This year I signed up for SmArt School with Todd Lockwood. We have only had two sessions and I have already learned a lot. It seems that my 2D design and composition class I took 15 years ago didn’t really stick with me. Some very basic principles were either forgotten, or missed.
As I prep for the DragonCon jury, I was looking at my older images and decided to do some small updates to help make them stronger. The most noticeable change was for the Sirin painting. When I had the drawing printed to the panel, it cut off a little too much of my bleed space, so her toes were always too close to the bottom of the canvas. Due to time restraints I didn’t have time to reprint it. But thanks to the digital age, I got to do some nice edits yesterday.
I first opened up the image by an inch all the way around and repainted the atmosphere. I did some touch ups on her, fixing some proportion problems with her arms, added some highlights, and fixed some issues with her head. The main thing, is I heard Todd’s voice “Who is your star?” and I added some light behind her head to give contrast to her dark hair/fair skin combo. I am pretty happy with the outcome.
I am working on a cool new piece in the class as well, exploring my difficult relationship with composition and values in depth 🙂