Drawing is fun. I tried a slightly different approach with this one, and it seems to work pretty well.

A few weeks ago, I happened to have a few hours of spare time, and some people wanted to see how I actually paint stuff. So I made this one.

The actual painting process was pretty quick, just a few hours, and I'm actually pretty happy with this one. I'll paint some more, when I can access my workstation again, hopefully next week.

Woof! The LJ login doesn't seem to work properly over here, so I may not be able to update my journal too often. It has something to do with the crappy router, and I have no way to fix it, so I just have to live with it.

Anyway, I'm working on an animation project right now, a short ~15 second rendered clip, so I finally had to learn some 3D-modelling. It's fun, really, not as difficult as I expected. I'm using Blender3D, an open-source 3D-modelling and animation tool that can be downloaded for free at http://www.blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html. Highly recommended to anyone who's even remotely interested in any type of 3D modelling!

A couple of screenshots of the animation clip:

The characters are rigged, the scene is set up, and I'm working on the actual animation part right now. The rendering will be another story, though..

I've done some optimization and little tweaks, worked on the details and roughly blocked in the rest of the fur. It'll take a few hours of work to finish the character, then I'll start painting the background.

Ok, the character isn't even nearly finished yet. I decided to scale and resample the whole image, and it's now 4x larger than the original one. I had to rework most details and pretty much the whole character outlines, but now the project file is big enough that I can make some prints of it (some 19 by 13 inches at 300 dpi, if I recall correctly).

It's slower to paint it in high resolution mode though, as I have to modify the original brushes again.. But that's ok, I have no deadline on this project afterall. I'll keep working on it tomorrow.

I finally decided to paint a bernese mountain dog, and this is how it looks like after ~ 6 hours of work. I'm planning to finish the character tomorrow, and hopefully even start painting the background.. This should be finished in a few days. I've used 2 layers so far.

This time I tweaked with the custom brushes quite a lot, and I found out that Painter's buildup-type brushes are really fantastic when you're rendering shiny or wet details.

I'm still experimenting with various kinds of blenders and smudge tools, so I'd be able to quickly and easily blend and mix the colors, and make smooth gradients where I need them. A sharp blender seems to be really good for tweaking and detailing the overall shape of the character as well.

I'll keep experimenting, let's see how it looks like tomorrow!