New project test

After painting the previous style test and the studies I felt ready to paint some test concepts for the project I had in mind. I used the same process that I had used for the painting tests that I preferred however I was also testing out a set of watercolour brushes from Adobe that act like real brushes in the way they mix together. Because the project is so heavily inspired by nature I believe having my paintings look as natural and painterly as possible will help sell the whimsical beauty side to the concepts. I don't think this project would work as well another way, like using hard edged blocky shapes for example.

I felt that all the previous studies I had painted paid off and came into action here while I was painting these tow concepts. I noticed I had more contrast in colour and was paying more attention to my colour theory and composition. With the first painting I made sure there was a high contrast in the mid section with a bright waterfall and towards the edges it was more darker with the shadows of the trees and rocks. I place the character almost central so that the high contrast would help the viewers eye snap to the character at first giving the image a nice anchor point to come back to. I used an analogous colour scheme making a conscious decision to paint the characters coat yellow to create this scheme through my two paintings.

For the second piece I placed the fibonacci spiral over the image so that it started from the bottom right and looped around past the boy and dog, through the rocks and then down the trunk of the tree and around into the face of the doe. Again I was making decisions such as having a slice of curved contrasting light in the bottom section to help the flow of the spiral and then adding highlights to the rocks to give them some form of interest. 

I stuck to the three colour scheme in these two paintings despite my previous tests having their mix of colours as a compliment. For this project I want the story and images to start of more grounded and natural to this world but then progress into something that looks more magical. I'll be using the colours there to help sell that point so I made the decision to save that certain part of the method for only paintings that have kami in them.

The idea of the doe in this piece is linked to Shintoism as in certain shrines doe are allowed to roam free around the grounds as their seen as messengers from the gods.

After painting these two images I'm selecting this project as a firm choice for one of the two projects I'll be working on next semester.