Experiments!

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

 William Blake

Last week was very productive for me! I've finished watching another Scott Roberton's DVD - Creating Unique Environments and it inspired me to experiment a little with different method of generating thumbnails. Here is short description of the technique I wrote.

Do eight very loose charcoal/marker sketches indicating only some depth by value change and shape design. It doesn't have to be anything. Just indicate some space very loosely. Then scan all your sketches. Take them into one .psd file top of one another. And then just play around with layer blending modes. Do some color burn, exclusion, differ opacity... etc. Just experiment. So you end up with one big abstraction which doesn't mean anything. Then funny part begins. Shrink your file window into tiny little thumb-size window. Zoom waaay in your abstraction and become a photographer. Search for nice compostions, color schemes, interesting shapes. Play around with you layers as you go. Turn them off and on, flip, move, whatsoever. If you find something interesting draw a selection and ctrl+shift+c, create new file and paste. 

So I came up with these compositions below. And you know what's amazing about them? I would never do that color choices or composition settings if I've done them straight-forward way. These are totally out of my comfort zone and later, developing that kind of thumbnail is quite a challenge!

And that's the developing process of one of the thumbnails. Really, when you start working this way, overpainting the thumbnail is just-not-ruin-what-you-already-have process. I've changed colors a little, but at the end I was satisfied with this piece.

Wanderings

This is another piece done that way. I was striking for really bold statements - both in values and brushwork. Thanks to Shaddy's videotutorials I learnt how important it is to be bold and deliberate doing your work. Surely, I will try to apply his method in doing environment photostudies studies in a few days.

Prayer

This one below was done in less than one hour using mostly lasso tool. Amazingly fun to paint. I really enjoy the moment when abstract shapes slowly turn into some kind of form finally creating a story. If you're looking for some kind of happy accident process, that is really liberating and refreshing at the same time, you certainly have to try it.

Exchange

However, it's not said that you are not allowed to take one of your thumbnails further. Like this one below. It has a lot of isseues like awkward perspective and anatomy. I probably could have paid more attention on early stages delepoing this piece. Nonetheless, I really recommend to you experimentg a little. Free yourself (but consciously) from perspective grids and 'thinking'. Just feel the shapes, rythms and colours. You can always come back and refine more accurately.

Chained

I'm also posting some exercises influenced by Feng Zhu's demos. That's all for now! Thanks for reading! Remember about my resources page. I'm still taking care of it. It's fresh and tasty. Cheers!