Aims for today

Today i aim to start to put my lovely robot creation onto a background, into a concept painting. I have plans that it will be put up against a 'sunset or sunrise' sky, as the purple and gold clash will bring it out a bit more, it will also make it so that shadows will be more visible, allowing more room to build in atmosphere. I will frame it in a nice Arch to help composition, i have obtained a couple of tutorials on composition which i hope will help me.

My strategy is to first open it up on Illustrator and make a black and white outline sketch, like a cell in a comic book, no shading whatsoever. Then i hope to bring it into Painter X and invert it so that it is mainly black with white outlines for all the detail, like a voodoo painting, then i hope to shade the image in negatively, then adding colour.

Final Painting1

This is my painting of my Ravana-themed sentry robot, designed for guarding the temples or attacking the invading English, this monstrosity uses psychology as it's foremost weapon, it only has to eradicate the fools stupid enough to face it, and those who run spread the rumours and strike fear into the rest of the invading troops. So far it has only 6 arms, quite a bit short of the intended 22 the original Ravana is supposed to have had, but i could intrduce some more. I decided it would have to have smaller arms near the weapons designed to reload the guns when they run out of ammo (Which it does regularly as the pesky English come in their thousands!)



The image i took from the thumbnails i made in all it's terrifying glory. I spent about 7 hours on this, done entirely on Corel Painter, it shows how i am trying to break away from the cliched worl of photoshop and jumping into the more superior painting program.

Overall i am satisfied with the way it came out, i like the way it's body resembles a chicken (the legs are supposed to resemble 'Pan' or Faun) a but it has human heads, i like the way i tackled the problem of including ten heads without making it's neck area a mess, if only i could do the same with the arms, (It is supposed to have 22 of them!)

Aims for the Chistmas Holidays

The christmas holidays will be more based on creating images for this competition, i also wish to re-address the robotic elephant ideas and recreate them using PainterX or Illustrator. I shall also practice putting my creations into environments which make sense.
The research i shall be doing will mainly be into composition, light and other painting techniques. It will also be quite useful to go and do some landscape painting of my own.
I also wish to get my Dissretation well underway, opting for a strategy where i do each part bit by bit.