Drawing Madness!

Doodles and other shit

2012-01-31T22:49:00.000-05:00

I've finished my Levi Challenge over at ArtOrder! I really enjoyed this one, gave me a chance to really push some color knowledge I've picked up.

I've also started on the next ArtOrder challenge, which you can make out in some of the doodles above...

Sketches and sketches

2012-01-22T13:05:00.001-05:00

More graphite scrawlings and painter mud...currently working on the ArtOrder Levi Challenge, you can see the other submissions here: https://artorder.wipnation.com/index.jsp

New year post!

2012-01-08T15:38:00.000-05:00

Hey hey, first post of the new year! Not much to show at the moment, some sketchbook pages and an illustration I'm working on for a challenge over at ArtOrder.

More Life Drawing...

2011-12-17T15:15:00.000-05:00

2nd batch of cherry-picked sketches...

Life drawing scribbles

2011-12-12T22:06:00.005-05:00

A break from the usual norm, some life drawing stuff from the past couple of months.

John Carter of Mars

2011-11-27T20:13:00.004-05:00

*click the picture for a BIG version.*
And it's done. I'm fairly happy with how it came out, with the exception of John Carter - no matter what I tried, I couldn't find a pose that seemed like a clear cut solution. I think next time I come across a problem like that I'll find the solution, it's just this time it eluded me.

Done mostly in Painter, with some Photoshop tweaks.

Where my time has been going lately...

2011-11-20T00:01:00.003-05:00

This, pretty much. I'll be posting the final a little after Thanksgiving, and hopefully some life drawing stuff before that.

Lost in the Woods...

2011-10-29T15:08:00.003-04:00

Here's an illustration I just finished earlier this week. Ancient hunters always had to contend with traipsing into some lesser deity's forest, accidentally killing their sacred animals...

Done in photoshop and Painter. If you want to see the Step by Step of it, then head on over to Deviantart, where I've posted it up. Here, I'll even provide a handy dandy link for you!

"Lost In The Woods Step By Step" - Deviantart

Sculpts and Doodles

2011-10-09T13:26:00.005-04:00

It's like a bizarre art version of Snakes and Ladders! Just a bit of a sketchdump and a recent zbrush sculpt. The scales weren't hard to do, but were a bit time consuming. I'm still trying to find a way to put out a nice render of my zbrush stuff, since all I'm using right now is Zbrush's built-in renderer.

The Usual.

2011-09-26T20:38:00.001-04:00

Lizards, monsters, and studies from life.

Heads and other things.

2011-09-18T17:45:00.003-04:00

Here's a set of head studies that I did in an attempt to push my sense of color, along with some new sketchbook pages!

Finally sat down to scan stuff in...

2011-09-10T15:47:00.003-04:00

Got a moment of time finally from all the stuff that went on in the month of August to upload my backlog of sketches. Enjoy!

Quickpaint

2011-08-02T21:49:00.003-04:00

Currently between hopping from one wedding to another, so no time to really scan and upload anything...instead, here's a quick environment paintup I did during lunch today. Done in Painter.

More Analog Sketchbooks

2011-07-15T23:30:00.003-04:00

This time of cars, tiny aboriginals, and Game of Thrones stuff.

What Kind of Hippotamus?

2011-07-09T15:31:00.001-04:00

Gothapotamus, that's what.

Analog Sketchbooks!

2011-07-09T13:42:00.004-04:00

Some pages out of the regular sketchbook...also, I realized afterwords that the Beatles song is "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"...NOT Buffalo Bill. Kinda puts a whole new awkward spin on it.

Dragon Lair - Final

2011-06-30T21:03:00.003-04:00

So! Here is the final of the Dragon Lair.

I had a few false starts with this, and after trying to start it from scratch I ended up just upscaling the color comp and working over that. It was my first time attempting that method, and it took a bit of elbow grease to get it to a polish I was satisfied with, but in the end it proved invaluable - especially with all the little color subtleties I got in the color comp. No need to replicate them!

Now that the environment is out the way, it's time to move onto the Dragon itself.

