[Art] I Want Your Brains.

December 14th, 2009

That’s right. I’m going to put you to good use. YOU CAN BE A PART OF MY ART.

As an artist, much of the time music is heavily played while I’m working on a piece of artwork. Different music can induce different moods, which in turn can be reflected in said artwork. I have a number of good Pandora stations for this, but there’s a certain type of music that I’m lacking.

Some of you may have seen this “trailer” recently uploaded to YouTube:

This is an example of exactly the kind of music I’m looking for.

Sure, there’s a list of a handful of the artists/songs (though the last may be a soundtrack?) that they sampled from the trailer:

AudioMachine – Akkadian Empire
Groove Addicts – Zero Hour
Audio Network – Mars
AudioMachine – Lachrimae (VadoskiN DNB mix)
Wild Rumpus Music – Blame It on the Falling Sky 2.0
John Murphy – The Last House On The Left SCORE

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I want epic, energetic, combat music. Instrumental, with perhaps a splash of intense choral vocals. Something that, when you close your eyes, your imagination is ripped wide, your body starting to pulse with subtle waves of adrenaline. Again, the video above is a good reference for the type of music I’m looking for.

Here’s what I need from you:

Artist/Composer – Song

There is no limit to the amount of suggestions.

I’m going to take all of the info I’m given, and feed it into seeding a new Pandora station, for playing when working on certain pieces of artwork. Potentially, they may get played while gaming as well, but the art is the important part.

In turn, I’ll present this to you, via Pandora station URL. I’ll likely also list what songs work for me, versus what songs don’t, so as to further refine the station, and to give you a better, more expansive idea of what I’m looking for.

Go. Go forth and bring me your lists. Actively shape and contribute to my creativity.

(The first comment with a new account has to be moderator approved, but any comments after that are auto-approved. Just an anti-spam precaution.)

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I Am Totally Out Of My Comfort Zone With This

December 9th, 2009

Uhm. Yeah.

So here’s a WIP of the current piece I’m working on for my daily exercise.

45min into the piece, most of which has been randomly fucking around w/filters & brushes. I’m totally out of my comfort zone with this…

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic
(Twitpic link, click image for full-sized version)

I seem to be onto something here– it’s a good thing this is digital, otherwise I’d be scared as fuck of touching it any further.

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Yesterday’s Daily

December 9th, 2009

The last 5 days were put on hold to prioritize a charity piece for short notice. While I won’t be able to disclose the specific children’s charity that it’s for, I’ll at least be able post the picture and give a description once the intended recipient has it given to him. The Mysta Remake/Remodel got backburnered so that I could get that priority done, but I’ll probably finish it up later this week, and post it here with progression details.

Moving along…

I dove back into dailies yesterday. No progression with this one, I’ve got a different lengthy post I’m working on for later today. Without further ado, here’s yesterday’s daily:

Just under 3hrs. Initial background and creature painted loosely in ArtRage, without any base linework used. Then ‘ported it to Photoshop, working around a dozen or so layers of varied filter, opacity, and selective erasing on the creature. Brought in foreground and background cloudiness. Rendered in the wreckage in the background with a couple of my custom brushes. Gave the eyes a touch of bioluminescence. Signed the bugger and called it done.

X-Posted to my LiveJournal

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This Daily…

December 5th, 2009

…Is being posted hot on the heels of the one from the day before.

ArtRage, then only slightly filtered in Photoshop, mostly for light and shadow.

Oh. Wait. I almost forgot. 15 minutes, total.

So begins Dark December…

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Daily w/Process Progression

December 5th, 2009

Here’s the full process post for yesterday’s intended daily practice piece, started shortly before midnight, worked on intermittently, and finished this afternoon. All images are clickable for much larger versions.

In this case, I wanted to try out a new trick that Rooth shared with me for pulling the linework out of of an image that had been brought from Manga Studio into Photoshop. I opted to do something a bit more cartoon-stylized, and didn’t want to fuck with the feet, so I just worked under the auspice that something would be in front of them.

