Thanksgiving

How is everyone doing this week!? It's Thanksgiving week over here in America! 

The week started rocky and it eased itself out towards the end of the week. I did get some time to draw and paint this week, which I'm really happy about and I really hope next week I'm able to sit down and work! 

I was hoping to finish this drawing earlier on the week, but as I said earlier, a family emergency emerged and I had to go help out. But it's getting there. My friend Daniel Wong has been challenging himself to create a daily UI (mainly towards Destiny) and I wanted to contribute to his cause! For one of his first projects, he did an animated logo for the Hunter Class. So for my contribution, I wanted to draw each sub-class and allow him to use it as a background to add to his project (This was thought after he had finished the animated logo). Here is the Work in Progress of the Gunslinger class. 

Im trying to get a Ink brush/dry brush look to the drawing. I probably have a couple of hours left before I can call it "finished" and i'm starting to sketch out compositions for the other sub-classes of the Hunter.  

For Thanksgiving, I wanted to try and do some Alla Prima Painting; I have almost no experience of the technique though. During my time at college, I only really learned how to "oil paint" and it was for once class (a fundamental class). It was one of my regrets that I didn't have more oil painting classes, but my Major was Illustration and I had an emphasis in Animation, so to fit in the Animation portion of the major, I had to sub out the traditional painting classes. During that time I was also practicing and learning Photoshop/Digital Painting for most of my Sophomore and Junior year. Since i've been out of college, I've made sure to take some off time of my professional work and try to paint in oils as much as I can (Oil painting has always been something I wanted to know since I wanted to do art as a career) Here is the painting I did for Thanksgiving. 

(sorry for the grainy photo)

I really wanted to try to Alla Prima as much as I could, but my knowledge of the method was extremely limited, for I haven't really practiced this method and my previous oil painting has been the traditional, underdrawing - underpainting - dark to light- fat over lean method. I would say this painting would be a draw or tie for me, at least. I thought there were some success and failures all over the painting, but thats the great thing with experimenting and testing things out; you learn for next time! My values are all over the place! I was still trying to capture the details in the photograph instead of capturing the essence of the photo. I still have a lot of learning when it come to mixing colors and getting the correct value out of it. It looked good while I was painting, but after stepping back and getting a photo of it, I see all the failures of the painting. Great learning experience though and I have more plans to play around with Alla Prima painting.  

Thats it for the week! I have other stuff I'm working on that I don't want to show just yet, still letting it cook a bit before I want to starting showing it off, but I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving (for the people that celebrate it)/ week! Until next week. 

Cheers!

-David