Dragon Lair - Value Study and Color Comp

2011-06-28T20:36:00.004-04:00

I went with the last thumbnail originally for my final piece, but I quickly realized it was a poor composition and didn't show off much of the scene. So I went back to my thumbnails, and picked this out as my favorite. After doing a little bit of clean-up and expansion, it was ready to figure out values and colors.

I do these steps separate - when it comes to stuff like I currently figure out my values first, then apply washes of color over it to figure out my palette. To achieve the color without ruining my values too much, I used a combination of multiply, overlay, hard light, color dodge, and normal layers.

I should point out for the color comp I didn't keep multiple layers - I usually stuck to three layers - one that was the main layer, another that was the lineart, and finally my "temporary" layer, where I would make changes to the comp before committing it to the main layer.

It was a lot of trial and error to achieve the look I wanted, and once I had it, it was time to move onto the final.

Dragon Lair - thumbnail workups

2011-06-26T14:06:00.004-04:00

So in the next part of the concept series I'm doing, I wanted to develop the lair of the dragon. For the planned storyboard sequence, this was where all the action was going to take place, so I decided on developing the environment location as a key painting to establish the look of the place, as well as a 3/4 top-down view to show off the larger area that everything might take place in.

I started off with a series of thumbnails. I wanted the dragon to live in a den, so I had at least some basic premise to work off of. There were a few trash sketches I did that were fairly uninspired and just a means for me to get a better visual idea going. Eventually I hit on the idea of the "cave mouth" idea and ran with that. I did a few different explorations of the idea until I settled on what I labeled as Number 6 in the lineup. I originally went with the last one, but after I started to hammer out the value study for it, it became quickly apparent that it was a boring take on it, and the composition wasn't very good.

From here, I went onto a value study and a color comp, which I'll cover in another post.

Painter 12 speedpaints

2011-06-18T11:53:00.003-04:00

These are from when I had the painter 12 trial still running - I decided to give the new watercolor brushes a try, along with some adjusted digital watercolor brushes that act like gouache (Because the gouache brushes in painter are so horrific and terrible that I can't fathom ANY use for them, ever.)

I still haven't found much of a need for painter yet - I really want to incorporate it into my workflow, since I adore the blending capabilities it has with brushes, but to switch over to an entire program just for that doesn't seem worth it. So for the time being, I'm seeing if I can get a similar effect with photoshop.

Hunter Girl Final

2011-06-16T21:05:00.003-04:00

As promised, here's the final of the turnaround. It's been done for some time now, but as I've mentioned earlier, I'm trying to play catch up with the various outlets I update on...unfortunately my own blog is one where I'm behind a few posts of art.

Up next: The intial design work for the environment! I'm actually quite excited for it, what I have so far looks and feels good to me.

Hunter Girl Concepts

2011-06-09T20:51:00.005-04:00

This batch of rough ideas are from a set of concepts I'm developing for portfolio purposes. The basic story is that a girl from a local clan has decided to take it upon herself to hunt and kill the indigenous dragon that inhabits the area. So ultimately, the portfolio will show the girl and her gear, the environment in which the little story takes place (which for the intents of the portfolio is the lair of the beast and the small surrounding area,) and the dragon itself.

So, to start with, these are rough explorations I had for the girl. I eventually settled on the turnaround below, and if you frequent the CA.org sketchbooks, you would have seen the finished file already. I wanted to make her young, maybe 10-12 in age - right on the cusp of adolescence.

Although at the moment I just finished the turnaround, I'm also aiming to do detail close-ups of the weapons, as well as flesh out that action pose of her.

Bringing you up to speed...

2011-05-21T10:02:00.004-04:00

All of my internet sketchbooks (including this blog!) Are seriously out of whack in terms of pieces being updated...so here's a big old art dump to try and get everything back on the same page.

Last Digital Painting assignment

2011-04-29T22:33:00.003-04:00

Above is the last painting assignment we received in class before we assembled portfolios - design an environment. I really enjoyed doing environments - not something that I expected to like. So I think I'll explore more of those in the future.

In the meantime, expect some more figure studies...

Week 6 - Creature! Squaawrk!