1) Linework, via Manga Studio, cleaned up in Photoshop.

2) Ported to ArtRage, did a quick paint-in of the background (under 2 minutes, as it wasn’t important).

3) Did a quick, rough render of the foreground.

4) Painted in figure color underlayers.

5) Subtle figure color tweaking/cooling via various layer types and opacities, with selective erasing.

6) Painted in face. More color tweaking/cooling.

7) Dropped face opacity to bring in linework subtly from underneath, and to soften the face a bit. Painted in midground.

8) Added various quick details to the foreground. Fleshed out face and bodysuit interior.

9) Ported it back into Photoshop. Used a mix of filter, overlay-type, and varied opacity layers of the image to help push/pull the depth and detail, with selective erasing.

10) Rendered in figure shadow via varied opacity black layers and a little bit of varied opacity mulitply.

Finally, I brought in a copy of the post-filtered, pre-shadowed image at a 13% opacity over the top, to soften the shadowing a bit. Drew in some quick lights inside the headgear/helmet, tweaked the in-helmet lighting, and called it "done"

Roughly 5 hours. More than I intended, really. At the point that I finished it, I was a couple of hours past the time I’d planned on investing in it, so as far as I was concerned, I was done. Lighting/shadowing is nowhere near perfect, but for a practice piece, I’m good with it. Aside from the linework being done in Manga Studio, this is all raw ArtRage with Photoshop finishing. No photo aspects pulled for texture or anything else.

I need to do some minor cleanup on the ones from last week, and then I’ll post them. Later this week, you’ll get a post on a relatively unknown, free piece of open source graphic/art software.

Time to make the donuts.

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Art Process: Thulean Dwarves

December 5th, 2009

Here’s a character design for a different situation entirely. All pieces were rendered strictly digitally from start to finish, using Corel Painter X, with no utilization of photos for textures or any other aspect in their development. Also, as rough concept art pieces, these aren’t really supposed to represent finished works on any level.

During 2007-2008, I was doing various conceptual design work on and off for Red Juggernaut. One of the things I was involved with behind the scenes was fleshing out bits and pieces of their world setting. In this case they wanted a different take on a dwarven race, under the auspice of being evolved from the Australopithecus robustus. Or, as they were referred to in their setting of Terris, "Thulean Dwarves". Short, hairy, and not nearly as much facial diversity as a human would have. Initially it was suggested that they have a touch of similarity to the orcs from LotR, but that was scrapped.

First, I sketched up some basic options for body type, hair coverage, and head shape:

The preferred versions of each were picked, giving me a rough guideline of where to start.

The description of them puts them as a race living in the cold north, sharing some similarities to viking culture, that’s resorted to scavenging to to having fallen on desperate times. While seemingly savage to many outsiders, they’re actually fairly civilized. Here’s the initial 5-10 minute rough speedpaint that sent off, just to have somewhere ot start:

(This image is low res all around, so I’ve opted not to post the full sized version. If you really want to see it, click on the RJ Concept Art page link below.)

After the initial bit of feedback, I opted to experiment, and created a digital "paper doll" version, much like the ones that kids would have various different clothing options they could slap on. With this, I had the core template for the stance and body shape of the Thulean Dwarf, with extra detail put into the face, but the rest left open to be detailed with each iteration. This is the result:

Once we established that I was on the right track, I started slapping some different clothing items on them, working on maintaining a balance between being scavengers in a harsh, cold environment, and being showing some glimmer of civilization. My first shot at that was a bit too much on the basic side:

The next iteration was more along the lines of what they were looking for, but not quite there yet. On the one hand, it reflected more of the brutal northman scavenger look, it was still lacking some degree of the civilized aspect they wanted to show as well. So, while not directly on their concept art page, I’ve included it as a bonus piece for those curious to the process (and to be honest, there are some aspects of it that I was quite pleased with for what was basically a fast and loose speedpainting type of concept art):

