Time Keeper | Outcast Odyssey Master Card Challange

5/5/2015 – Update – The “Time Keeper” time lapse video was featured along with many other talented artists on Krita’s 2015 Kickstarter campaign. Awesome!

Unfortunately I spotted this little challenge a bit too late on Google+. I decided to take a crack at it anyways to see what I would come up with, and to produce some more content for the YouTube Channel.

You can see the list of entries that made it on time here, and there is some very very impressive work on there. I am pretty sure I didn’t have much of a chance even if I did start and then submit in time, but it always fun to see what others come up with, and varying skill levels involved.

Love and Hate

This piece for me had a very love hate relation ship. I like the composition, I hated the composition, I like the colors, I hated the colors. This doesn’t happen to me very often, and usually if a painting/drawing isn’t working for me, I scrap it, or it just doesn’t ever make it to the public. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe it is the worst thing I have ever produced, I just feel indifferent about the final image. I believe it was a combination of elements which I will now attempt to distill here in hopes to avoid this in future situations.

Composition

There were some repetitive elements that I wanted to make sure were included. The most obvious one was circles. From the staff to the clocks and watches, to the background rocks of the cave, this was implemented from the start of the painting, and all seemed very clear in my mind before I started. But throughout the entire process it felt like it wasn’t quite working. Besides changing the entire theme of the image, I never figured out how to make myself feel better about this. Maybe it wasn’t enough to tie the image together with the story I was trying to tell.

Story

This one started out simple. A magic user, maybe a witch or sorceress, capable of manipulate time locally to kill her opponents, or bring them back from the dead as her servants. This is one of the elements that I feel was communicated well enough. The man in the foreground to the right could have been used a bit more to show her power to defeat, but decided to remove emphisis from that section of the painting because I felt it hindered where I wanted the viewers eyes to go.

Color

I am starting to feel that I just need to start out with color from now on. After working on the grey scale image for so long, I found myself getting too attached to it, finding it hard to move on into the coloring stage. The next painting I do, there may be some rough grey scale work, but I am going to make sure that I push into color far earlier than this one. For those who are interested, I used and online pallet generator to get my colors.

Close Ups

Again, overall I feel that this piece isn’t bad, but there are just a few unknowns that bug me about it, and some things in my processes that need to be changed.