Sandtacular!

I just finished my last trooper in the queue, and I'd love to do more and I have people saying 'I'd love a picture!' but no one sends me pics. Should I just pick and choose or what?

Anyways, this is Brian and he is a sandtrooper. I dunno what it was, but the pose in the photo seemed almost stoic to me and (this sounds really hippie of me) but it provided a lot of neat visuals. One thought was with a Dewback next to him, but Dewback riders have gray/white pauldrons, not black. I thought about tatooine and desert scenes and what not after I drew my initial sketch. Tatooine has two suns that set at slightly different rates (very apparent in Ep. 4 and the very end of Ep. 3) so that became my image. All during painting, my coworkers would say a variation of "you should put one of those dinosaur thingys in the background'. I decided to do it and I'm happy with it. As usual, the gun (and backpack) are probably wrong. And I think his hands are too small. Dammit!

Oh well, it's a pretty picture of a sandtrooper.

Another trooper!

Luke, who has one of our garrison's Boba Fett's, also has a Sandtrooper, who I never seen him in, but nonetheless, I need experience drawing and painting troopers! The photo of the gun was dark so I kinda fudged it based on other photos I found online. I hope he likes it!

Help me, painting on, you're my only hope!

I'm sorry the title is really stupid, but whatever. I needed to save this. i wasn't about to buy ANOTHER piece of paper and start over, so I dug out a bottle of what I thought was acrylic matte medium (turns out it was gesso...oops) and used a foam roller to roll it over the surface to lock the drawing in place and add tooth to the paper so the paint could grab on. For those of you who don't know, tooth=texture, acrylic mate medium is clear and gesso is white.

thankfully, the paper is uberly taped to a foam core backing, so buckling, warping, curling, etc. should be minimal. Back when I did a 30x40" piece for my nephew http://i823.photobucket.com/albums/zz159/MoonCat-Arts/Other%20Media/HMSDillion.jpg I bought a whole bunch of miss tints from work, and some little Pratt & Lambert sample jars that our store decided to stop carrying. I used those, plus some actual acrylic artist's paints to paint it. I still had all of those paints, so i broke them out.

One of the things I learned in my painting 1 and 2 classes (taught by the awesome Michael Jacques http://michaeljacquesfineart.com/bio.html omg he's on Facebook!) is do tackle the big stuff first! Fill color into the big shapes, then start working on details. this makes sence since if you focus on one little corner, you finish it and it's looks awesome, but then you pull away and the big picture has so much work left to do!

In this piece, I blocked in the night sky (wait...that's no moon!), then the ground, then work upward, lighter to darker for the forested background. I didn't want to blend my gradation of colors, I wanted texture. the more texture I put in now, the less I'll have to fake later. All the white shapes are characters, vehicles, Ewok huts, etc. Like I said, I blocked stuff in, trying to save my drawing.

Overall, I'm happy with it, but we'll see how that goes. In other news, I updated my design for the Garrison Titan shirts!http://i823.photobucket.com/albums/zz159/MoonCat-Arts/Digital/GTwashington4up.jpg This was supposed to be purple! >>http://i823.photobucket.com/albums/zz159/MoonCat-Arts/Digital/GTwashington3up.jpg