After one more round of feedback, we came up with a "final" version, which gave the best feel for the race, and incorporated some aspects to reflect an alliance between them and the another world race that was more Roman-based. For concept art that’s not intended to be a "finished" piece, I was pretty pleased with how this came out, as was Red Juggernaut:

For those interested, here’s the direct link to their concept art page for the Thulean Dwarves. There you can find two other concept pieces for the race done by another artist (I’d guess they were the initial concepts before I worked on them– it was the first I’d seen them, and they weren’t presented to me for reference).

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Art Process: Boobie Wednesday

December 4th, 2009

Some of this is a more cohesive compilation from another post, so if some bits read familiar, that’s why.

“Boobie Wednesday” (or #boobiewed and the lesser used #boobiewednesday, which are the Twitter hashtags) is a theme started by two women on Twitter who wanted to do something to promote Breast Cancer Awareness. Every Wednesday, there’s an increasing number of people who change their Twitter icon to something breast/cleavage-related for the day. Additionally, a number of them submit photos for the blog, in support of cause.

You can find their blog and site-affiliated Twitter here:

http://boobiewednesday.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/boobiewed

FYI: While my picture below is safe for work, some images/photos that go onto the blog are NSFW, as they may contain nipples. So, if you work in a strict environment, you might want to look at the site at home.

I wanted to find a way to contribute (after all, who doesn’t like breasts?), and decided to do a piece of artwork in support of it the week of Halloween, gratis. The idea came into play that Tuesday, and I bounced it off of one of the two women who started Boobie Wednesday. She told me to go for it. In turn, I opted to do the whole of it on Wednesday.

As I’d just started playing with Manga Studio, I thought this would be a good exercise in learning the software a bit more. So, I did the initial render, up through colors under the linework, and exported it to a Photoshop format. As I’d saved it that way, I didn’t bother with saving it in the default Manga Studio format, and closed out the program. Little did I know that it was not a .PSD format, which would bite me in the ass in short order. I opened up Photoshop, and looked for the .PSD file, only to not see it. So I looked for all formats, and found that it had saved as a bitmap. While a minor nuisance, it wasn’t a huge deal, right? Wrong. I opened it up, and descended immediately into gratuitious use of the word “FUCK“. What happened?

The image had saved with all of the layers merged. In monochrome. Or, to put it more bluntly– all I had to show for that first 1.5 hours of work was a black silhouette on a white background. What lesson was hammered into my head? Make sure you have a viable copy of the file saved before you close the program out. Yeah, I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.

I walked away from the computer (so as to not give into the urge to punch a hole in the monitor). Came back. Started over from scratch in Manga Studio again.


(Click for larger version.)

So I recreated the original image to the best of my ability.

1) On the base layer, I used the pen tool to rough in the image with the default (I’m assuming non-photo) blue color for said layer.

2) Once I got to that point, I created a new layer, using the same pen tool, but with black, and did the inked linework.

I found the “export to another application” option or some such, and copied it to the clipboard. Opened PS, created a new document, and pasted the image into it. Only then did I go back to MS, save it to the default format, and close the program out. Having discovered that it saved as an opaque B&W layer (I’ve yet to figure out how to copy a layer just as linework, or for that matter, a multi-layered file), I used the magic wand tool, clicked on one of the black line segments, and then picked similar on the selection menu. This selected all of the linework. I then inverted the selection, and deleted everything else (the white).

3) Save the image, ported it to ArtRage, and painted in the underlayer of color. Did tweaks, played with layers, etc., until I got to the point that I was good with the image for details, textures, and such in PS.

4) Heavy layer creation/manipulation, filtering, opacity work. Integrated rough necklace idea. Addition of texturing via both photo and brush usage. Brought in a couple of photo overlay components on both subtle (skin/face/hair) and not-so-subtle (necklace/corset texture and clasps). More filtering and opacity work. Added more depth to the form via filters and erasing.

