Painting a new hobby

I'm very excited to have found something that is both exciting to me and could also come in handy with my work on Xenocell. It's finger-painting! Unless our lead artist, Kevin Turchik says otherwise, some of these could even make it into the game as (fake, alas) concept art. :)

My friend, Danila Laurentiu (a.k.a Apparatus) shared a painting of his on Facebook wall depicting Captain Nemo. He's very very talented and does both traditional and digital painting. It was him who brought  an iPad app called "procreate" to my attention which he used to paint his portrait with. Of course I am a mere noob when it comes to painting, but I got the app anyway, and decided to give it a try. In the end I realized that it was not the final picture that gave me satisfaction, but the process of painting itself.

My last futile connection to graphic arts, drawing and painting was made during the 1980s in my elementary school years. This one time I actually won a special prize at this summer camp for drawing the ugliest picture of my math teacher. It was a shame, because she was pretty hot. No wonder I chose math over arts... not that I ever felt bad about it, it was just the way it happened.

In the past few days I spent about one hour each day painting on my iPad - time I'd otherwise waste watching TV anyway. I looked up where I wanted this to go and it's called speed / matte painting. I'd like to pay less attention to detail and more to being done in a few minutes. When I'll have more time, I'll try to take it more seriously and train myself - I enjoy this after all. With passion you can get better at anything, so I'll first see if it survives the Xenocell launch craze - whether I have that strong enough passion in me.

Here are my first two pieces. I'm not an artist, but working on these was a calm and peaceful process - not exactly the kind of experience you get by fixing bugs, which is usually a lot of stress spiced with select curses and waiting for the compiler. I'm still in the fragile critic-sensitive period, so if you comment - thread softly because you thread on my dreams. :)