On 4/23/2017 at 1:59 AM, banjobenito said:

Citrus, your Fenn Rau is the best pilot card I've seen for X-Wing. Absolutely great stuff, and a pleasure to watch your creative process.

thanks

For anyone who was interested in the art in this thread, I've started a webpage with 600DPI cards readied for printing now

everything will be found here:

https://citrus7workshop.wordpress.com/downloads/

On Saturday, January 28, 2017 at 10:51 AM, citruscannon said:

Incredible work. Really, all of your art in this thread is amazing.

One possible opportunity here: the Protectorate Starfighter's wings swivel around the cockpit. Makes the Fang Fighter unique. With three squadmates in the background...

I hate to necropost, but Citruscannon hasn't responded to my PM, so...has the Fenn Rau artwork been finished yet? It looks amazing right now, and I'm incredibly interested in the finished art...

On 5/2/2017 at 0:01 PM, citruscannon said:

thanks

For anyone who was interested in the art in this thread, I've started a webpage with 600DPI cards readied for printing now

everything will be found here:

https://citrus7workshop.wordpress.com/downloads/

I had a look over this website but can't seem to find any Fenn rau stuff...

Yup. Last I checked Fenn was still in progress and not looking like being finished any time soon. That was in the run-up to Euros, and I've not seen anything from CC here or on Facebook since, so outlook isn't good on the appearance of Fenn any time soon.

9 hours ago, caelenvasius said:

I hate to necropost, but Citruscannon hasn't responded to my PM, so...has the Fenn Rau artwork been finished yet? It looks amazing right now, and I'm incredibly interested in the finished art...

Hi,

yes, still puttering away on it, I haven't had a good stretch of time to work on it for the last month owing to vacation, and research demands from my day job, but it's coming along.

before that I was contemplating a background change to make the scene more dynamic, you can see the work on that below. The problem was solving the multiple points of lighting in the cockpit and making it a bit more cohesive. Anyways, I'll be back on it shortly, but I haven't got any kind of a firm finish date if that's what you meant. As TSI said I was hoping to be done before Euros, but my work at the university sort of got in the way of that.

Ah. Good to hear that you're still working on it, the piece deserves to be finished! If you check your PMs (both here and on Reddit), you'll see I asked about it some time ago. I was hoping to use it as some kick-*** prize support in the future. I run two X-wing events per month at my FLGS, a "standard" dogfight, and an alternative format. I like handing out non-official FFG promo materials on those latter events, to both boost participation and to reward those who come out. This art fits the ticket perfectly.

On 03/05/2017 at 8:02 AM, E Chu Ta said:

Incredible work. Really, all of your art in this thread is amazing.

One possible opportunity here: the Protectorate Starfighter's wings swivel around the cockpit. Makes the Fang Fighter unique. With three squadmates in the background...

I'm going to try an incorporate this in the next edit, this sounds really good and is a great idea. I'd like to see a bit of Fenn's wing as well, just takes a bit of planning.

whew. been a while since I've posted here. Doctorate vacuumed up my life and time, but I'm all graduated and the dust has settled, so hopefully I've got a bit more time to spend on this thread.

Here's a sketch I did of a vaksai for a friend in Gouache the other week in a letter. I've got some more things coming down the pipeline and will post appropriately.

20 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

... Doctorate vacuumed up my life and time, but I'm all graduated...

Well done!

3 hours ago, ABXY said:

Well done!

thanks! I don't think my (supposed) expertise in structural biology will help me much with X-Wing, but you never know

9 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

... expertise in structural biology ...

What?!

Your formal qualifications are in the sciences?...

I would have guessed 'graphic arts' or 'engineering'...

... so your card-work is a side hobby???

39 minutes ago, ABXY said:

What?!

Your formal qualifications are in the sciences?...

I would have guessed 'graphic arts' or 'engineering'...

... so your card-work is a side hobby???

Yep.
Academic research in Biochemistry, mostly focused on protein structure and dynamics. I draw when I can!

CitrusCannon is one of those people that were just built better than most of us--and he's not a jerk.

Blame our parents.

He's a better artist than most I went to school with and now he's a Doctor. Don't be jelly, just be glad that he shares his talent.

27 minutes ago, Force Majeure said:

CitrusCannon is one of those people that were just built better than most of us--and he's not a jerk.

Blame our parents.

He's a better artist than most I went to school with and now he's a Doctor. Don't be jelly, just be glad that he shares his talent.

Oh, I'm jealous. (and glad)

On 11/14/2017 at 4:26 PM, citruscannon said:

Here's a sketch I did of a vaksai for a friend

Wait, that's a sketch?! Your absent-minded doodles must be better than my greatest pieces, then!

Still looking forward to that finished Fenn Rau piece. I can't wait to see it finished!

29 minutes ago, caelenvasius said:

Wait, that's a sketch?! Your absent-minded doodles must be better than my greatest pieces, then!

Still looking forward to that finished Fenn Rau piece. I can't wait to see it finished!

I'm also looking forward to Fenn. I keep making it more and more ambitious and at some point I just have to finish it. Right now I'm having difficulty getting the look I want, I'm not happy with "something" about it, and the best way around that is to try and churn out other work such that I learn around the problem by trying new things on other pieces.
I've done about 15 paintings since I was working on Fenn (the vast majority not Star Wars related), and each one has helped, I'm pretty sure I'll wake up one morning and my Fenn block will be gone.

in the meantime, I have two pieces I can't show until after christmas now done, but to keep things rolling here's one that's in the planning stage right now. This is technically the hardest painting I've ever accomplished. Curves and perspective is NOT something I'm very good at, so, this is correspondingly a nightmare.

