. And Holly (the teacher) even praised us for our lighting! A small victory, but feels good nonetheless.
And a small bit news about my upcoming exit review: I'm almost done planning my portfolio. I'm having Blurb print it out as a bound book. I just need to finish some more of my comic from Special Problems so that I can put parts of it in. Not sure if I mentioned it before, but I've got a concept artist from Austin agreeing to come down. And I might have a major game studio from the area sending a representative...

Warm-ups before I start on the cover for my special problems comic. Check out my other blog for progress on that.

We of course start with my warm-ups of the day. Decided to do fog after seeing so much of it yesterday on my morning drive. Harder to paint than it looks.

343 seems to be collecting a nice bunch of artists. And I'm glad that they are being put to work in redoing some of the older Halo novels. The Flood was one of the first released. The art really wasn't the best. I even did my own version of the cover. But this is the actual version of the cover, done by Kenneth Scott. An improvment indeed. I'm looking forward to picking up this new version just for the art, as well as the new forerunner book that is coming out. It's cover was done by Sparth.

Even with landscapes being my weakest subject, Cityscapes are the weakest part of that. Since I have to add a background of some kind to an illustration piece for class, I decided to tackle this.

Here's the latest assignment for Illustation Tech. Teacher gave us descriptive text from the novel "Perdido Street Station" and had us illustrate a character. This guy is a garuda who had his wings sawed off. Fun time.
Did some quick pen and copic landscapes during interactive yesterday too. Don't worry. I took notes.

I'm finding these easier and easier to do. And I think they're starting to look better too. Awesome.
Note: While doing these, I try not to sample colors from the reference. I want to work on my color theory too. I'll try to find what I think is the right color and use it, then check to see how close I was using the reference. Sometimes, I'm more off than I realize!

I have to say this warmup turned out better. I did this pair in corel with the oil brush. It's letting me focus more on the overall shapes and less on the details.  Done from pictures found online.

Today, I wanted to get back into doing warm-ups before getting into homework. So, I picked my weakest subject: landscapes. I found a few beautiful photos and did my best to reproduce them. Let's just say that this might become a daily thing.