Christmas Card

Class project for creating a christmas card. The limitations were that we had to design the card to incorporate the red and white santa outfit in some way.

I had a huge difficulty getting an idea that I liked for this project.

Steampunk Santa

Robot Santa

Samurai Santa

Here is my mood board. I found dwarves helped me a lot with the beard and face design.

I did try and start with a robot santa which would turn into a paintover, although I found I began to just completely copy one of the images on my mood board and I was not sure if I liked the idea.

Eventually I settled for a simple painting of Santa handing out a painting, he looks slightly grumpy as he was meant to be slightly singed from coming out of a lit fireplace that someone forgot to turn off, but this idea died due to lack of time.

Sketched design

I started by using the lassoo and fill method like I did in my surreal project, but I soon found that this would not work due to the amount of details I wanted, this method proved too messy and untidy,

Here I settled for just painting values

Added some textures to the image to give it some detail very quickly as at this stage I was running very low on time.

Finished off with framing santa and because of the foreshortened hand It made sense to have it coming out of the frame

Keeping in mind that this is a christma card I tried to add some very simply Christmas details.

I found this assignment very difficult due to having such a hard time to get an idea that I liked. I did not like the idea I settled on but I knew it was a safe bet and it meant I could just get started. 

Painting values is still difficult for me, mostly because I do not practice it often enough, but I believe I was able to make convincing values on different materials.

I am unsure of the composition of my image, becase when I sketched the design I thought that A6 was much more box shaped and assumed my design would sit better in it.

Surrealism

This weeks assignment was to create a surreal piece. This could have been done in either 3D or 2D, I have opted for 2D.

I really had no idea what I wanted to do when i first started this project so I simply searched Surreal in google images and came across a few that I liked.

When i finally did come to an idea it was extremely depressive and dark, the idea was to have a figure being pulled by multiple hands coming from their back and them clearly being in pain. I decided I didn't want to do anything so depressive and moved on to something else.

I was completely stuck again, so I simply google searched the word Surreal.

 'having the qualities of surrealism; bizarre.'

"a surreal mix of fact and fantasy"'

This then made me think of a picture I had saved to my computer a while ago and made me search for similar things. (the reindeer man being the first picture I had)

Also Monika's bird man needed to be put here as these two reminded me of her work.

I absolutely loved this idea of the anthropomorphic figures but the style  really appealed to me and I wanted to try to do something like this on my own, and here is the sketch that I came up with.

I didn't work the sketch up as I knew I would be doing a lot of work in photoshop. 

To begin with I created a silhouette over the base sketch.

Then using the opacity tool so i could see my sketch i used the lasso tool to make rough selections and fill in with black for my sketch lines. This is how I was going to do all of my values. 

Same process using four or five different shades to build some form.

Some refinement and face details

Some more, I tried to make as much contrast as I could so I made the shirt as white as possible and the tie as dark as possible to really make it stand out.

I also decided to paint in values with a hard edged brush for the face and hand instead of using the lasso tool to make them appear a different texture than the clothes. 

Placed a background so I could plan where to put the clock and used texture filter to give the background something a little more interesting than just plain and used gradients to simulate where light is coming from. However being surreal this is not meant to make much sense.

Using the paintbrush tool I simply painted the clock in using a hard edged brush and adding a stroke effect to it. I then used the text tool to write the numbers. The middle circle has a satin modifier to it to make it appear reflective.

Something had been bothering me the entire way with this painting and I realized close to the end that because I draw with my right hand my character is leaning to the right, I did not correct this at the start, so I simply added a cane which now makes it appear that lean is going purposely into the cane.

I have been flipping the canvas the entire time just to give myself fresh eyes when I am working. However at the end I decided in keeping it flipped to keep the clock mirrored as that fits with the surreal theme.

To make things a little more interesting I added a glow to the cigar and kept that as the only colour splash. I decided to use a cooling photo filter over the image to make it a little more interesting as I wanted to keep colours to a minimum.

To add some more surreal elements I selected my silhouette layer, loaded the selection and made a new layer underneath and filled it in black. Then using the distort tool I moved the shadow to make it appear exaggeratedly long and then did the same for the second shadow.

I am extremely proud of this piece of work. I believe this style has helped me to combat my perfectionist when it comes to painting values as it is not meant to look smooth with perfect hard edges. 

By doing this I was able to half the time it usually takes me to paint.

Overall this piece has really developed on its own. I could have come up with lots of variants but I kept focused and was decisive in what I was doing.