Just a little side project, testing out my new desktop. My younger brother built himself a new machine and I bought his old one off him. He’s a pretty hardcore gamer/programmer so he builds INSANE machines. For instance, he built this one 3 years ago and it still runs any game coming out today on near maximum settings without fail. So I upgraded to Photoshop CS4 and I’m in love with how it integrates graphics acceleration (among other perks).

This is what I was up to yesterday testing it out. Still not finished, but I thought I’d show the process.

If you don’t know Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, you should probably check out her solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer.

Ps. Windows 7 was temporarily the bane of my existence, and now I’m fully satisfied being back in XP. It owns.

Pps. As I’m typing this in Firefox, I’m also listening to iTunes, running Photoshop, and I’m about to return to my paused game of Mirror’s Edge, which can function at full speed with all the above still going.

I fucking love my brother.

Quick self portrait done in photoshop. When I asked Todd what more it needed he said “Don’t do anything else, you’re done! You got your stare down perfect!” Apparently I have a stare. Nice.

Update 5-17: Spent some time cleaning it up and fixing some proportion issues.

Close ups:

Here’s a look into the process of creating the Conan concept painting.

Quick sketch to establish the pose and perspective:

Added flat color, established light sources and began rendering:

Started on the background, more rendering and started adding accessories:

I used Liquify a lot to adjust proportions all throughout. Here you can see where I started to use it to tweak the face:

Some more painting and tweaking and viola!

I’ve been bringing my laptop and tablet with me to my figure drawing classes the last couple weeks. It was a little frustrating at first (partly from my memory being eaten up) and my drawings felt really sterile, but after purging my laptop of countless extraneous programs and startup system tray “helpers” (using the wonderful Revo Uninstaller) and switching to a ‘pastel’ brush it got really fun.