I wanted to paint what I had been avoiding, which was something human and with emotion. Adding the subtle fangs to the girl was a bit of an afterthought done near the end.

I am really happy with how I’m getting along with Photoshop CS5′s Mixer Brushes. I feel I am fine tuning them more with each new painting and getting them and myself closer to where I want to be with the look and feel of the final result. The overall style I like and am aiming for is one of looseness, one in which you see hopefully see expressiveness in clearly seeing the brush strokes.

This is all serving me well in stepping back from the perfect exactness of 3D, which I love to do and always will but this more raw looking 2D painting, feels great to be able to make.

Photoshop CS5 with Mixer Brushes. Original painting made at 4K.

I wanted to force myself to try and represent something in a painting with a limited amount of solid shades (each on a seperate layer, actually). I got it down to about 15 shade layers; a couple layers for the yellows of the beaks and claws, a couple of layers of white for the highlights and the rest are shades of black. All the layers are set to various levels of opacity to; either screen (for the yellows and white) or multiply for the blacks. What this did was “tint” the original background, which is a scan of a grocery store paper bag.

This is either a Brown Hawk or Eagle, I’m not truly sure what it should be considered as I found out later the only major difference between the two bird types are that eagles are larger than hawks. Imo, I say hawk.

Gizmodo had a contest to see how people could insert the Sony Move into snapshots from movies, trying to integrate the Move into the scene itself. I had ten ideas and screenshots but only had time to complete three entries. One of my entries placed third.

This is Christina Ricci and Liam Neeson from the movie “After.Life“. This is the entry that had placed. I think you can see why…

Fight Scene from “Repo Men” with Jude Law. This was actually my favorite entry that I did.

Chris Evans (Capt America) from “The Losers“. The guard on the right is Stunt Man Garret Warren, he also worked on A Christmas Carol and Mars Needs Moms (as I did).

Original Contest Link – Contest Announcement.

Final Entries – Gizmodo has changed the format of their website and the entries are not showing up, so the link is to a Google cached view of all the entries, which right now, does work.