So ... you may have noticed I haven't posted many paintings lately (I'm working on that, really). Basically I've been working at BeamNG (you may have seen our totally epic video a few months back [link] on our game for a while now which has been awesome; designing and building levels. I'm going to get back to doing painting studies and some full paintings soon though, most of it has been super secret BeamNG concept art lately.

I just posted some pics of the terrain I've been working on over on the website, you should totally check it out: [link]

What has been really interesting is applying my knowledge of 2d composition to a 3d scene; which as it turns out is a lot more difficult than I first anticipated. You've got to try and anticipate where the player will be standing (or driving) and where they'll be looking and also design scenes that work from a lot more than a single angle.

I've got a time-lapse up of one of the paintings I did recently and a dump of all my brushes and settings for Gimp (including a few I haven't uploaded to dA yet).

Time-lapse and brushes: [link]

How do you feel about resources like brushes which are only allowed for non-profit usage and require attribution? Do you have brushes like these installed or do you avoid them?

I personally avoid these resources like the plague, I feel they are a real pain. The last thing I want to do when painting is write down a list of all the brushes I used, or when I'm doing commercial works to have to go through and try to remember which brushes are OK to be used. It's actually one of the main reasons I started making my own brushes, I was absolutely fed up with all the restrictions on downloadable brushes. Now, with the exception of GPS, I only use my own stuff. Naturally, they don't have the above two restrictions, I certainly don't mind if people want to give credit, but if they don't want to or don't have time that's fine by me.

What do you all think?

Oh man, why did I do this? This is awful, possibly the hardest thing ... ok ... right I can do this, no problem. Why is it so hard?! How did people manage to do this! I don't think I can keep going ... no ... must ... finish. WTF!? How can this be so hard, it looked easy before. Alright I'll just do this and then no problems it'll work and everything - ARGHRGH!! My gods this is horrible. Biggest mistake of my life - ever. I think I'm going to throw up, yes if I keep on doing this I'm going to be sick.
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That's a rough approximation of my thoughts yesterday when trying to do a painting the old fashion way (with messy paints and brushes and all that). Everything takes about a hundred thousand times longer to do lol

Also, here in Aus it's ludicrously hot right now

This morning I did my first nude modeling for life drawing, which I've wanted to do for ages now. I was fine until about 24 hours before, when it finally sank in that I'd be naked in front of a bunch of people, at which point I was a little nervous. That was almost entirely replaced by worry that I wouldn't be able to come up with enough interesting poses and be standing there awkwardly. In the end I wasn't really all that embarrassed or nervous about the nudity (although my heart jumped a bit when it was time to start).

It was pretty good though, I went all out on the 2 minute poses and I'm pretty tried now. In an effort not to replicate the previous pose I got gradually more ridiculous until about pose 5/10 where I was "squatting", balancing on one foot with the other on my shin, arched over supported by one arm with the other over my head. I only just held that and was shaking by the end so I eased off a bit and remembered to alternate between difficult and "resting" poses.

I also got given a really great drawing of myself which is awesome. Overall it was a really cool experience, definitely glad I did it. I'd do it again

It has to be my most wanted feature, unfortunately it's not planned for version 2.8, but for 2.10. I'm not exactly bursting with knowledge of what OpenCL is/can do/how it does it, but I do know that the performance increase when using the GPU is immense. Performance is in my opinion the single largest issue with Gimp for painting, I don't mind waiting an extra %40 for a blur filter, but when the brush outline alone is bringing Gimp to 5fps (yeah that's right, the outline!) you're in trouble. When you go past a certain size with brushes Gimp simply cannot handle it (the same with all programs), using the GPU's power simply means that limit gets pushed back, a lot.

OpenCL means larger images painted faster, and it'll arrive not a moment too soon

With the internet filter thankfully gone it was only a matter of time before something else cropped up, now it seems that a conservative Christian senator is trying to have any film depicting full frontal nudity banned and all artworks age restricted. From what I gather it, on top of that all artists would need to have their artworks classified before being displayed, and they'd almost certainly have to foot the bill too. What wasn't banned would essentially be made very difficult and costly, a strong "deterrent" to nudity I would say. This follows a push to have 1000's of native Australian plants banned, which I at the time took for an April fools joke.

