Exercise 001 - Todd Harris

My first exercise is to imitate a Todd Harris digital painting. (It must be said, I luuurv Todd's work)

But what to draw?

I felt I needed to practice my female forms, and I wanted to make it a little dynamic, perhaps with cloth (something else I need practice on).

First: The initial pencil sketch...

Not dynamic enough.

Sketch number 2...
I liked this a lot better, but the angle might be wrong since it's making her look large, when she should be looking weak.

Sketch number 3...

Too strong.
(I thought of a different direction to the scene, but no).

Sketch number 3...

This is a better angle, but a crappier drawing. It would have been difficult to get the image looking as good as the second, so I chose to keep with a less frightening angle, but more detail in the form itself. Sketch number 2 wins.

I trace this onto tracing paper, putting details in as I go (and as I think of them)...

Turns out she's a school girl. How about that, eh? The gun was a crazy last minute add-on. I thought: Whatever's chasing her will be massive, and if I ever get to a third iteration of this scene I want her to fire at it with something. A ridiculously huge machine gun was the obvious choice.

This is a progression of detail.

What I learnt during this process is that to get this look I needed to futz with the brush options. Even though you don't see it in the final product (below) I managed to replicate this look by putting a canvas texture within the brush option itself instead of using a canvas-type brush. Big difference.

The easiest way to do this (that I could find) is to open a new file, put a texture filter over a white page (canvas), then find the edges of this tiled texture. Crop this, then save this as a texture (define pattern). This will then show up in the brush options. Viola!

In the end, I finished this image simply to finish it. The look I was going for I never managed to get, and so the Todd Harris experiment was ...essentially... a failure in the ultimate sense, but I did learn a little about brush techniques. So it wasn't a total failure. Small steps for now.

Addendum:

Milenko, you provided a clear vision with your quick critique in the comments section. Thanks! I always take good criticism as art direction so I was very interested to see what the image would look like pushed a bit further. I think it's a definite improvement, but I'm still not 100% with it for some inexplicable reason. As artists are their own worst critics then I'm doing fairly well to be only this disappointed with it. :) Thanks again.