My most recent finished work - James Zapata

[Pixelhead]

Some stuff I did entirely on livestream. Both pieces ~4 hours each.

I made some videos for them!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm9SIi9RcsI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLsQZIIr-To

[Sickbrush]

sexual tension

[Gloominati]

Ouuuuuuuu dat Harvey Dent Portrait O__O

[Pixelhead]

Ha, thanks!

More enviro stuff. Naked butt was an after thought. Or a perpetual one.

[Robert.B]

naked in the woods... gotta love it. I might go easy on the blurr tool its losing its subtlety in some of these pieces. It will also work better for you if you separate some of your composition elements into layers and then put post blurr on them.. that way your hard and soft edges wont bleed into each other in a seemingly arbitrary way which hurts the illusion of spacial depth.

[Pixelhead]

Haha, yea, the blur was definitely just slapped on sloppily for really no reason. I'm not very delicate with my sketches Thanks man!'


EDIT: And..... I just realized I posted this in the wrong friggin thread. Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap. So, this is totally just a sketch. Not gonna get rid of it though, just going to explain it hahaha.

[Pixelhead]

New personal piece. Sea Goddess.

[lewiston]

very nice lighting work!

[maxswinton]

Nice work james, sexy sea bitch.

[Star Eater]

Beautiful man.

I look at the growth guy and just expect him to start yelling "Kaaannneeedaaa!!!"

[Icedearth15876]

Very cool stuff i really like the sea goddess piece

[Ben Moriconi]

I absolutely love the melty skin looking dude 4th to last image. So sick. Inspiring me to do something similar.

[Sickbrush]

lovin'it

[Pixelhead]

Thank you, everyone, so so much!

Here is something I just finished on livestream this morning.


and a detail

[Fahd]

Something for fun.

I particularly like this one for some reason.

[Pixelhead]

The Irony is Quite Stark

[Pixelhead]

Some stuff I've done recently, some on livestream





study

[Daniel Andrews]

He's definitely got a few posts with some stamps of his influences but looking over his thread I can see they have helped him reach a higher level than some of his previous posts. Keep it up James you doing well for yourself.

[Pixelhead]

Something from livestream. First painting since the hurricane!

[j.zhang]

lookin' good james =]

[Sputch]

It is unfortunate, however, that the community thinks dramatic lighting of a highly detailed closeup shot is patented by Dave Rapoza

Yes indeed, I must agree with this. Dave's as good at self promotion as he is at painting and consequently he's become a community celebrity with a lot of people acquainted with his lighting, framing and rendering. Honestly though, the tricks he employs to get "punch" are pretty standard (RIM LIGHT!) and I feel like there's less stylistic wiggle room when rendering high fidelity materials. A lot of the cinematic blurring, blooming and colour grading could be said to be borrowed from Jason Chan (cuz he's famous!) who in turn borrowed it from someone else (who's maybe less famous or just really old). You have admitted Dave's an influence, but you are creating original artwork and to me, that's what matters. Because, at the end of the day, you are working for clients not the artistic community (though admittedly, they overlap somewhat) and there is a considerable market for this kind of work. I see your own voice in a lot of this work anyway and I'm sure it will grow stronger the more you do.
Had to get that off my chest. Now I'll offer some crits. I really like your stuff, but I think overall everything feels a bit too smooth. Even the textured surfaces feel like smooth with an overlay. I wanna feel like that texture is truly integrated with the forms, penetrating it, lifting it up and moving with the contours. Also breaking up your specular hits a little would help combat that soft look. Same with your backgrounds, try to a little more visual noise in there, some sharper edges (tone em' down with close values), more value shifts in general.
Anyway, great stuff, lots of impact. Kudos for handling peoples probing inquiries with decorum as well. Keep it up!