SMH article: [link]

This seems absolutely insane to me, what do you think?

I got my gradient map tutorial up on youtube if anyone's interested. I go through briefly how to create gradients in Gimp, how the gradient map filter interprets the gradient, and how to apply it. And there's a cool explosion!
Since it's my first video tutorial I'd welcome your thoughts on it.

Tutorial [YouTube]: [link]

Well I finally got my blog up and running, I'm using Twitter now for updates too so don't forget to check those two out. I'll have some tutorials coming for Gimp and Blender as well on youtube in the next couple of days. My most recent project (admittedly small since it took only an afternoon ) was to texture and model birch trees for Rigs of Rods. They're on my blog, I'll probably get a screenshot up on dA soon too though, just got to get a nice polished one first

Blog - [link]
Twitter - [link] "/#!/LJFHutch" (evil link breakage )
Youtube - [link]

And one more thing, I'm working on new brushes for Gimp, some foliage brushes, they're pretty cool, painted quite a nice tree in a few minutes.

I haven't been uploading a lot of artwork lately, you see, I learned Blender and now I'm hooked I've been working on Rigs of Rods mapping and concept art/textures for Xonotic and have neglected my 2D work a bit. I'll be uploading more soon though, including some concept art for Xonotic, stay tuned

Well, I've done a few time-lapse paintings now.

I'm getting better at them now too which is good. Am I the only one who gets slightly annoyed when a video is called a "speed-paint" when the painting took over 8 hours? It certainly has caught on ... I can't remember any videos labeled "time-lapse", I think Wikipedia even has a section on youtubers calling them speedpaints as opposed to TL.

Also, a month or so ago bought a whole bunch of tutorials from idrawgirls.com, need to watch them at some point ... I have over 26 hours now I should have got them in small increments, going through each one is a serious task now I have so many.

Oh in other news my mouse is breaking down, keeps double clicking instead of single ... sooooo annoying, especially when you're trying to select a bunch of items on the desktop and you keep opening them Banging it hard on my desk seems to stop it though, so maybe I can hold out until I get a new one.

Time-lapse!
US Army Assault: [link]
A battle of sorts: [link]
Field (not very good/long): [link]

In order of awesomeness, feel free to skip the last one or two.

Well I've probably got more enthusiasm for my painting study now than I ever have, done about 10 paintings in the last 2 days alone as well as watched about 2 hours worth of tutorials and done a few hours of life-drawing ..... and studied "the" Loomis Book again of course

My painting has improved dramatically thanks to the sheer amount of it I've been doing as well as the many things I've learned from Xia's tutorials recently (idrawgirls.com). He has heaps of really great free video tutorials and even better paid ones - I've tried one and it's incredibly good value.

Right now I'm working on my knowledge of anatomy mostly, focusing mainly on hands/feet/faces since they're my weakest point. I'll upload my good sketches/speeds/paintings, but most of them are purely for me to learn from so they're real messy and not anything anyone probably cares to see Spending hours upon hours on a single painting just isn't my style at the moment - not efficient enough learning wise.

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Also, as you may well know, my tablet died a few weeks ago, well it's working nicely, however my headphones died! Argh! What is it with me and ...... stuff! They should arrive back here soonish which is good: this whole non-surround sound thing is killing me!

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I may fix up the recent painting I did, the nude. But I really don't feel like going back to it

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In other art related news I think I'm finally getting the hang of painting a single image now, instead of randomly place elements all shoved together

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Finally, what do you think I should paint more of? Let me know

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Okay I promise I'll stop writing now.

Wacom didn't fix my tablet. Which you might think would be a bad thing, except they replaced it with a new one! I read the note 3 times before I believed my eyes, opened it up and sure enough, brand new tablet

So with that I'm back again! Expect some more work soon.