5) It was almost midnight, and I was pushing time, so I took a shortcut with the background. Found brick photo I liked. Altered it. Did a few layers of filtering with it. Then I did the shadows and lighting for all of it.

For what was ultimately 8ish hours of time from start to finish, I was happy with it.

What am I not happy with? I’m an artist, I’m my own worst critic, so I’m not happy with a lot of things. ;) I’d have liked the sleeves to have been more in line with the rest. I missed fixing a couple filter-related errors with the light and shadow on the face. While the brick wall works with the picture, I don’t like that I took such an overt shortcut to put it in there, but at the same time, it’s far better than a blank white background with this piece.

I’ve given them consent to utilize the image in any capacity, so long as it’s for the purpose of promoting Breast Cancer Awareness (this includes promotion of the blog and Twitter themes, as they were created for the same purpose). As such, they’re using it on a T-shirt, all the profits of which will go toward the cause.

For those interested, or simply curious, you can order it here, courtesy of the girls who founded Boobie Wednesday.

All proceeds go toward National Breast Cancer Foundation (it’s my understanding that there are other options for printing, for those who may wish a v-neck style shirt instead).

As a bonus, I’m posting the linework and giving permission for anyone to color said line work. Feel free to email me the colored pictures, I’d love to see what others do with it, and will post a compilation of them at a later date.

Thanks for reading. I hope this was informative.

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Thoughts & Insight (Part 1): A Glimpse Behind The Curtain

December 4th, 2009

(This is the first in an open-ended, ongoing series of posts I’ll be doing where I where I delve into personal introspection, philosophy, theory, and such. Oooooo… FANCY. Yes, this means I will likely ramble and tangent with some regularity.)

For those of you unfamiliar with my artistic background, I’m still relatively new to the digital medium. No formal training in it, nor any formal training for traditional art aside from 2 art classes between the age of 15 and 17 (one of which I failed the first time around due to wanting to work on my own projects, actually). I’ve found a handful of video tutorials online that have been useful, but for the most part it’s strictly been me just trying to figure out things on my own. For most of 2007 I almost used Painter exclusively.  If you saw the work that I was doing in early ’07, or even in the middle of last year, you’d see substantial difference and visible improvement. For that matter, there’s a visible improvement in the work that I’ve done just in the last 6 months. It is, as it says, a process. ;)

My linework itself, when drawing something initally, is often very sketchy. Always has been. I think that, in my recent digital experimentation/learning, I’ve not been as focused with needing to clean up the linework. I will say this: going digital, for me, was very much learning a new medium from scratch.

Some of you will be familiar with a number, if not all, of the pieces of artwork that follow.

I’m going to being with some speedpaintings from early ’07 when I was first trying to find my way around the digital medium (all in Painter).


(Click for full-size.)

Now a couple of the first finished pieces I did a few months later, that were still solely in Painter.

Now, the last batch of exclusively Painter finished work that I did was in mid ’07. Here are 3 sample pieces from a Luchador project I did for some friends at that point:

I think the problem is that I’ve got two personal styles vying for the same production space in my head right now, and I’ve been trying to find a proper fusion for them. What actually put me into this rapidly evolving/changing learning overdrive was the Disco The Boy Detective piece I did here. I was working on ideas for Hyper, and when a one-off of Disco came up, The Muse shoved me in the passenger seat, and took over. 4 hours later I was staring at something very outside of my artistic comfort zone.

