day #365 - the end of an era

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I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
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day #15 - Racing the Sun

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I don't know if I should be happy with today's artwork or not. I'm especially happy with the vehicle - possibly the most complex shape I've done this far. Very happy! I'm also satisfied with the figure; well, I mean it was satisfying for a quick sketch - Within the first seconds I had a rider and a face with an expression. Then, at most 20-30mins later I had a hover-bike too. The character's face looks like manga to me, but hey, I'm not picky.
A strong vehicle, a strong rider and I was confident that the background would fall into place without much effort. After 3 tighter and tighter sketches I had my character's outline, then I started blocking in the colors.

That's were it started falling apart. While I'm studying light, I still don't know how to give material colors - it's as if I'm working in blender, shading textureless objects.

Anyway, I tried to give a base color in each object and build color on that but I wasn't very successful; At least the pants got a dark color. Eventually I did some strong orange highlights all over the place and occlusion shadows and moved onto the background. By that time I was tired and lazy. I blocked in a few shapes and started creating highlights and shadows in the background too. I'm happy with the outcome in that respect- though I don't enjoy the combination of a very painterly background with intricate lighting and a cartoony character with cutout light/shadows. But it is what  it is.

What I didn't like is the palette of it. It came out too chaotic. Eventually I did some post-processing (that I hate - whenever I do processing I feel incompetent) to desaturate the background slight and then started shifting the hue around.  I just realized that I prefer the actually painted version to the edited one. Too bad I don't have the original anymore; except in the timelapse video.

In any case, it's probably one of my most complete pieces and in that respect I should be proud; but color-wise and style-wise it feels weak. Time for bed, the sun is up.

By the way, it's a digital piece that took me 4 hours.

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