Got to drive a Mitsubishi 380 today as well, awesome car

My tablet just broke. The plug where the USB cord connects to the tablet has come loose and disappeared inside the thing. It has two, but that's beside the point, to get it repaired I first have to send it away, which means I will be without the means to paint for some weeks. Also, the second one is getting loose as well. It's a relatively new Intuos 4 and it just dies like that, not happy

The $50 cheapo-brand tablet was built sturdier than this ... what is Wacom doing these days?

I'm not really sure what to do to be perfectly honest. I think buying a new one while I wait is out of the question, and I don't need a small one so buying one of those to use while I wait isn't an option either. Not only can I no longer study while I wait for repairs, but I can't work on concept art for Xonotic either I'm essentially stalled.

Not happy, Wacom, not happy at all.

Well, recently I've stumbled upon an incredible thing, planning!

Planning: [link]
Finished piece based on VI: [link]

To think I considered painting the first one. I've always opted for the dive straight in approach, which isn't really the best one, from now though I'm going to make sure I do a series of roughs first to make sure I don't end up painting something boring.

Another thing I used to do wrong is paint using opacity and size brush dynamics - the harder you press the larger the line and the more colour - I also set the power too high, meaning that light pressure would produce a very fine line while heavy would ... well produce a heavy line. While watching Dave Rapoza paint recently I noticed he only used opacity. "Well," I thought to myself, "why don't I try that?" The result? It was incredible, my painting improved tremendously, not only was I getting better more polished results, but I was actually thinking more and planning ahead. Now I only use size/opacity for highlights and details, avoiding it if possible.

I've been playing Rigs of Rods lately - which actually inspired the painting I was talking about earlier - and so I got out my steering wheel. While painting later on I had my feet on the pedals and thought "hey ... I could use this for painting ", so, I mapped them to changing layers in Gimp Works surprisingly well actually.

A funny thing happened actually, turns out Firefox uses the same keys to scroll as Gimp uses to change layers, so it works in my browser. Anyhow, I told my brother that I can use my webcam to scroll and so pretended to scroll by waving my hand in front of my cam like an idiot (while actually using the pedals) he was amazed so he tried it and I kept using the pedals He still hasn't worked it out yet XD I'll see if I can trick my dad too, should be amusing.

Today I had a look at a print of an artwork I did when I was in high school. I shuddered It was then that I realized just how far I'd come: back then I would have looked at myself now in absolute awe. No doubt in a few years time I'll look back on my current artwork and think the same ... I wish I could fast-forward my skills

Well right now it's one of my weakest areas, along with fabric of course, so I'm right into studying it, probably won't see much from me for a while until I'm done.

In particular I'm reading Andrew Loomis' book "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth", which is the single greatest book on any area of art I've ever read. Already my figures are looking much better and more realistic

Well, if you're ever seeking to try everything at least once, running over and impaling your foot on a rusty two-inch nail is certainly not one I would suggest! I actually planned to paint today (... read the final book of the Boreal Moon trilogy) but my foot hurt much too badly and I'd gotten absolutely no sleep the night before. As such I was in a sorry state all day and my mind not at all sharp or willing to do much more than moan about and read all day long. My brief ah ... resting ... from painting can most certainly be attributed to reading the final book in the previously mentioneed series after a harrowing week of ... well not having it Just finished it today, an awesome book for sure. I've now got another trillogy by Julian May ... but perhaps it would be wise to leave off reading it until I'm back into painting ...

And my foot hurts profusely!

Well, it's been ages since I painted last, and it was rather hard to do when I went back to it So, as a new year's resolution or whatever, I'm going to pick up the pace and get much better with my painting. It was quite laborious, which is another thing I need to do, loosen up. My painting is too rigid at the moment.

Well, my last five or so pieces have been in backwater categories of DA, so in order to get some exposure I'm gonna have to work in either the science fiction or fantasy genres

From now I'm going to try to do at least one artwork a day, really focusing on honing my skills.