Sunday, March 22, 2009

Art Show at 2 Bells


This is a piece I have done for an art show that I will be participating in with some other artists from PopCap. We will be showing the work in a Bar/Grill down the street from the office called 2 Bells. It's a great little place and something of a local institution. I think each artist will be including 2 or 3 pieces, and this is one I have done for the show. I may show the Wicked Witch one I shared here a while ago, and one other that I will work on between now and then.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this piece... it's almost entirely done in Art Rage, with just a little bit of messing with levels and some dodging in Photoshop.

10 comments:

  1. Wow Rick. This is amazing. Did you paint over a rough pencil in ArtRage?
    Exceptional vibe with this piece. Will you output it using Kinkos or do you have a nice inhouse color printer to oversize it?

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  2. This was originally a pencil drawing that I added digital color to about 3 or 4 years ago. I imported that into Art Rage the other day as my base layer... I started a new layer and totally painted over the whole thing. I grabbed colors from the base layer, but otherwise, it's completely covered. It went pretty fast because a lot of the basic color decisions were already made.

    There is a photo store a few blocks away from my office that I've been getting some pretty nice prints from... $20 for 11 x 14.

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  3. I like all them warms and cools workin' together! Nice work, Rick, and I hope there's an eventual link to the rest of the works.

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  4. Rick. Break it down a little more. I can tell almost all the atmospheric background is artrage. Photoshop for the flying dragons? To tighten their edges or did you manage that in artrage?

    Almost all the foreground house get some edge work in photoshop?

    I'm inspired. I'm going to revisit my siegfried piece with this artrage approach.

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  5. Almost all of it was Art Rage using a smallish brush (7, I think, zoomed in). The original file is much larger than this (4 or 5 times larger).

    In PS I upped the contrast and then I dodged (or is it burned?) a bit of the underside of the observatory to deepen the shadows. I also did some of the curlies and hanging moss on the silhouettes in the background (more because I was too lazy to take it back to Art Rage than because PS would do a better job of it) I may have messed with the flying creatures a bit as well, but they are mostly AR, too.

    With this piece I finally figured out how to best use the brush and the palette knife. I didn't even try to use any of the other stuff, with the exception of the eyedropper, which got a work out as well.

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  6. Beautiful. I think drawing directly on the computer with Art Rage has brought your art to another level.

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  7. well, that came out of nowhere!

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  8. Looks awesome Rick. Love the fishbone weather vane. Real good strokes for digi...but it still looks digi. Not to say your contribution doesn't look great, but there's a slight mushiness to those digi-strokes that shows up on close scrutiny.

    It only takes minimal scrutiny to spot your talent though, so that's good!

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  9. Wait a minute, somehow I am logged in as my wife. Blair would never criticize anything even remotely associated with you, Rick.

    I agree with Tom that your paintings are showing a lot of really enjoyable vibrancy, and the digi medium must help that. I was only noting in this piece a very slight thing that unsettles me a little--the solidity doesn't read as well in this sort of digi-painting as in yr other work (which is always so solid)--this prob isn't unique to yr stuff--it's a much bigger prob with most digi work, even that done by the revered "greats" of the concept art world. Maybe I should just keep quiet, cuz it looks great!

    Oh wait, I'm still Blair. Dang!

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  10. Thanks for the comments, NotBlair. ;)

    Interestingly, I was just looking at a book of some digi concept artists and found myself thinking that it was all rather mushy and non-specific. I found that it did, indeed, lack some solidity... and more importantly, clairity.

    In my case, however, I think it has more to so with my lack of painting experience than anything else... I haven't done a whole lot of painting since college, so I'm more than a bit rusty.

    In the end, I don't care so much if a person can tell if I did it on a computer or not... I just like the tools and I'm happy with the results... and it's way less messy than oils. I'll keep the comments in mind on my next one. :)

    So post a drawing or something already, Davisdude! It's been too long!

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