Hard Boiled

So last week, I tried drawing Chow Yun-Fat and kind of failed. Determined to get a passable likeness, I tried again. Then I thought, "Eh ... why don't I throw Tony Leung in there too". Then, "I might as well do a background now." And so I ended up with a tribute to one of the great Hong Kong action films.

When I first saw the Hard Boiled, what struck me was that it felt more 'Hollywood' than Woo's previous films - a little more 'cold' emotionally when compared to the thick melodrama of films like The Killer and Bullet in the Head. This is exemplified in the film's overall bluish tint. That blue-ness really stuck out to me, and so it's something that I tried to convey here.

Sketched and inked in Sketchbook Pro and colored in Photoshop.

Play on, play ooooooon ...

Voodoo by D'Angelo is my favorite album of all time. For better or worse, it almost single-handedly made me the music junkie that I am today; constantly searching for something that'll make me feel like I did when I first listened to Voodoo. With this digital painting, I tried to convey how the opening track, 'Playa Playa' makes me feel like I've been transported to some smoky jazz club. That opening still gives me chills more than a decade later.

I also used this to experiment with using a monochrome underpainting. I'm not really satisfied with the way it turned out. I think it looks OK when scaled down, but sloppy when blown up to full size. But I've already spent too much time on this and I need to move on to something new.

Sketch was done on paper, then scanned, cleaned up, and painted in Photoshop.

Baby got back

Back study that turned into a painting exercise. Even after this, the human back remains an area of great wonder and mystery.

Painted in Sketchbook Pro.

Backgrounds for 'The Turtle and the Monkey'

My student film, 'The Turtle and the Monkey' is 'finished' and in the process of being entered into film festivals. There are still a few things that can use improvement, or that make me cringe while watching it with company. But at some point, you've just got to let your baby go, let it fly off into the sky and proudly see it soar or watch in horror as it crashes to the ground and gets eaten by a cat.

The production process was interesting in that it was backwards when compared to how an animated production would typically be handled. I went into animation without much of an idea about how the environments were going to look, because I couldn't paint or draw environments. I worked on the animation with a general idea of where the character would fit into a shot, but I had to take several basic painting classes to be able to actually do the backgrounds themselves. I feel that I still have a long way to go as a painter, but I don't think these turned out too badly.

Scene1

 

Scene 2

Scrolling background for a long right-to-left walking shot.

Not as long right-to-left walking shot

Scene 3

Scene 4

In the film, there is a cross-dissolve from the shot shown in the top pic to the one at the bottom

Scene 5

Distorted BG to accommodate for a pan from right-to-left.

Process

Corel Painter X was used for both layout and background painting. Because I learned to paint with actual paint, Painter's mixer felt way more natural to me than picking colors out of a swatch in Photoshop.

I started off by exporting a snapshot from Toon Boom Studio that I felt best represented the shot.

I then brought the image into Painter, reduced the characters' layer opacity, and drew the environment, as well as notes and framing information.

Then I painted the backgrounds, giving attention to layer hierarchy for when the artwork was imported into Toon Boom Studio. This was especially important for the shots that involved camera movement. Toon Boom Studio was used for all of the compositing because (1) I didn't know how to use After Effects at this point and (2) the ability to position and move elements in 3D space within Toon Boom is awesome.

Not that I recommend going about a project this way, but if you can't draw/paint environments worth a lick and you're willing to learn, at least you aren't completely dead in the water.