Hey everyone, it's time for another speed-paint update!

I got this one finished in 30 minutes 38 seconds. I was sort of worried I'd run out of time like yesterday, but I tried something new again and it worked! Before I was laying down color in one area and then carving out the details, but this time around I put all my color down first, then quickly added detail at the end.

This one's not as tight as yesterday's post, but I got most of the important elements in there to relate it to the original photo, so I'm happy with that. Take a look.

Here's the original for comparison.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

Check back here tomorrow for another post, see you then! Thanks for looking!

Hey everyone! Here's today's landscape speed-paint.

This one took a little more time than anticipated, my goal was to be finished at 33 minutes and 3 seconds but it took an extra 9 minutes 52 seconds to finish. I'm really happy with the result though!

I sketched everything out before I started blocking in the color. I started with the sky first then jumped to the foreground, that's where my trouble started. Next time I've got to make sure I work from back to front, I got suckered into the foreground by wanting to render those details and it ended up costing me a lot of time.

It's still not quite 100% accurate, but I think this one's the best yet.

Here's the original for comparison.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

That's all for today, I'll be posting again tomorrow. Thanks for looking!

Hey everyone, here's today's post!

I think this one was a lot more successful than the last two, I mentioned yesterday that I was going to try something different and I think it worked pretty well.

With my prior two pieces I just kinda roughed all the mass in really quickly and then tried to flesh out the details. I didn't take the time to look over everything and make sure it was all in the right place. This time around I took a moment to sketch out where everything should be, then laid in all the color, I think it really helped! You can be the judge though, here's how it turned out.

And here's the original for comparison.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

I'm really happy with the way it turned out, obviously it's not a perfect (there are some color issues and the bottom portion around the base of the rock isn't completely painted), but I feel like this was a step in the right direction. This piece was completed in about 35 minutes (I wanted to be done in 33:03 but the rock was too unfinished for me to be happy with stopping).

Can't wait to do another one of these tomorrow, see you then!

Hey there everyone! I think this month I'm gonna stick to doing landscapes. Maybe I'll switch it up next month and do figure drawings or something anyway, here's my painting for today!

And here's the source image for comparison.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

I think it turned out okay, there's a lot more contrast in the original photo than in my work, and I couldn't get the colors quite right (I'm picking the colors by eye, not from the image itself) so that's something I'll have to work on. I think I'm gonna try a different technique for laying out the image tomorrow and see if that helps. I hope you enjoyed this post! Expect another tomorrow!

Happy New Year! It's official, I've been at this for a year. That's pretty exciting, right? I missed the update I wanted to do yesterday due to it being New Year's Eve, but I just wanted to post something really quick to mark this milestone.

I've decided that from this point forward I'm doing one digital painting a day, it doesn't matter what it is, it's gonna be one each day from here on out.

Here's a landscape I completed in 30 minutes 56 seconds!

This is the image I was working from.

I claim no ownership of this image, it was used as a reference for the study above.

You'll be seeing a lot more work from me this year, check back each day for new content. I'll still be posting updates related to my personal and school work as well, so look forward to that too! Enjoy 2015! Thanks for visiting!

-Francesco

Hey everyone, it's time for another update. I'm closing out November with three posts under my belt, super happy about that! Anyway, time for what you (hopefully) came her for. This post is about yet another school project, the design item du jour was an infographic. It seemed pretty simple at first, find a topic, arrange some statistics, illustrate. I can assure you it was not that easy.

My first struggle was picking a topic, I wanted to start with something fun like "Death through the Ages," but that didn't pan out due to a lack of information that I could source (and also because I didn't feel like looking through that much data). I then tried to look up something I thought would be easy to find, which nations around the globe consume the majority of certain fruits. Again I hit a wall. This time it was in the form of me only being able to find records of imports and exports from particular countries but no data on what they actually were consuming. After staring at the Google search bar for what seemed like an eternity I typed in "sugar content in fruits." Bingo! I finally found something I could work with. A handy little drop-down menu popped up with all of the info I needed.

Since my idea was relatively simple I decided to go with a minimalist approach to the design. I was working with this kind of manila envelope color in my last project (though I didn't end up using it at the time) and decided it would be perfect for what I wanted to do. I did a few sketches at work and got all the details ironed out, here's what they look like.

