The Optimistic Painting Blog

Lazy Afternoon

mattvr — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:40:23 +0000

Having a lazy afternoon here as the temperature scales the dizzy heights(for Hobart) of 30C degrees. Nice excuse to stay indoors until the sun drops low enough to get out the sprinkler and go berserk with the kids in the back yard.

Also a nice excuse to get the sketch book out and do a thumbnail of a Spinosaurus having a lazy afternoon lunch!

Based on the new skeletal reconstruction by Scott Hartman who took advice from Andre Cau and Jamie Headden. Most notable is the length of the sail, which now goes well down the tail.

I’m pretty sure there are some proportions out of whack, and the posture surely brings into question the flexibility of the spine and hips, as well as the volumes going through the torso.

I’d like to do more with this initial image, though it’ll have to join the queue forming of ‘stuff I want to do’ and paid work!

Feilongus youngi: Oops.

mattvr — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:51:18 +0000

From the sketchbook, a Pterosaur head study drawn by.. er… accident. I made a post somewhere about ‘listening to the scientist‘ didn’t I?

Recently rejected diagram for scientific paper..

mattvr — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:49:52 +0000

Really, I don’t know what the problem is?

A Great Illustrator passes..

mattvr — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:37:47 +0000

The name Dan Varner is probably not well known outside of those who enjoy wildlife and reconstructive illustration. I’ve enjoyed his illustrations of prehistoric sea life for many years and admired his ability to approach the photoreal but maintain the beautiful qualities of paint.

Tylosaurus proriger by Dan Varner

Sadly Dan has passed on after a battle with disease, for those of us who know his art his fantastic contributions will be sorely missed.

2011: Year of the Prehistoric Kitteh

mattvr — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:41:33 +0000

With 2011 behind us, and in the tradition of self absorbed internet navel gazing, I thought I’d pass on how this little blog is doing.

Thumbs up From king Iguanodon!

Optimistic Painter started back in 2009 with the ‘optimistic’ aspiration that it would help me get my painting trousers on and get brush wiggling, since then it’s grown beyond any expectation, with 18000 people going through the turnstiles this year!

Why oh why did they come? Well, it’d be a mystery to me too but WordPress give some nice stats that might help! To start, top searches for 2011 were for, I kid you not, “Creepy Forests”!

A little project I did for Stefan Le Mottee as a background in a short film. The other top search was quite unexpected, especially as I can’t even type it without checking the spelling. It was Quetzalcoatlus, with the ‘Big bird Goes Postal’ illustration proving pretty popular.

Of course these may have been the top searches for 2011, but they were far from the post with the most hits. Back in June Dave Orr of Love in the time of Chasmosaurus and I were discussing Dinosaur TV Tropes with the possibility of doing some posts together. Just for fun I haphazardly collaged together a little gag cartoon. Dave ordered me to immediately post it in my blog for the betterment of all humankind… or er, mostly frustrated scientists and paleo-nerds.

A minor…er, very minor, internet meme was born! Kitteh garnered more hits in a single day that OPB usually got in a month! Since then the adventures of Kitteh have continued to be popular so I’ve kept chopping up bits of photos haphazardly to make new ones, who am I to argue with the public!

2011 continued the paleo themed illustrations with the above mentioned Quetzalcoatlus and a painting I wanted to make ever since I’d done the ‘official’ scavenging Tarbosaur back in 2010 for Dave Hone.

2011 was also the year of my clients being kind and allowing me to post about some of the other projects I’ve been involved in. So thanks to all for putting up with me asking “Is it ok if I blog this?”

I’d better wrap this up. 2012 is already shaping up to be interesting, with at least two ‘official’ paleo illustrations slated thanks to Dave Hone (watch out for ‘cute fuzzy death from above’!) and more freelance work and non paleo illustration on the way.

So thanks for watching, you’ve kept me painting! And have a great new year!

Matt

Animated Mr. McGee narrated by Hugo Weaving!

mattvr — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:35:45 +0000

One of the projects I was involved with earlier this year in house at Blue Rocket Productions was development of an animated version of the Mr. McGee children’s books by Pamela Allen.

To my surprise I found the trailer we’d done online at the Youtube channel of Australian TV producers Blink Freehand, who produced with JDR Screen.

In a star move they enlisted Hugo Weaving to do the narration. To be honest I did do some fairly lame Matrix/McGee jokes around the studio. I’m pretty sure only I was amused.

It really was a team effort with Paul Newell doing character design and Stefan Le Mottee rigging and animating. My job was trying to emulate Pamela Allen’s illustration style and adapt it for animation. So the line work, colours and design of the characters and backgrounds all had to work in motion but still reference the illustrations by Pamela. In the end we all did a bit of everything. The youtube clip compresses the texture work quite a bit, so you’ll have to take my word for it!

This was all then taken and animated beautifully by Stefan Le Mottee with direction by Blue Rocket’s David Gurney.

Kitteh: A Predator Meets His Match!

mattvr — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:54:00 +0000

Here’s the latest Kitteh. I’m finally getting down to the nitty gritty of predator/prey tussles, so many tropes…

For best effect please imagine the narration is read by Kenneth Branagh.(make sure he gets especially tremulous on the last bit)

Animated Idents

mattvr — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:34:13 +0000

I had the pleasure of doing a smattering of smaller animation jobs here and there over the last few months. These have been fun as often they call on a variety of skills and the whole project needs to be put together quickly, so you’re usually with it from start to finish.

The two Idents (essentially moving logos) in this post were produced at Blue Rocket Productions under the direction of David Gurney. David is fun to work with and has a spontaneity that can take projects in fun directions.

The first is for Tasmania’s government funding body for film Screen Tasmania.

The soundtrack in the Screen Tasmania Ident was produced by the talented Nicholas Storr.

The second animation is for The Australian Script Centre. There is no established audio for this one so I grabbed some music from freestockmusic.com/.

Both of these Idents were made using 3DS Max, After Effects and Photoshop.

Little Tip: I really like adding grain to the things I do but find the film grain in After Effects takes far too long to calculate. I’ve found making a grain loop created in Photoshop does the trick, simply overlaid on top of the footage in Multiply mode then adjusting the opacity to taste. For all I know this could be the oldest trick in the book!

Hello Cocky! (extant therapods for the paleo crew)

mattvr — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:56:10 +0000

A little while back during a project at Blue Rocket Productions I was given the job of painting some parrots in the style of a bird book. My usual role at Blue Rocket has been very much the ’3D animator guy’, and though I’ve done some illustration work and concept art there before it was nice to be the ‘go to guy’ for some illustration style painting. I’m pretty sure this blog may have had a little to do with the decision too.

In any case, I didn’t have much time so I knocked these out over a day and a half and had a great deal of fun doing it.

Galah

Major Mitchell Cockatoo

Black Palm Cockatoo

Thanks to Blue Rocket for allowing the use of the images!

Meanwhile, on the Internet….

mattvr — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:58:48 +0000

Annoying things in forums.

Hopefully self explanatory.