Muse CD cover- City of Delusion

Slammed this out over the weekend for my Narrative Illustration class.  I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out considering the time I had to work on it.  Its based of the song City of Delusion by Muse, and designed to be a wrap around jacket type thing.

Amandroid revision and random cowboys.

Its crazy how you can come back to a piece after a week of not thinking about it and see it with fresh eyes.  I realized how flat and colorless this was, that it was basically grey-on-grey with blue highlights and a fleshy blob.  Thanks to the infinite ability of almighty Photoshop to make drastic adjustments within seconds, I've tried to make this one pop much more and also work better as an integrated whole.

I forgot to post this for some reason, but here's a random thing that I did in my free time at the beginning of the semester.  (I would really like to know where the hell this time came from and where it has gone...)  I was messing with overlaying layers and textures on top of a pencil sketch.  I might have gone a bit overboard...but it was just for practice.

One more random thing...an environment speed painting that from start to finish took the  duration of a phone call with my mom.  I'm thinking 30ish minutes...?

Amandroid

This inevitable illustration was brought into existence by stretching the parameters of an assignment in Illust 2.  We were instructed to draw ourselves or someone we knew with toy or doll-like features.  I got away with doing a robot.  Do I even need to say that this was inspired by Masamune Shirow?  (I titled the file "meintheshell" haha.) This one took about seven hours, which actually seems a little too long.   I've come to embrace the fact that I am an extremely restless an impatient person, and need to be doing either a ton of projects at once or short focused assignments.  Blogger desaturated the colors as usual (reds especially.)  Does anybody know how to fix this???

Anyways, I'm trying to get faster and looser at digital painting, and not get obsessively sucked into rendering something to look perfectly smooth and seamless.  I'm past the point of trying to make my digital work look like "real paintings," instead I want to capitalize on the speed and versatility of digital media to create unique effects.  I'm a huge fan of custom brushes, and think that when used with a normal hard round they can add a spark of individuality and contribute to the "cool" factor of a piece.  I'm also trying to incorporate the energy and messiness of my drawings into my finished pieces, since I normally find myself looking from a finished piece to the sketch wondering why the heck the sketch always looks better.  In this case, my painting improved on the sketch (the face, geez...) but remained true to the original sense of form and light.

Also, a massive dump full of cowboys and depressed people is on its way...I just need to get my lazy butt to a scanner.