Illustration, Iteration, Frustration

Here's a couple spaceships from this evening:

Sport Cruiser spaceships: Photoshop CS5

I'm trying to do anything and everything I can, within the limited working time I have now, to increase my output, learn new techniques and get better at painting. Been watching Feng's videos - I went through all of them, actually, over the last week - so I'm returning to following his lead and working on stuff that shows a high level of professionalism.

So after watching Feng's latest Design Cinema, I thought I'd try his suggestion of doing 3 environment paintings in the same file simultaneously, and started this:

3 environments, same file: PS CS5

I managed to get to this point in about 2.5 hours, but I've stalled out. For some reason my brain is not letting me figure out how to take these further... which is very frustrating. I'm using pretty simple forms in all of them because I want to do the technique without having to do too much design work, I want to concentrate on value, lighting, mood, atmosphere and composition instead.

They're all at about the same level of completion, but I think the middle one reads and works best. I feel like the background looks especially good on it, I did use some photo for the clouds but everything else is painted, I only laid in the clouds as a desaturated overlay onto the sky colors. The top one's okay, but the bottom one is falling apart for me. There's some simple perspective things that need fixing, which won't take long, but the whole thing just isn't working for me.

So I hit a wall. The next step is to just keep going with details, but for some reason my brain doesn't want to paint detail at a "mid" level, it wants to zoom all the way in and do really tight stuff. I have to not do that, and it's actually really difficult trying to find that middle ground. More practice I guess.

Once I realized I was getting really upset and not progressing, I said screw it and did something I know I can do, zapped out a couple of spaceships. That only took an hour! At least I can do that no problem.

I really do need to get the production painting thing down, though, or I'm not going to get the kind of work I really want to do. I guess I'll start another 3-shot tomorrow and see if I can improve.