It wasn’t until I started participating in the Remake/Remodels on here earlier this year that I started to truly get a grasp on the tools at hand. Before that, I had been in the midst of a several month artist’s block. This piece was an absolute epiphany for me– causing something to click and jump-started things inside me (no, it was not a chestburster). Mind you, were it for an actual paid piece, I wouldn’t be comfortable with calling it “finished” at that point, but for 4 hours, I was thrilled with it. So I started doing other things outside of my comfort zone. At that point, I was doing my linework and initial colors in Painter, then porting it back and forth between Painter and Photoshop for layer filtering and such. My skillset and my style(s) were improving, evolving rapidly as I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone. I’m still very much in the midst of the early part of that, and as such, my style is wildly in flux. Every piece is trial and error, a learning experience if we actually choose to learn from it.

My “inking” is currently in flux as well, as I’ve not found a program that suits my liking for it yet. The linework in ArtRage is done with the regular brush at minimum size. I have yet to find a brush in PS that I can ink with that doesn’t look like it has pixel bleed issues. Painter probably had the closest thing I wanted, but it had the potential for getting a bit on the inconsistent side. While I’ve got a copy of Manga Studio EX, I have a love/hate relationship with it right now, as it’s not as readily accessible/intuitive for a beginning user.

I’ll go into my first foray of utilizing photograpic aspects in piece in another post, sometime in the next week.

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Daily With Process Tutorial

December 4th, 2009

Recently I decided that I needed to do at least some minor daily art project for myself for the sake of my sanity. Something that’s completely independent of any work or project endeavors. After some of the conversation and feedback I’ve gotten in a thread elsewhere over the last few days, I decided that I would start today, doing something raw, with complete disclosure of the process. Here it is, staight and to the point, so that anyone can follow it step-by-step with a piece of theirs, if they choose. The changes are subtle in the latter 6 steps– I may swap the images out with larger, clickable, linked-image versions in the next day or so.

I started off in ArtRage on a 4"x6" 200ppi canvas:

1) 10min Grayscale speedpainting on first layer (not background). This was a mix of the roller, brush, and palette knife tools.
2) Duplicated original layer. Dropped original layer to 40% opacity. Turned duplicate into overlay layer.
3) Created layer under first layer to establish color underpainting, just roller and palette knife. Created layer on top of other layers to establish minor linework with brush.

Then I ported the painting to Photoshop.

4) Duplicated color underpainting layer (still below everything else). Ran it through the watercolor filter, shifted it to a multiply layer, and dropped it to 14% opacity.
5) Selected the whole image, copied it merged, and pasted it on top. Filtered with poster edges, and changed layer opacity to 42%.
6) Pasted same previously selected layer on top. Filtered it with paint daubs, changed layer opacity to 25%.

7) Pasted again. Filtered it with dark strokes, desaturated it, shifted to overlay layer, and dropped opacity to 20%. Erased selectively to start bringing more pop to the image.
8) Pasted again. Filtered it with accented edges. Dropped opacity to 46% Erased much more of the layer, selective, just leaving certain areas that I wanted highlighted.
9) Pasted again. Shifted to multiply layer at 46%. A bit more selective erasing to accentuate the depth.

Finish version:

(Click image for full size.)

Just under 2.5 hours, if that. 12 layers, counting the blank background and the signature layer.

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Art Process: DDH Issue 1

December 4th, 2009

Someone asked for this on Whitechapel recently, so I thought it would be good to post here as well.

For those that haven’t seen the initial DDH post, you can find it here. Direct links to the full-sized final images for the Ghoul and Troll are directly embedded in their respective headers.

All of the pieces in that batch were done on two sets of heavy time-constrained deadlines. They were also all done gratis. The first deadline was on a day that I had to leave for a convention, and as such, the completed versions of the 4 pieces I finished were rushed, and I wasn’t happy with them. Especially the initial versions of the first 2 pieces in that post.

