Tan Beholder via Procreate

I have been doing more sketching recently, just pena nd ink and occasionally a bit of color, but the texture of the fur was just not coming along how I wanted. I picked up the family iPad, and decided to bring the sketch into Procreate for the fur and a bit of color tinting. I had forgotten how much fun using Procreate can be, and how intuitive the application is! 

The Sharing Pair

One of the advantages to being out of work for a few weeks is getting the chance almost daily to draw or sketch. It's a challenge to get back into the habit, I must admit. My plan is to make a digital version of these two, maybe even add a third character. 

Storybook Challenge Sketchfab

I have been kicking around ideas for this concept for a while, but this recent Sketchfab challenge pushed me to evolve the idea further. It also helped to have a few days worth of break from work to sketch out part of the story.

Stuck on You, Chapter One by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

The first draft for the model looked like this:

Schmug4_test_solo by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

The Shipment

I have been continuing with the experimentation with Tiltbrush speedsculpting, using this as the means to jumpstart ideas that I can finish either in 2d or 3d. I leave the symmetry tool on, and then use the matte poly brush for the big shapes, than add more detail, timeboxed at about 15 to 20 minutes. 

The export process direct to Photoshop as a 3d object was not working too well for me, mainly because this gave me less control over the lighting of the object as I imagined the airship fitting into my scene. Modo was an easy input and ouput to just modify the lighting quickly, and then make a render along with a mask that Photoshop could use to isolate the ship. 

Photoshop does a great job for image filters, layer management, and masking, but personally, I find the painting tools through the brushes to be tool slow from moving my Wacom pen to seeing the resultant stroke, whereas SketchbookPro is much faster on the uptake, and has more 'painterly' brush kits.

In this case, I placed the SketchbookPro .tif file as a linked Smart Object within Photoshop, so that when I made changes to the greyscale SketchbookPro image, it updated automatically in my Photoshop file underneath the color adjustments and sepia filter. 

Extraction Point

I am really enjoying the newer features in Tiltbrush on my Oculus Touch for painting concepts in VR. The poly tools are very intuitive, though I do wish that you could edit points and faces a bit more. I suppose the result would be more tweaking, and less immediacy. (Tiltbrush content removed as their Poly hosting site has been shut down by Google)

Update on Monday, April 27, 2020 at 8:38AM by Matthew Seydel Connors

After posting the TiltBrush model, I felt that the mood that I was looking for had not really been achieved, though I was pretty impressed at how fast the scene could be realized through TiltBrush. When in doubt, I threw it over the wall into Photoshop for a paintover, partially inspired by the amazing Swedish sunsets that we have been getting in our rown of Gothenburg.