Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 4: The Painting

The Painting...

My studio becomes a mess whenever I paint.

    After I sealed the drawing with acrylic matte medium, I put down a few thin layers of acrylic paint. On top of that I pretty much just painted background to foreground. Mostly using thin paint at first and then thicker paints later, using my color comp and tonal as guides and changing whatever I think could be better as I go.

you can see the oil paints in the background, and the acrylic in the foreground.

I think it took me about a month of painting after I finished the drawing. I mostly used Liquin and Gamsol to mix with the paints. Sometimes when i need to paint on top of something that isn't super  dry and I'm afraid will pick up, I put down some retouch varnish and that seems to protect whatever's underneath. I did that a lot on this painting. Hopefully it won't burst into flames someday from all the weird chemicals and rushed drying times. I guess at the end of the day this is just a cornhole board, so I can't be too worried about the ill effects of sloppy oil paint procedures.  

slowly getting covered in oil paint.

Here's the finished oil painting. The whole project took me about 3 months. There was a lot of time spent learning technical things, hopefully the next one will go by a bit quicker. I have one more to make the set. Here are some close ups of the finished painting, shot with my iPhone... I should probably get a better camera.

 The whole project took me about 3 months. There was a lot of time spent learning technical things, hopefully the next one will go by a bit quicker. I have one more to make the set.

The finished cornhole board.

The theme of the next board is New Horizons, the current mission set to fly by Pluto in July and take pictures. I'm anxiously waiting to see those close ups. Both because I think they will be awesome and so I can start designing the board.

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 3: Finished Drawing

The Final Drawing... This is where I did the research: built models, watched documentaries, read articles, studied reference pictures, asked lots of questions and tried to get everything pretty accurate. Although in the end I kind of just had to make some decisions and simplify a few things.

An Atlas rocket model, a painted soapbox for the tower, a mars/ rocks model I built from Sculpey and aluminum foil, and a cut out of the rover's back panel on a stylus.

After completing the tonal and color comp, I took the thumbnail drawing to Staples (before I painted over it) and had them print it out the size of the cornhole board on some cheap paper. I covered the back in pencil and transferred this to the board.

I cut around the rover and rocket because I had to redraw everything else like the rocks and smoke. And of course I had to add all the details on the rover and rocket/ launch pad, so I just drew all of that on top of the printed drawing with ellipse guides, rulers, french curves, a T-square and a whole lot of coffee.

The finished drawing on the cornhole board.

But even after you transfer it down, you kind of have to redraw it again to darken it a little more. Otherwise it's too light.

This part took me awhile. It can get pretty monotonous, but it's also kind of fun because you finally start seeing some details.

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 2: Color and Tonal

After deciding on the overall layout and finishing a semi-detailed drawing of it, I painted a few color sketches, the biggest one being done directly on top of that drawing. I kind of used this as my working color guide while I painted the final version.

 I knew I wanted to try and stay within a certain color gamut (which is something I had never done before) so I didn't experiment too much with what colors I used for the whole. But I did experiment  on each individual part, like the smoke. I must have repainted it like 7 times. So this one painting (the bigger one) represents about 10 little experimental paintings. 

I also chose to paint this large to get a little more practice with oil paint. I wanted to try out a few things before going to the giant 2 by 4 ft. cornhole board. After a certain point though, I didn't bother too much with it. I got what I wanted, so there was no point in adding details or fixing small mistakes.

At the same time I was working on the color guide, I was working on the tonal guide too. I did it digitally because I knew I'd be changing it a lot.

In the end I didn't follow either one of these exactly for the finished painting. They were incredibly helpful though.

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 1: Thumbnails

I was commissioned to design a cornhole board with the theme centered around the mission that sent the Opportunity rover to mars. In the beginning we weren't entirely sure what that should include. It was initially just going to be the Delta rocket and Mars in the background. It later changed to include Opportunity as well. 

I started off with a lot of little pen and marker sketches. I also did a lot of planet studies in oil, just playing around with different textures and mediums and brushes etc. 

Mostly pen and sharpie sketches. Some oil studies too.

After a few dozen of those, I brought it into Sketchbook Pro and did some super rough tonal/ color thumbnails, just to get a little more mood into it. But nothing is final here or detailed at all. 

Putting a little tone and color in

Some of the weirder ones.

After we settled on the layout, I did some research and worked up a slightly more detailed drawing of the whole thing.

The final layout 9 x 18 in.

Mars Cornhole Board

A few months ago I was commissioned to paint kind of a mash up of the Mars Rover Opportunity mission. Heres the finished oil painting Its 4 x 2 ft on a cornhole board.

In the next few days I'll post the whole process of designing and painting it on here.

Unicycle Boy For Free For Now.

Unicycle Boy (The game my brother and I made) is free for a little bit on the App Store.

ArtStation

I created a portfolio with ArtStation. I'll be updating it as I get more things finished and photographed.

danielnew.artstation.com

One Fantastic Week

During the long hours I spend painting, I like to listen to music, books, documentaries or anything interesting. Over the past four or five months, my favorite has been One Fantastic Week. Its a weekly Youtube show hosted by illustrators: Peter Mohrbacher and Sam Flegal usually featuring a guest artist as well. They talk for about an hour each week about day to day art stuff. They tend to focus on the business side of things like conventions and Kickstarter projects etc. but that's certainly not all. What I love about it so much is it's laid back, honest approach to being a professional illustrator. They inadvertently answer a lot of questions and clear up a lot of mysteries about it; and as a little aspiring illustrator, I am incredibly grateful. I've watched (or listened to) every single one of them and I find them all fascinating. I hope they continue the show for a very, very long time. 

Doing it again...

I can't believe that I agreed to do it all again, but I've been working on painting another set of corn hole boards for the last couple months. It's consuming absolutely all of my time, so I haven't been doing much else. But it shouldn't be too much longer.

The Raley's Barn

Here's a little unfinished oil painting I did a few months ago. The sun went down before I could finish, It got dark and the mosquitos started swarming. I set up my little pochade box (you can see it in my last post) on my parents' property while they were on vacation and painted the neighbor's barn. I think I've drawn or painted this same barn at least 20 times in the last few years. 

Fun Fact: This is where Primitive Tim lives, and you can see the barn in a lot of his How-To videos.