This was my first sketch, it's how I figured out the layout of the image. There's a little note scrawled at the top that reads "need 1 more fruit." At the time I had only listed eleven fruits in my design but in order for that arrangement to work I needed twelve. That'd make three on the top, four in the middle, and five on the bottom. I wanted to mimic the food pyramid a bit with the shape, so that's why I went with a stepped pyramid design.

This drawing shows what the key or legend was going to look like and also has a thumbnail of the finalized design in the top left.

 This one shows the title of the infographic at the top along with some text that would be displayed under that. I also drew the fruits in a little more detail, the black silhouette is the shape of the fruit and the white unfilled space represents the percent of sugar in the fruit.

I started my image by making a background in the manila color I selected, then created a two inch white border around each side. I got all of the bits and pieces arranged where I wanted them, then it was just a matter of creating the fruit shapes and listing all of the information I gathered. The description of the process was greatly simplified as I really don't feel like going through the horror of that again. For some reason filling in the shapes I created with that little touch of white at the bottom was exceedingly difficult, I'll be asking my professor if there was another way I could have gone about it. In the end I came up with something I was pretty happy with. The design's pleasant, well balanced, and the color pallet is simple and doesn't distract from the information being conveyed. Here's the final product so you can see for yourself.

That's all for this post! I've got one more project I need to finish so look forward to seeing that one sometime in early December. Hopefully I've got some time for some personal stuff on winter break, I'll make sure to update as frequently as I possibly can. Thanks for stopping by!

Hey everyone! It's time for another update, and you guessed it, this one's for another school project. For this assignment my professor tasked us with creating a heads up display in either Illustrator or Photoshop. It had to be sized according to a 16:9 aspect ratio and displayed over a photo to simulate a first person perspective. I decided to have some fun with this one so I used a picture of one of my cats.

This is Pinky, as you can probably tell she's serving a bit of attitude in this picture. Perfect for what I wanted to do. My idea was to take this sassy cat picture and turn it into a Terminator 2 homage. Seeing how the Terminator viewed things in the movies was something that stayed with me from my childhood, so thought it'd put my own spin on it for this assignment.

First I needed to change up the image a bit and make it look more digitized. After adding one orange and one blue radial gradient to a layer I switched the blending mode to hard mix and came up with this.

Looks pretty cool but I've got a long way to go. After duplicating the original image then combining a copy of the gradients I created I sandwiched those layers together. I then changed the blending mode to exclusion and this is what I got.

I'm really liking it now, it sorta has a 3D look so I decided to really push that concept later. I added another copy of the original image in hard mix mode to give it a bit more depth. After that I put another copy on top in luminosity mode, this brought back a little more detail that was previously missing. Here's what that looked like.

It's getting there, now it was time to add in some noise. I also added a blue green gradient to the top and bottom to balance out the intense red of my cat in the image. This is what I ended up with afterwords.

Almost done! At this point it just needed a little extra tweaking. I added a bit of green in the background to further contrast the red tint on my cat. I then added a color dodge layer to make her look a little less dark. That left me with this.

Now it was time for some text. The HUD in Terminator 2 didn't really look as complex as what we might be used to today, but I liked that retro look so I tried to stay true to it. After a little creative writing I came up with this.

I liked the way this looked, but I felt like it was missing something. That's when I remembered I wanted to incorporate something else to push the 3D feeling I got when I first started editing the image. I selected every bit of text I typed, then added an outer glow blending option, then separated the blending options from each set of layers. This was done in red, green, and blue to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. Once that was done I added a bit of letterboxing and then my image was complete. Here's the final result!

There you have it, the finished product. See if you can spot the not so hidden Terminator reference. I hope you enjoyed reading through this as much as I enjoyed making it. It was a lot of fun.

I just wanted to make a quick announcement at the end of this post. I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that has been stopping by and viewing my blog. It was important that I post something today because after checking my account I noticed I surpassed one thousand views! That's super incredible to me and it's extremely gratifying to see. Thanks again!

Expect another post later this month. The semester's winding down so I've still got a few projects left to complete. Till next time!