Painting....moi?

I thought that I'd resurrect my Blog and carry on with it on the remaining time on my Masters. After Josh came down to see us at Futureworks Towers, I'd decided to model my next fighter - based on Eric "Butterbean" Esch. My character is going to be over the hill, fat but still a bruiser.

Also instead of doing another realistic character using photo manipulation for the textures, I'm going to be doing some more painterly stuff. I was really inspired by an animation that Mark Penman showed me called Meet Buck. I really like the look of the texturing of one of the main characters, seen below.

Another influence would be Valve's TF2 characters that are very similar in their cartoony painted look.

So now I have a firm direction to go. So I set about doing some painting tests on my iPad as well as on my computer. So here they are....

The main dude in Meet Buck

Repainting the texture for my previous street fighter in a "painterly" style.

Saw this pic of Rupert Murdoch in the press and wanted to do a paint over....love his creases

Then a quick sketch of my 8 year old on my iPad.

Finally on topic - having a play with doing Butterbean based on some photos taken off the interweb.

One more realistic in proportion, the other a cartoon version. Both done on the iPad.

Finally settled on a style of painting that I'm happy with. This was done on SketchBook Pro on my Mac. This Butterbean based on another pic off the web. I'm happy with this style and think that I'll be doing something like this. Might even take a look at some Lucien Freud paintings for more inspiration. 

That's it for now. More to come....