Airbrush Paint reviews and info

So last week I was working on a Sculpture of my Abade to have as a display when I do a Sculpey Demo in April, and then she fell from the table and was pulverized. She got even more destroyed when I tried to repair her.
So Now I'm going to use her Dishevelled remains to test painting scupley, and top coats etc.


Abade Sculpture by `guruubii on deviantART

So I've also been changing up my airbrush paint so here are some reviews of Airbrush paint I've used:

Golden Airbrush paint sucks... It claims to be useful for paper and illustration but I did light coats and it seemed like it was just way too watery. It seemed like it took too many layers to get even a moderate colour covereage, even of the opaque colours! I do not recommend it even for paper.

Com*art and Medea is what came with my airbrush. It's good. I wouldn't rave about it, but for what Golden should have been able to do, these ones actually do it.

Createx is a great one. I find I have to thin it a little since its quite thick, but I painted Metal with it and its a dream. They also have decent mediums, top coats and stuff. Recommended for painting with sculpture and metal!

Now, Having said all that, I don't think I'll be using any of those much any more with the exception of Createx for some things because I discovered something far better to all of them.

Golden Fluid Acrylics + Golden Airbrush Medium = WIN

Right now Golden has a promo going on that is if you by 6 1oz or 3 4oz bottles of Golden Fluid Acrylics you get a 4oz bottle of Titanium White for free.
 I got mine! got to any Opus Framing Location in B.C., they're participating and also have the Fluids on sale for the month of March. The Price is definitely right! (Friends of mine, I can pick up some for you if you cant get to an Opus, Let me know!)

Okay so this Golden Airbrush Medium is mixed with the Fluid acrylics in a 1:1 Ratio. and I've put them in mixing bottles.

That website I just linked is a great resource with 2 videos on how to use the Fluid Acrylics for airbrush!

I really love this fluid acrylics! I never liked painting with acrylics because it was difficult to get a thin even coverage coat without brush strokes or that sort of globby look, and as mentioned I had trouble with the other paints applying to sculpture before. These are beautiful!

I'm doing a demo on March 17th 2-3pm at Opus framing and Art 120 lonsdale ave in North vancouver on my painting technique for my previous airbrush painting


Noplan by `guruubii on deviantART

and I'll be going over my tools and the techniques. I've been preparing some samples :)
see my work station:

There are 3 panels there, the green one being worked on is drying from gold leafing :)
In the picture:
on the box is my airbrush matte topcoat, the box for my airbrush, Opus acrylic polymer medium, a couple of my mix bottles of colour, airbrush cleaner, and my table cleaning station with my airbrush shoved in it. there are also 2 pieces of broken Sculpey wing and a frisket film cut out.
beside the box is a bag with the bits of my Abade sculpture in it XD
on the board I was painting on is my heat gun (my best friend), the green painting has gold leaf on it, and beside that is a package of gold leaf (imitation), up against the back is the 2 other paintings I had going.
all for my demo.

Hope that was interesting to you airbrushers :>
I might try to do an online or video demo of my techniques in the future if there is any interest for it.
Next month I will be doing a Sculpey Demo as well, so stay tuned for some sculpey information soon :)

Tik Film

I've been working on a comedy short film for Daqueran for a while now, and I realized very quickly that the deadline was pretty ambitious.

No matter, I thought I could do it, but it seems like this production is rather cursed. First to start off everything went well. we had a competition to get a good voice actor and what we got was awesome and I was cruising along but then boom, my eye gets damaged and I'm half blind. I still plugged away at it, but it definitely slowed me down. that healed and my wrist craps out (admittedly this is really my fault. I had a very awkward set up and push myself very hard), then as soon as the wrist heals with the help of a new brace and a gel wrist rest for my tablet and keyboard; we had an unfortunate cat death. aside from the de-motivational powers of trauma, it also took several days of work away. Now to catch up I scheduled today off work to get some hardcore work done, and boom.. I'm taken out with a horrible head cold. I'm trying my best but my hands are just unsteady, and very weak. I have 0 energy and I'm tired as hell...

WTF?

on top of that, I've put a call out for clean up animators to help me each week, and no one will do it. Its an odd contrast to people asking me for stuff to do all the time before, and me not having anything for them Ha!

well, I'll keep trying.

toon boom storyboard.

So, I've been  battling with Toon boom Storyboard since the days received it. 2 weeks with tech support as they Scratch their heads about my two second brush lag and I'm now done! I've emailed them and asked for a refund but I seriously doubt they will give me one. I might be stuck with this Piece of shit. If I do manage to get a refund I cant decide if I want to get another program, or just suck it up and use flash for it. I don't know if it's worth it to buy another program. I haven't found a storyboard program other than toon boom that is geared towards animators.
Man that company needs some serious competition so they are forced to get their act together.

animation??! repetitive? no wai!

Having a discussion with Kitty today, we were talking about our art lives. Back in the day I took a comic production course at Vancouver Film School thinking that it was going to be my career. Now I really can't stand doing comics... That's not entirely true. I like doing them sometimes for fun, and in general I like storyboarding as well. Then Kitty mentioned that animation was Tedious! I'm like! whatever!!! its so not!

There is a general misconception that Classical animation is like "drawing the same picture tons of times only a little different." Anyone who's done animation knows better, but it's interesting you know? how people perceive things. Every type of person has a set of thoughts about stuff they don't know much about. In our minds we make stuff up to fill in blanks. I think that's pretty interesting.

It's not at all like drawing the same picture over and over because you don't draw one picture completely each time. you don't draw frame by frame. You draw the movement. You take a sequence between 2 keyframes and you add frames, directly between each pair of drawings completing the motion.
 Example: if you have 5 frames. you draw 1 and 5, then you draw 3, then you draw 2, and 4. all the while adding these frames you tighten up the other drawings as you go along. in the end it feels like you've done one image, but it's just a multi page image...

Does that make sense?

I don't think I've ever felt that animation is a repetitive process. Maybe it's one of those things you have to do to understand. I think I'd die if animation was as repetitive as it's stereotyped as being HA! I can't stand repetitive art tasks.

anyway, that's my thoughts.

Oputopia

Just a Pre reminder!!! in march (most likely the 20th!) my work Opus will be doing a Staff art show, and i plan on exhibiting quite a bit of work! we will each have a 5 foot wide by 8 foot tall section to put art in, and I'm going to have my animations playing as well as some production art, and some of my work will be for sale. I'd love to see a good turn out so you all have plenty of warning to get your buts there in march! mark it down!
It will be in the evening!

More information as it develops :)