Color studies 2: Prince of Egypt

Continuing with the theme of color studies I did a marker rendition of a color study that was used for the movie "The Prince of Egypt" by Dreamworks. I remember watching that movie and being amazed by the level of animation produced. I had at that point begun to become jaded by Disney animation and feeling that all those proclamations of "animation is dead" were true. This movie blew my mind and remember thinking "Disney is back" and then "Holy S#!% this isn't Disney!". I was blown away and pulling out this art of book after all those years just reinforced that idea. The art direction in this movie is amazing and more films need to be made with this level of dedication, details, and love.

Sorry to gush. I was really impressed.

Going back to color studies, I was using my limited palette of handy Copic markers. I usually try to buy a limited palette of them to carry with me. I sometimes feel having a full palette makes you lazy. Not think of how colors are created, how they look next to each other, how they can create different moods. I'm trying to think more about how I use color. I'm obsessed. And trying to draw my own subjects sidetracks me. I'm happy with the way this came out.

Color Studies

Last but not least last week was Color Studies. To start with after working 2 days on value studies, we had to switch gears to color. Using the same concepts of values, we had to color pick the light, medium, dark values of each area of the photograph to help us realize the shear amount of colors that a single object can have. I started with the image on the bottom and worked my way up, changing the way I not only picked the color, but also how I placed them in the image for easy access of review. The last (top most) image is a screen capture of an amazing artist names Craig Mullins. His photoshop paintings have so much depth, lighting, and variations, I had to try to break it down. It was amazing. You should try it yourself, with an artist that you like. You'll be surprised at what you can learn. I hope to post more color studies soon. 

Value Studies

In the Environment class from last week, I had to break images down into value studies. Using only 3 values I had to describe an exterior scene, showing depth and shape to tell the entire landscape with only those limitations. I had to do various versions, as you can tell by the image below. Some of the first ones weren't very successful, but after looking at scenes from Limbo I had a better idea of what needed to be done. (Side note, I need to purchase and play that game, it looks gorgeous!). Can you tell which ones came after looking at Limbo?

 The following day it was interiors, and we did the same thing with value studies, but he allowed us to work with 6 values this time around. I had even more trouble with those as I was lost as to the type, style, time of day, and lived-in-ness of each interior and that overwhelmed me. So I picked a photograph of an interior, desaturated it and worked off of it to create my own value study and add some of my own elements to it. On the bottom though you can see an image I created from my head that has it's merits. It's not completely successful, but isn't a bad start.

Overall I feel that what I really learned about all of this for me personally was that in the beginning I was both too wild and too timid with my values in creating the basic shapes. Eventually the whole image becomes one "muddy" medium toned bland image that has no interest (no matter how well designed and/or imagined the picture is), and only after I take step back can I see that I'm wasting all my schooling and I need to push it more does it come together and show it's true potential. Still have a lot of work to do, but it's nice to get back into the swing of things.