Pacific Rim Inspired Speed Painting

Hey guys! So this time I decided to do something completely new and record myself painting! Two nights ago I saw Pacific Rim with a few people from Celestial (cough cough check out the blog I run for that as well) and the director of Yours, Mime, and Ours. I LOVED the movie (Gipsy Danger!) and was really fascinated by a lot of the designs in the film. I decided that since my last creature concept went over so well, I'd do another. I also decided lately that I wanted to start a visual development reel, so I figured it would be better to have more than just elements from our film in it.

For this piece I didn't really have a concept in mind, just certain elements I wanted. I knew I wanted it to have big curved horns, sort of like the Balrog from LOTR, and I knew I wanted it to walk on its Knuckles with it's shoulder raised. I also liked the idea of giving the creature back ridges. Other than that, I had no clear picture so I decided to just get to painting.

I quickly assembled some reference pictures to inspire me and began to sketch. I won't go into too much detail as to what I did next because you can actually see what I did below!

So I really am happy with how this turned out. As you can see I decided to line this piece, and surprisingly I managed to do it without resorting to the pen tool... go figure! After watching the video a few times, I did go back and make one more change, I decided to add some rain. Pacific Rim seemed to always take place during a rain storm, so I thought it was fitting. Here is the final, full resolution piece

I had a lot of fun painting this piece, and I hope you guys enjoyed looking into my process for painting. I decided to keep all of the mistakes in the video, rather than cutting them out,  so you could kind of get an idea as to what I was thinking. Leave a comment below if you'd like to see more speed paintings from me in the future. By the way for those interested in how long this took, it took 2 hours and 23 minutes.

As always enjoy!

~Josh