I've been taking some time these past couple of weeks in Photoshop to work on my painting/coloring skilz and add to my portfolio. It took me a while, but I've finally decided to focus on digital painting as opposed to traditional painting. I LOVE watercolor, but I'm very slow at it. The benefits of digitally painting are too important at this stage in my career, I think. I value 'true' paintings so much and intend to keep up with it, but for the sake of speed, revisions and cntrl+z, I'm goint to focus on my compy generated work. I mean, who wants to spend 10-15 hours on coloring an illo and an AD to come back and say, "Love it, but we'd actually like the kid to be older." or "Um, could the dog be a cat instead?" And then you have to repaint the whole thing! I sure as heck don't want that. No sirree Bob. And besides, I like the effects/look of digital paintings. So it's all good!
Here are a couple of spot illustrations from a set of 4 I did recently (I haven't colored the remaining 2 sketches yet). Hope you like :)
1 comment:
Great to see you pushing into new areas. I think doing digital water-colors or digital painting in general is the way to go. Traditional is great, but for all the reasons you mentioned in your post, there is really no compelling reason to do traditional paintings as far as career in illustration goes.
Now, if you were planning to sell paintings in a gallery, we could argue in the other direction I'm sure.
The only reason I can see for doing traditional paintings as an illustrator, is that at the end of the day, you have something you can hang on the wall, or sell. And yet, with the printers we have today, with the archival inks, and awesome papers, you could print your illos all day long, and sell as many as you want.
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