For many month I have been all consumed with working on two large (door sized) commissioned paintings. A real dream job! When I am focused on painting like that, everything else gets a bit neglected. Like the back yard, which finally got some attention and rewarded us with baskets full of apples, berries and fresh vegetables.
Oh, and yes... mostly disappeared online too again. Back now, to grow my digital portfolio with mostly animated NFTs. Here my newest piece "Dragonfish":
It is based on a traditional oil painting I made for a group show with the artist group "Libellule", themed "Phoenix and Dragon". Ok... my interpretation is a bit far fetched, I admit. But Dragon fish actually do exist and I just made it spit some fire. Like a dragon. Sort of...
My wife modelled for the hand, which holds the fire spitting cyborg being in the original painting:
The original painting is on a round board and so I wanted to keep this element of roundness in my digital version. For that I created a frame, with a round cut-out.
In Photoshop I separated the fish from the background. Since there was going to be some movement added to the fish, I had to fill in the space behind it. Then I added a color overlay, to give it a more under water look.
The idea for the animation was, to reveal the main image with an opening aperture. First it took some experimenting to find the right number and shape for the moving pieces.
In Illustrator I designed the pattern, that I wanted on the moving parts of the aperture and my logo, which appears in the beginning and the end in the centre of the image.
Once I had all my individual parts, I put it all together in AfterEffects. One of the biggest challenges for me was to find a way, to not only have the aperture open and close properly, but also rotate throughout the whole animation. To get a realistic flame coming out of the blowtorch, I used a very light yellow triangle and made three versions of it with different amounts of blur. In AfterEffects I placed them on top of each other and moved them at different speeds (dark background added for visibility).
The background seemed incomplete, so I added some water ripple effects.
For the soundtrack, I used sound files I purchased from Soundsnap, combined with audio created in Garageband.
Finally combined in my visual story of the Dragonfish:
https://makersplace.com/reinhardschmid/dragonfish-1-of-1-31417/#
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