Meditation & my progress...

I started painting digital in April 2004. I was hanging around with my buddy Stephan in school. He is a very gifted concept artist and since the day I saw his paintings, I wanted to improve my painting skills as well. He told me that I should paint at least one picture per day. At the beginning of April I decided to start with my daily paintings. The first 20-30 paintings where mostly painted using reference photos. I tried to paint them as quick as possible (around 30min - 60min each) without picking the colors from the original photo, just to get used to colors and values. Once in a while I tried to paint my own pictures that I had in my head. But it was very difficult cause I rarely painted with colors before. I drew my whole life with pencil and paper but working with colors was kind of new to me.

The first few weeks were very hard cause I had to learn the basics, painting from reference all the time...but as I reached around 30 paintings, I started to understand little things and painting without reference was getting easier. Now I knew the basics and Stephan could easily critisize my work. That was the most precious thing during the learning process. I didn't miss one day without painting a picture until the beginning of August 2004. I went to SIGGRAPH and I coudn't go on painting. ^^
Until today I still try to paint as much as I can. Sometimes I painted over an old painting just to compare my improvement. Last year I painted over one of my very first digital paintings and I was really pleased about the result. Here is a comparison of the two paintings.

"Meditation" April 2004

"Meditation" August 2005

I can't describe how much I learned from the daily paintings. There were some really busy moments where I had to animate night and day and I couldn't find time to paint but I never really stopped doing my dailies and I certainly will go on doing them ^^.
Thanks Stephan for the continuous support! Check out his work at www.stephanart.com