The Drone

I’m going to tackle the drone piece first, as that was an odd circumstance. I was given the description, and a reference picture provided by the author of that particular article, stating that was what it should look like. The drone wasn’t gotten to the first time around, as I was pushed for time and they had said default image. However, when I found out that the publication had been pushed back, due to various technical difficulties, that was what I tackled first. I took the original image the gave me, blew it up, flipped it, and distorted it in Photoshop (henceforth referenced as ‘PS’). Then, I moved it to ArtRage (henceforth referenced as ‘AR’), and started a paintover of it, like one would do with a matte painting. I created areas/parts, removed areas/parts, and worked on distancing it from the appearance provided by the initial image, while still keeping the basic shape and functionality qualities. One of the things I love about using AR is that you can imply complexity and detail very quickly just with a few bits of contrasting color and knowing how to make the palette knife tool work for you. After that was done, I drew in some quick line details, saved it, and ported it back to PS. At this point, I started playing with layers and filters, pulling in a couple of photo textures/overlays in the process, as well as some photo-manip to create both the turbine caps and the open air “turbine” in the middle. One more port into AR to create the sensory array, minigun, and their mutual cover plate. Then, a final run through in PS, texturing those items, filtering, layer alteration, and such.

I’ll make sure I had more time with the next one, and render it up from scratch between PS, AR, Google Sketchup, and/or Alchemy. Maybe Manga Studio if I get more comfortable with it. It would still get finished out in PS though. Not mangle the perspective. Oh, I almost forgot– I would have done the removing and modification of areas/parts in PS instead of AR, as it would have been much cleaner.

The Ghoul

Before and after versions:

The one on the left was the initial version I did. While I liked it, I wanted to overhaul both the background (which was a 75% photo-manip shortcut that I took due to the time constraint) and the ghoul figure itself.

In the case of the background, I went back to the layer with the base B&W photo, and started working it over from scratch. Ported it into AR for creating a subtly textured color underpainting, then ported back to PS. I removed some areas, modified others, and then started playing with a mix of varied layers, filters, and opacities. Then I took the layer that I created the background shadow and lighting in from the initial version, and reworked it a bit as well, helping push/pull certain aspects of the background. At this point, while still founded in the manipulation of said photo, it was at a point where I was more satisfied with it.

In the case of the ghoul itself, I wanted to flesh it out, give it depth. So, first I ported the image back to AR to focus on it, specifically the color and painted texture under the linework. Then I started playing with varied opacity overlay and multiply layers to pull out more depth. Added more detail to the face. Then I ported it back to PS, and started doing more filtered layer work at varied opacities. In addition to some minor skin texture that I pulled from random photos, I also brought in some very low opacity overlays, distorted and warped for individual parts of it’s anatomy, to bring the depth out more. Finally, I integrated the lighting and shadowing on the figure via a few different means.

(wherein I pause for a moment to tell people reading this that I’m totally distracted by the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the house’s heating vents… *drool*)

The Troll

Before and after versions:

I actually had a WIP (work-in-progress) image of this saved, so I thought I’d include that as well on the left, with the initial version in the middle. Like the other pieces, I wanted to overhaul this one as well.

The background is relatively bland, and like the rest of the image backgrounds in that batch, I took a shortcut for the time constraints. In this case, I rendered a quick under-layer of color in AR, and did a mix of altered photo textures, overlays and layer filtration at varied opacities above it. Aside from determining lighting, it was of menial importance compared to the troll, so I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it.

As for the troll itself… The WIP image (left picture) is strictly AR. At that point, I had done the initial sketchwork, and created a relatively basic underlayer of color to go with it. After that, I built on things a bit, giving it a little more depth while fleshing it out with other colors and paint textures in AR. These are still mostly evident in the first version of the piece (middle picture), where I’d imported it to PS for minor filtration and layer work. Upon revising, I took it back into AR and started detailing out the colors a bit more. I did more of the whole photo texture/overlay, filtration, layer opacitiy thing. I changed some aspects of the clothing. Then I really cleaned the clothing up, adding some details, mixed from photo-snippet overlays, painted details, and custom brush textures.

Therein gives a detailed version of the creation process of those images. These processes apply to the other two images in the batch as well.

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