Inking

Where/how did you learn your techniques? You've got an eye for composition, scale, contrast, color, etc. so it couldn't all be from farting around on PhotoShop, and you've alluded to working with paint. (Unless you're talking about digital paint.)

Also, you obviously have great artistic talent, so what made you choose the other career path?

8 hours ago, Force Majeure said:

Where/how did you learn your techniques? You've got an eye for composition, scale, contrast, color, etc. so it couldn't all be from farting around on PhotoShop, and you've alluded to working with paint. (Unless you're talking about digital paint.)

Also, you obviously have great artistic talent, so what made you choose the other career path?

Thanks!
Answering in reverse order, I just didn't think I had enough skill to paint for a living coming out of high school, but didn't really have the guts either. I didn't see art as a realistic career path because by the time I finished high school, I had so few pieces of art I'd ever made that I really couldn't convince myself I would be very good at it doing it for a living. The most art I did outside of school was painting the odd warhammer figure I got from my brother, I found one from just before I finished junior high here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/96864?browseid=4480436 .

That's the last painting project I finished for about a decade and a half outside of what school required me to do. I found painting really hard, because I could never get things to look like I wanted them to look, and hadn't quite clued in to the simple fact that I needed to study and practice. I knew how to study science though, and found it pretty fun, so that's what I went into.

Wind forward to my PhD, I wanted to draw but also finally understood that meant studying was important too. So in short, fundamentals have arrived recently. I googled what were generally found to be the most cost-effective and best-rated books on theory and found "Color and Light", Gurney 2010: https://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Realist-Painter-Gurney/dp/0740797719/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510553565&sr=1-1&keywords=colour+and+light . After reading this (it's an amazing book and literally every artist should own a copy, not kidding.) I picked up over the year "Imaginative Realism: How to paint what doesn't exist" Gurney 2009, ""Figure Drawing for all it's worth" Loomis 1943, "The Eye of the Painter" Loomis 1960, "The Artist's Guide to Sketching" Gurney and Kinkade 1988. I've picked up a number of other books but those have not been as useful for me as these. I built myself a kit of art supplies and carry it with me to work and paint for an hour over my lunch-hour when I have time, but generally am doing something artsy every day after my labwork. The process I'm using for each painting is changing every time, as I find what saves me time and what doesn't. (Most of the time I frankly have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm trying to keep what I've studied in mind).

Every painting I'm doing, I'm trying really hard to incorporate major points from those books. The defender ( https://citrus7.deviantart.com/art/Delta-Squadron-Defender-x7-622132009 ) involved a lot of time trying to understand "The Mud Debate" and "Limited Palettes" from 'Color and Light', for example. The most recent picture above I'm trying out perspective methods detailed in Robertson and Bertling "Drawing and Sketching Objects and environments from your imagination", which seems to be working at helping me with perspective construction, but I'm not happy with how difficult I'm finding it so it clearly needs more practice.

So it absolutely wouldn't be fair for me to say I've only been doing this for a few years, but at the same time I haven't taken it seriously before ever either. I became a scientist because I was much better at studying science than I was art. In a roundabout way, hopefully this long winded explanation has answered your questions.

Thanks for the response.

See kids? You too can learn to draw purty! Truly.

There's innate talent and there's learned talent. It's always bugged me when people say they can't draw/paint/dance/write, etc. Those of us that put in the time practicing any of those talents see them pay off more readily. It comes faster or slower for some and at some point it plateaus, but the moral of the story is that you should be able to develop the skills if you work at it.

If it's important to you, you will find a way. If it's not, you will find an excuse.

Thanks again CC. I'm adding that book to my Christmas list. And maybe soon, I'll have some work to show.

On 11/14/2017 at 11:07 PM, citruscannon said:

Yep.
Academic research in Biochemistry, mostly focused on protein structure and dynamics. I draw when I can!

Holy crap, you're the only protein structure PhD that I've ever met not through academic circles. Where did you do your graduate work?

I started in an X-ray crystallography lab, but ended up branching out to electron paramagnetic resonance primarily. Congrats, man, it's like a whole new world once that stuff is over.

18 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

Holy crap, you're the only protein structure PhD that I've ever met not through academic circles. Where did you do your graduate work?

I started in an X-ray crystallography lab, but ended up branching out to electron paramagnetic resonance primarily. Congrats, man, it's like a whole new world once that stuff is over.

Awesome! I did protein structure by NMR in Oxford, I'm based out of Edmonton now as a Postdoc. EPR is really awesome. I've never used it but I've seen talks where people have used it for (among other things) generating long distance restraints and comboing it up with solid-state NMR and it looked phenomenal.

Yea it's a pretty great feeling

15 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

Awesome! I did protein structure by NMR in Oxford, I'm based out of Edmonton now as a Postdoc. EPR is really awesome. I've never used it but I've seen talks where people have used it for (among other things) generating long distance restraints and comboing it up with solid-state NMR and it looked phenomenal.

Yea it's a pretty great feeling

I was at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Not as nice as Oxford, but assaj good structure department. Had the opportunity to take an X-ray Crystallography class from Michael Rossman, if that means much to you.

Protein structure via EPR is pretty cool, and I was, doing simple stuff, mostly large domain movement. It's nice to do work at reasonable concentrations, in solution. I did a post doc at Washington University in St. Louis, now I'm in industry.