Hot September Nights

This one was inspired by a story.  Let's just say that life stories were shared, and things got a little out of hand, and they had to take things into their own hands, but no they're not..., they're just friends.

The original rough sketch

First clean pencils.  This one came together pretty quickly.

And the final pencils.  You can see I adjusted the faces and head size and location quite a bit.  I was never quite happy with either face, so the final version I tweaked everything.

I also started painting this as a daytime scene.  I can't quite decide which one I like better.

Film Fun

Another Trinquette challenge piece.

Here's the final.

The initial sketch was pretty small.  Around 2k on a side.  I should consider doing this again because it worked pretty well.  The nice thing about working lo-res is it forces you to worry about form, not line or detail.

The first sketch came out pretty quickly based on the forms.  At this point I wasn't sure where to take the picture, but after roughly drawing in the shape of her hair, it reminded me of an egyptian headdress, and an idea was born.  It's pretty common for me to start a piece, not knowing where it's going to go and have ideas emerge during the sketching.

And then I did a quick color test to get a general sense of how I wanted to color.

This piece was unusual in that I went straight from the rough pencil above to the final painting, blocking out basic color forms and adding painted lines to delineate the edges.  Usually I start with much more precise pencils.  But this seemed to work out pretty well.

And this is a facebook-safe version.

Warrior Woman

Here's yet another Trinquette Challenge piece. (http://www.facebook.com/trinquettebooks)

The final piece (actually this isn't the version submitted):

This is the version I submitted.  After submitting it I realized the colors on her face look really muddy, especially when compressed and reduced.

And the cleaned up pencils.

Space Girl

Here's another space girl from the Trinquette challenge.

Here's the final:

The original sketch.  I was pretty happy with this.

The colors changed the flow quite a bit.

Here's the first pass. Her jaw felt a little too square in this one.

This was a candidate final:

Here's a closeup of her face.

As I stared at this one of the things I realized was that I didn't have enough contrast in my color values.  So I took another pass at darkening the skin.  I also tried a different background color:

The background color wasn't quite doing it for me though.  It brought out her skin tones nicely, but it also seemed to compete with it.  So for the final I went back to the blue.

Recline

Here are some shots from the latest Trinquette Alternate Challenge.



The final piece.

The original sketch

A facebook-safe verison.

Slave (Trinquette Challenge April 20)

Just a quickie post here.  More details later.

And here's the Facebook-safe version.

Here are the finished pencils.  I actually like the pencils much better, which suggests this probably needs a repaint/recolor.