2011-04-18T22:19:00.003-04:00

Here's week 6 of the digital painting class - design a creature using photo textures. Unfortunately, I think I ended up painting over most of my textures! I'm still fairly happy with the end result though, and I DID learn a few new things from it, so it's still a success in my mind.

Week 5 of digital painting - Photo textures. Blegh.

2011-04-08T23:54:00.003-04:00

Last week's assignment was designing a robot and painting it using photo textures. For some reason, early on I got it in my head I wanted to do a construction robot. So, the Caterpillar Inc. Heavy-Lift Bot was created.

I've never been a big fan of using photo textures, and this assignment kind of reinforced it for me (though not nearly as much as this week's assignment.) I got lucky with my design being geometric, since it was mostly a matter of laying the texture into perspective with the Distort option and doing a few paint overs, but for the most part it seems like a messy process to me and more work than needed to get it polished.

In the end though I was happy with the result, though Erik was awesome enough to point out some improvements I could have made to it. Once this class is through I'm planning to go back and tweak it with those improvements in mind.

Imagined Studies

2011-03-27T14:09:00.005-04:00

I completely forgot about posting these here - these have been posted before on CA.org.

Above is a collection of studies I have been doing from the imagination - I've wanted to push my ability to try and draw these things from out of my head on the knowledge that I'm familiar with from doing life drawing and studying the forms in day to day observations and photos.

I've been approaching it systematically, taking each major portion of the human body and isolating it to some degree, before I bring it back into the fold of the whole human figure. I'm right now about to start arms, followed by head and shoulders. Most likely after I'm done with these I'll do another round of them, but this time from life.

Week 2 of Digital Painting - Environments!

2011-03-19T11:21:00.004-04:00

This is the second assignment from the digital painting class. We were given the task of designing either an environment or character, and paint it using the lasso and pen tool almost exclusively. The goals were to make it simple and graphic.

This was a fun assignment for me - not only was it way out of my comfort zone (Both content and style-wise), but at the end of it I had a blast! And I learned quite a few new tricks regarding masks...

Zbrush noodles and movie studies

2011-03-08T21:43:00.005-05:00

I've started to get back into Zbrush after a long long hiatus from it. Surprisingly, I just needed to get quickly reacquainted with how to make a basic bust with zspheres or a polymesh sphere. The rest of it came back naturally. So now every few evenings I've done a quick sketch in zbrush (by quick, I mean somewhere around 1-3 hours.) No preliminary doodle, I just make a standard bust shape with zspheres and try to make some interesting shapes.

I'm also taking a digital painting class through CGMW (whose workshops I wholly recommend.) The first assignment was value studies from film stills. I've never done something like this, so the first few I struggled with - place down some values, double-check, see I'm ridiculously off, and readjust. After awhile I became pretty good at recognizing the value relationships, and it certainly taught me a good deal. Why I haven't done these before, I don't have a clue - they seem really invaluable.

More about Reilly's Values

2011-02-27T16:50:00.003-05:00

This has been sitting on my to-do list for a bit, so let's try and finally get this done.

Above is a collection of charts for values in different lighting conditions, plus a Reilly Value scale. On the left are different conditions for Form Lighting (Which is defined by Faragasso as the typical indoor lighting that life drawing and still life models are under,) while on the right are the conditions for Sunlight and Rim Lighting (light that is illuminating a figure from the behind.) There is also front lighting, but that's one I'm still trying to sort my brain around, so for the time being I've left it out.

These charts have been pretty invaluable in helping me get a jump start on getting proper values down - too often I don't push values enough, and it ends up as a grey, soupy mess when it's done, without any sort of clear focal point. So let's try and dissect one of these charts, yeah?

They're actually pretty easy to decode - there's a light side column, and a shadow side column. On each column, you have a base value that that translates over to what the value may appear as in either the light, or shadow. For example, say your object is a value of 5 (that's middle of the middle of the middly grey, pretty much), It will appear as a value of 7 in the light, and a 2 in the shadow. If you're not quite grasping it, look at the chart again reread this paragraph - it'll grab you eventually.

Here's an example of two imaginative still lifes made using these value systems. The top uses the Sunlight chart, while the bottom is the Form Light chart. Can you guess what the base values are of the objects based off the light and dark values listed?

