Digital Painting, 5 ft x 2 ft

While researching for ideas and methods, we ran into the problem that polar coordinate worlds created from photographs would be too challenging to properly incorporate into a digital painting based on the project’s deadline. Our first solution was for Ashley to create panoramic digital paintings and then create polar coordinate worlds out of them. It was a fascinating idea at first because we didn’t see anyone else online attempting this, so it was very much an experimental stage. However, this didn’t work as smoothly as expected. Ashley came up with the solution to use graphite drawings of hers to create polar coordinate worlds out of, and these worked out pretty well for the style of my digital painting.

 

Establishing a solid style for my digital painting was a big challenge of mine. I’m used to creating paintings and drawings in the photorealism genre, but with the massive canvas size that we decided on (5 ft x 2 ft), I knew that it would likely be too tight of a deadline to create a photorealistic digital painting that was detailed enough for that size. I attempted it (as seen in the birds’ wings in some Work In Progress images below), but I changed my mind and switched to a more illustrative style.

 

The final piece ended up depicting a story of giant deity-like birds of prey who are responsible for churning the ocean and forcing these worlds to rise up out of the water. To learn more about this project, then read Ashley and I’s case study at the following link: LOWEWHEELER_CHALLENGEPAPER.PDF