New Project

I started working on a new comic book with a really talented friend of mine, Loic Nicoloff. It's going to be pretty short, 4 pages only. Loic is working on the story right now. I invite you to go check out his website (there is a English version too). Lots of cool stuff!

It's a fairly new project so I can't say much but here are the first character explorations.

Invitation to the 30 mins painting exercise

It seems like a few people might be interested in starting these 30 minutes paintings with us. Obviously, everybody is invited!
I started this exercise last week for myself and quickly invited Oliver Chipping and Jason Scanlon to join me. I made a few rules that I think keep the essence of the exercise (which is some kind of "Digital Alla Prima"). I invite you to follow them so that we can compare our paintings knowing that they are done following the same restrictions.
You'll see, this exercise is really addictive!!

Here are the rules:

- use a picture as reference or if you are lucky enough to have a laptop, do it from life.
- make it in 30 minutes or less
- never use the dropper tool to pick up the colors directly from the picture
- use only ONE layer
- keep the picture under 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels (I guess this rule is not that important, the idea is to keep it small)


Have fun and remember: 30 mins, not 32!!! :) It's harder to stop than you think!

I'm excited to see what you guys will come up with.

More quick paintings with the flu

Well, I'm sick as a dog today (although I don't know what a sick dog looks like, it must not be pretty...) The only advantage I can see of being sick is that I had time yesterday for more 30 mins paintings, the only thing I could do. Here are the last ones. It's getting there.
Please wash your hands after visiting this page, I'm contagious!

30 mins paintings of the week

Here are my 3 favorites of the week. I feel like I learned a lot with these. I'm discovering which brushes I'm the most confortable with. It's usually really hard to stop after 30 minutes. There are so many things I would like to fix, so many improvements to make but... hey, that's not the purpose of the exercise!

Please, feel free to give me critiques on these.

See you at the end of next week for more.

30 Minutes Painting Project

I just went trough a rush time which is finally over. So I'm back on my blog... finally!

Lately, I've been thinking of new ways to get better and go to the next level as an artist. I named one of my new idea "The 30 mins Painting Project". This is actually not something new but I made a few rules for myself to keep the essence of the exercise. Basically, I'm going to make a painting everyday using a photo as reference. The rules are:

- to make it in 30 minutes or less

- to never use the dropper tool to pick up the colors directly from the picture

- to use just ONE layer

- to keep the picture under 1000 pixels for height and width (which is a lot for some people, I now! But I'm planning on being so good that I'm going to paint every single leaf eventually! :) )

So here it is. I hope this exercise will help me understand colors better and be looser with my paintings. These are the two mains purposes of this self inflected exercise. I'm going to start with landscape and move on to figures eventually.

Here are my first ones from yesterday and today (30 mins each).

Hope everybody is doing well. I'm sorry again if I don't reply to all the comments. I really appreciate them though.

Have a good day everybody!

Sebastien