This whole system actually becomes really easy to understand once you try it out a few times. And like all formulas, it shouldn't be the end-all, but for someone that has trouble pushing their values, it's a valuable stepping stone to see accurate values and be more confident in their value choices.

Here's another example, a before/after of three figures. I first chose base values for the different parts, then applied values according to the Form Light chart. As you can see, it yielded some pretty fast and decent results. You still need to understand how light and shadows work, though, otherwise you'll be placing random shadow shapes everywhere without thought given to form, cast shadows, etc.

This is only the surface of this whole system. There's more complicated variables that take away the initial simplicity of it, and that's just without adding color (once that's added in, it becomes inevitabley more complex...something I have yet to figure out all the way.) For the start though, the use of this chart and value scale is something that should be taken and used with gusto.

(If you'd like to learn more about Frank Reilly's methods, I can't recommend John Ennis' blog "The Reilly Papers" enough. You can find a link for it in the sidebar, or in my previous post.)

Sketches, values, and Reilly.

2011-01-29T12:06:00.004-05:00

Above are some digital sketchbook pages I done over the past two weeks. It's really nothing more than a photoshop file with an ever increasing amount of layers, but I've been finding it a great way to fuss about with my digital tools, experiment, and learn.

Ever since I graduated from SCAD, I've found myself trying to get a better grasp on painting. It was something that, regretably, I didn't actively pursue: I focused my efforts almost exclusively on improving my line drawing, believing that'd be enough to spring me forward into other avenues (you can guess how that turned out, otherwise I wouldn't be talking about this.)

It's been a forward march of improvement, but the progress can vary from tiny steps to gigantic leaps, depending on how well I absorb and understand it all. Self-learning can come easily to some, for others, you need a lot of learning material and grit to gain anything out of it. Which brings me to Frank Reilly and Jack Faragasso.

I've always been fascinated by Frank Reilly's teachings. His systems and methods are tried and true, and have proven to be a great springboard for artists to get a grasp of the fundamentals and hone their technique, allowing them to experiment and push themselves while relying on a solid bedrock of teaching. Unfortunately, for someone who is revered by a lot of modern day illustrators, concept artists, and painters, there's not really a lot of his teaching information available. Most of it is out of print, or if it is in print, it's usually glossed over and not covered extensively (I think this might be in part because the author's either don't know enough about Reilly's methods, or they have it so ingrained in them that a lot of things they know instinctively are things they need to cover.)

There have been some gems in the dirt though, with Fred Fixler's amazing site and the recent addition of John Ennis' "The Reilly Papers" to the internet (I highly recommend John Ennis' site - they actually are the lecture notes from Reilly himself, and he does try to elaborate on some points that seem murky in the lecture notes. Plus he's just a great painter to boot.)

So how does Jack Faragasso figure into all this? He was a student of Frank Reilly, and wrote two books that covered Reilly's methods extensively: The Complete Guide to Painting the Human Figure, and the Complete Guide to Drawing the Human Figure. Unfortunately, both have been out of print for some time. Fortunately (for me, at least,) I was able to get pdf copies of them recently, and have been poring over them like mad.

Although the figure drawing one so far is okay (I STILL can't quite figure out how that whole system of figure construction works, and I probably never will,) Faragasso's painting book is a real eye-opener. I had recently finished reading the chapters about values and shadows, which ended up with my digesting that information into one of the sketchbook pages above (value study has been an extremely weak point for me, and this was sort of solid footing I needed.)

It's a shame a book like this doesn't exist in print anymore, since I really do think it'd be a boon to anyone that is trying to learn painting on their own. Hopefully though, I'll try and disseminate anything I've learned from it in any future posts.

Awake from the Winter, new resolutions.

2011-01-22T16:04:00.004-05:00

Above is a piece I submitted to the Dungeon Delve challenge that went on a month back over at Artorder. It's not my most favorite piece (in fact, to be truthful, there's a lot that bugs me in terms of the painting part even though I rather like the drawing) but I was happy enough with it at the time. I think I might revisit it and fix it up soon.

