Digital Coloring Exercise

Today in the studio, I spent some time brushing up on my digital coloring skills.

Although I use Photoshop religiously, I almost never paint with it.
In fact, the last time I colored anything 100% digitally was 2010.

So, to break my digital dry spell, I found an inked image from a comic book (the cover of Uncanny X-Men #514 by Terry Dodson) and spent an afternoon filling in the color via Photoshop. It took me three hours, which is not half bad when I consider how long it's been since the last time I saw a swatch palette. I definitely want to make that go faster though and I'm certain that a few more exercises like this one will help me get back into the swing of things.

Adventure Time: Marceline - pt. 2

The Marceline piece is finally finished. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but I'll post it here and see what people think.

I'd also like to give some long overdue praise to Marcus Ranum. I don't always have the time to stage my own photo shoots and Mr. Ranum's gorgeous stock photography has been an invaluable resource to me.

Any artists looking for a reliable source of free-to-use reference images should check out this link. You can thank me later.

Adventure Time: Marceline - pt. 1

After running into some extremely frustrating technical difficulties, I've decided to put the Cloud Atlas image aside for a little while. Until I resume working on it, (or can get started on any of the paid assignments that are sitting in my own personal queue) I'm going to devote my time to putting out a long-overdue Adventure Time themed image!

Marceline the vampire queen is one of my favorite characters from that show. Rather than feasting on blood like traditional vampires do, she eats shades of red- hence the strawberries.

Color Study

Planning out the image was more frustrating than I'd been expecting, but I feel like I've finally worked out enough of the kinks to take it to final. As of right now, the plan is to complete this image in watercolors with only a little bit of colored pencil detail work.

I've been in a bit of a creative rut recently and I'm hoping that this image will finally get me out of it.
So far, so good!