THE SIMPSONS NEWS
Okay, so, a rough cut of the clips of Homer getting hurt has already been edited together. My director Lance has been sick this last couple of days, so he hasn’t actually been to work and I’m not sure if we need anymore suggestions. I’ll update all the posts that ask for them when I find out.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the show and I feel like I’m not going fast enough. I’ve just been given some scenes that I need to finish by Tuesday. They are very complicated, I hope I make it.

MY WEEK
My friend Aimee had a birthday the same day as my daughter. Last year I drew her a picture. This year I decided to draw her one also. A few weeks late, but it’s better late than never I suppose. After reading her Live Journal page, I realized she’s into Doctor Who, so I thought I’d draw her a picture of him. So I did:

After looking at it, I thought it would be nice to give him a digital paint job. I thought it would nice to have him in color all painted up and three dimensional looking. There was only one problem, I can’t paint. So I thought maybe I could fake it.

I took some Oil painting classes years ago. They started me off painting in only one color. That way I could, not only learn to control the paint, but also learn one of the most important things to know about painting, namely value. When you’re painting in black and white, all you’re concerned about is the separation of values so that your painting is clear and sticks out in all the right places.

At first, my paintings really stunk. The paint got all muddy on me and I had no control over it at all. My values where weak and it seemed that I never got them to separate right. In the class we where only allowed about four values. Mid-tone, lightest light, shadow, darkest dark. I got the hang of the separation after a while, though, sometimes, my dark values where too light or my mid-tones where too light, but I was slowly improving. Unfortunately, my brush strokes never really improved much. The thing is, I never got past the first few steps of the painting process they were teaching. I would set up the painting and place all the values in the right spots but I never learned what to do after that.

So here I am, years later, with this drawing I want to paint for a friend and I never learned to how to paint in color nor did I ever learn to get pasted the first steps in painting. So I thought to myself, maybe I can figure it out. So I thought, first, I should do a value pass. Paint it in black and white using Photoshop. So I started it and did what I could. I did the rough value pass using only two values (midtone and shadow), and then, I froze…I didn’t know what to do next. I just sat there and stared. I didn’t want the drawing to look like a colored animation drawing. I wanted it to look painted but I didn’t know what to do next.

After staring for a while, I decided to experiment and I started putting some reflective lights and some highlights.

I don’t think that was what I should have done. . On hindsight, now that I’m looking back on my decision, maybe I should have added the lightest light value to it, like we did in my painting class. Well, I didn’t, instead I looked at the mess I’d made and decided to add more superfluous detail by adding a core shadow to see what it looked like. While I was at it, I used the same value and darkened a lot of little spots in the drawing.

Man did I hate the way it looked. What happened to my drawing? I’d lost my way and it looked awful. I didn’t like it at all. I just sat there frustrated. I was thinking that maybe, I could add color on top of this black and white value pass, but I couldn’t see what good it would do. It wasn’t working. So then I started messing with the opacity bars on each of the layers I had put the values on, trying to find a setting that would at least allow me to see my original drawing under the mess I’d made.

It helped a little, but not much. In the end, I gave up. I’ll send her the line drawing and the last version of the tonal drawing and hope she likes it.

When I was at Comic Con this year, the booths that really made me stop and look where booths with paintings on them. I’m really interested in learning to paint this year. There are some painting DVDs out there that I want to get. There is a really expensive art school by the name of Gnomon that sells them. I’m thinking of buying a painting DVD from them, hoping that I can get a few tips from it. They’re really expensive. In order to make sure we don’t overspend, my wife and I have our own allowance for every month. I’ve already spend most of it tithing, paying for a retreat I’m going to this weekend, and small little emergency food purchases. If I have any money left over by the end of the month, I might pick a DVD up. I hope I get to, I need the help.

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