I noticed that the last two times winter rolled around I tend to drop off the face of the Earth because of all the holidays getting mashed together; and I find myself trying to get back into posting regularly a little difficult (you should see how I am on other sites though...I guess you could say I do not put myself out there well enough.)

In anycase, one of my resolutions this year was to make an effort to post at least once a week - if I do well enough with that, I think I'll try and double it. Here's a few other resolutions I've made for myself this year (All art-related, surprise surprise):

-Have six illustrations done by June
-Have a basic concept art portfolio ready by June
-Get a better grasp of oil painting (a medium I'm finding myself liking more and more!)
-Continue to work on watercolors and digital mediums

I'm also kicking off this year by signing myself up for a bunch of workshops and a digital painting class over at CGMW (they have become one of my favorite sites so far for this stuff - I loved the last round of workshops.)

All in all, a strong start to what will hopefully be a strong year.

Horned Grouseback

2010-11-28T11:23:00.004-05:00

This little thing was something I doodled in the corner of a random piece of paper, and the idea of an alien anteater took hold and got it done.

The whole drawing was done in Photoshop and Painter; Photoshop for the lineart and shading, Painter for the bulk of the rendering.

For those curious about the process, here are a few notes about it -

-Drew the lineart in with something close to 80-90% grey. Once it was done, I adjusted the hue/saturation on it to make it a dark red-orange color, which blends better than if it was just the grey line (got this little tidbit of information from watching a Carlo Arellano workshop.)

-In Painter, I didn't do a monochromatic underpainting (though on reflection I probably should.) Instead, I took the New Simple Watercolor brush and roughly laid in my colors that way (I also tried to place value in at the same time, and it didn't work out - more on that later.)

-From there, I took a new layer and started to render it out bit by bit. The bulk of this work was done with the oil round and the chunky oil pastel brush

-After I finished rendering, I realized that the drawing was overall very flat. So I took it into photoshop, and created a photofilter layer (under the same tab as levels, curves, hue/saturation, etc.) I gave it a warm overlay, and using a layer mask started to carve into the drawing, creating the shadows.

In the end I had to resort to cel-shading to take it away from looking flat - not my original intent, but it suites it fine.

Building a Pochade Box, Part 4

2010-11-24T20:31:00.007-05:00

Now it’s time to bring this project to a close and add all the hardware.

First, we need to attach the tee nut. The tee nut is what we'll be using to attach the pochade box to any standard camera tripod. I took a spare piece of wood I cut out, and after finding the center of it, drilled a hole that was just a bit bigger than a 1/4" in diameter. I then took my rubber mallet, and started to bang the tee nut down into the hole (For some reason, the nut was extremely difficult to get in there. But a tight fit will ensure it stays.)

Once you find the center of the bottom box, attach your tee nut piece with some wood glue and once it's dry you can continue assembling the rest of the box.

The next thing to do is to reinforce the boxes – you’ll put an L-bracket in each corner of both boxes, to reinforce the sides, as well as attach a few to the bottom and sides of the bottom box. Since the plywood can splinter easily and the screws I used were made some of ludicrously soft metal, I’d advise to pre-drill the holes a bit.

From there, I attached the hinges. My hinges are placed oddly because I thought two would suffice, when in fact I need a third to steady the open/close action. Again, pre-drill your holes.

(It should be noted that it’s quite likely that the screws may poke out on the other end by just a smidgen. If this happens, take a flat file and file them down so you don’t get snagged by them.)

Now it’s time to install the turnbuckles. Without these, the box would just flop open, and I wouldn’t be able to adjust the angle of the top half.

The construction is fairly simple. We’re going to drill ¼” holes about 2 ¼” in from the edge of the box on either side of both halves. Refer to the pictures to get a general idea of where this is going.

Once we’ve done that, it’s time to install the bolts, which the turnbuckles will hang off of. Since space is at a premium on the side, the bolts will face outwards. It’ll be a tight fit, so some elbow grease will be required, but you’ll soon have them in.

