As it so happens, the art challenge this week at work was to use a color palette full of blues and purples to create something, and since Peanut and Jay are two different shades of blue, I figured I’d kill two birds with… hmm, that might not be the best way to put that.

As opposed to spending a lot of time crafting mine, I decided to do it really quick and rough this time:

That color scheme is called Zen And Tea. It’s from an Adobe website called Kuler, which I’d recommend checking out if you’re interested in color schemes. Zen and Tea was a random color scheme that we found. It immediately made me think of watercolor painting, so I decided to give that a shot:

I don’t particularly like watercolor painting… I find that it’s more unforgiving and less accurate than dry media like pencils and pastels, and even when I’m simulating watercolor with Photoshop, that still seems to be the case for me. Oh well… stretching yourself artistically is what these art challenges are all about.

If you click on the image, you can see the full size version that I worked on (Warning: dimensions of image are most likely bigger than your screen size).

This image took approx. 6-7 hours to make, I think. I worked on it sporadically over the last few nights. I’m happy with how most of it turned out, although the rock certainly could use some work. It probably wouldn’t have taken so long if I hadn’t worked at such a large scale, but I kind of liked working at the size that I did… it made it much easier to work on details.

Thus, the work art challenge is essentially to make up a gigantic sea creature, and I made some sketches tonight, trying to figure out what the creature might be. Here’s my first try:

It’s quite the hodge-podge mix of sea creatures, that’s for sure. A bit of whale, squid, alligator, and eel in there, I think. It’s all right, but I gave it another try:

Well, it’s a neat looking crustacean, all right, but it doesn’t look that large to me. I need something more epic… let’s try once more:

Yeah, for some reason, the first thing that came into my mind for epic sea creature, after drawing the other two, was “giant turtle with an active volcano on its back”. I have no idea where that came from, but I like it.

This is just part 1, though. By Saturday, I plan to have it fully colored in Photoshop, complete with snazzy light effects for the lava coming from the volcano. Fun times!

Estimated time spent: 4-4.5 hours.
Medium: Rough pencil sketch first, then a vector drawing in Flash, and finally the shading and background done in Photoshop. Photoshop’s great for shading, but I can never get the clean lines with it that Flash is so good at creating. I just wish there was an easy way to export a Flash file with layers as a Photoshop file with those same layers, I’d love to know it… the only way I’ve figured out how to do it is pretty tedious.

In retrospect, the barn with chicken pox had a much worse pun than this. This isn’t really even a pun, it’s more just a visual gag. (However, it won’t get any funnier the more I analyze it, so I’m just going to leave it at that.)

Anyway, this week’s challenge was “Sick House”. Yep, basically, to make a dwelling of some kind that was suffering an ailment. I had two pretty good ideas, and here’s one of them:

It’s a barn with chicken pox.

If I feel so inclined, I’ll draw up my other idea soon. I warn you, though… that one’s pun is just as bad as this one’s.

Instead of going the cartoony route, I decided to attempt a more realistic penguin using Photoshop. It’s a Rockhopper penguin, which is one of the coolest penguins due to its big yellow eyebrows. Here’s the result:

Estimated creation time: 2-3 hrs. Have I ever mentioned how amazed I am at artists who will work on the same painting for 50+ hours? I am in awe at that level of patience and dedication to getting every detail perfect. Unless I was attempting a wall mural or something, I don’t think I could do it.

Caption: And without warning, winter hits the Serengeti in 3.7 seconds.