Spock Portrait Tablet Class

So as most of you know, I learned how to paint by going to tablet classes that one of my seniors Trey taught each week. Since I'm now a senior, I decided to continue that tradition, and teach my juniors how to use their tablet. The first tablet class I taught how to paint a portrait and decided to draw Spock as our subject matter. It was a fun class, and the portraits turned out great. Here are some pictures from the class:

As you can see, we had a lot of fun! Now I didn't get a chance to finish my painting during the class, so I went back and worked on it and I finally finished it. First here's the sketch:

I was quite happy with how the sketch turned out, because I think it looks a lot like Zachary Quinto, which was exactly what I was going for. Several hours later, this was the final result:

There are a few things I might have changed, but overall I'm quite happy with the finished product. For someone who only recently started painting portraits, I feel like I have gotten the hang of them early on. As always thanks for checking out my blog!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Digital Painting Progression

So I have had at tablet for the past 8 or so years, that being said I didn't start using it until my first semester in the Character Animation program. One of the seniors in the program, Trey Buongiorno, is a FANTASTIC painter and would have weekly tablet classes (he just graduated so make sure to check out his site!) In the very first class we ended up painting a floating  mountain scene.

I was pretty impressed with how it turned out, considering I had never used my tablet before. The other thing you should know, is that I don't traditionally paint. I have tried in the past but I've just had so many issues, that I decided to stick with drawing. So I really liked digital painting because it fixed all of the issues that I had with traditional painting.

Well two semesters have passed since I started painting and in addition to getting better equipment (going from an 8 year old Wacom Graphire to my baby, a Medium Intuos 5), my skills have gotten significantly better. I decided that for this blog post, it would be cool to do an updated version of that first painting.

I wanted to do another floating mountain piece, but I wanted to have a mountain range involved this time, as opposed to the rock columns I had in my last piece. In addition I wanted to go for a more arctic feel to this piece. Most floating mountain pieces are more tropical (ala Avatar) so I wanted something to set mine apart.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with this piece. I like how it turned out, and I think it definitely shows a progression of my skills as a digital painter.

Enjoy!

~Josh