If you notice in the picture, the turnbuckles can be removed by simply unscrewing the nut off the bolt and slipping the turnbuckle off. To adjust the box, you don’t even need to do that – twisting the middle part of the turnbuckle left or right will lengthen or shorten it, affecting the angle of your box.

And with that, the construction is complete! I still haven’t found a suitable clasp to hold the two halves together while traveling, so at the moment I’m using an old woven belt.

For the trays, I’m using an old breathmint tin with a binder clip to hold it to the side. It won’t hold my brushes at the moment, but it’s the perfect size to hold my water cups.

Building a Pochade Box, Part 3

2010-11-14T12:04:00.009-05:00

(Apologies for this going up later than I wanted. Wrapping up Border Crossings has taken up a bit of time lately, and this just kept being pushed to the side.)

In part 2 of this series, I went over gathering supplies and drawing out the plans. Now it’s time to cut and build those boxes!

There were two main goals I was after while cutting out the pieces: Straight cuts, and clean cuts. I thought at first I could use a hacksaw to get through them, but it was a lot of work with very little return.

Enter the jigsaw! Using a jigsaw, I was able to cut up the pieces quickly. A few words of caution when using the jigsaw to cut out your pieces:

-Always wear protective goggles (this should be extremely obvious.)

-Be sure to secure your wood to a worktable or whatever it is you’ll be cutting over. I used a stack of weighted milkcrates and clamps to secure the plywood while I was cutting.

-Don’t rush through your cuts! This can lead to rough and poor cuts, and you’ll end up with pieces you can’t use (as I found out a few times.) Take your time, and make sure you’re cutting along your measurements.

In the end, you’ll have all your pieces cut out and hopefully straight, like above. If you need to, sand the sides a bit to get rid of splinters.

Now, at the time I wasn’t able to seal my box with shellac or what-have-you. I would recommend it though, as it’ll help protect your box against the elements. Ideally, you would do this after you pre-drilled the holes for the screws, so you would probably have to test fit your box first, then remove all the hardware, seal the wood, then reassemble once dry.

Since I didn’t do this step though, I can’t provide much beyond that, so we’ll move on to the actual construction of the box.

The sides of the box are not going to be sitting on the bottom of the box – instead, we’ll be putting them on the edge of the box.

Also, the approach we’re taking to assemble the sides involves each side overlapping the previous one. Hopefully the diagram explains this better than words. Believe me when I say this is a stronger design than having two sides nestled between two other sides.

To start, I decided to assemble each side one at a time. We’ll need the brad nails and wood glue for this. Apply a layer (not too thick!) of wood glue to the edge of the box bottom, then butt the side of the box side up against it. You’ll have to hold it for a few minutes, and if you have a clamp system that can do this, great, you’ll need one less person down the road.

After about 2-3 minutes, the glue will have dried enough that you can hammer in the brad nails to firmly secure it the bottom and the side together. You’ll probably need another person to hold the pieces together while you hammer them, though. I used two brads for to attach each side to the bottom, and one to two brads to secure the sides to each other.

Be sure to not do this part hastily! The wood is thin enough that if you aren’t careful about the direction the brad nail is going in, you’ll easily end up splitting the wood or finding it sticking out one of the sides. So BE CAREFUL.

Once you have one side done, congratulations! You’ve pretty much figured out how to do the remainder of the two box halves. Just repeat you’re steps for the remaining sides.

After that, you’ll have two box halves assembled! In the final post, we’ll go over attaching all the hardware and assembling your box for outdoor painting.

Building a Pochade Box, Part 2

2010-10-26T12:00:00.004-04:00

My woodworking skills are crap, and my measuring skills are even crappier (hooray for poor math skills!) So I employed my girlfriend to help figure out the separate sizes and parts. The wood we got from Michaels was 1/4” thick, 12” x 24” birch plywood, so the plans were made to fit as many pieces as possible on as few boards as we can. In the end, 3 pieces were used.

Above are the plans for the box. You’ll notice some pieces marked trays; these were to eventually be trays I can clip to the side to hold water cans, tubes of paint, and possible brushes when not in use. I unfortunately didn’t get them done in time for the trip, but I did find a decent solution in time, which I’ll cover later. These aren't scaled up to 100% - I used the plans just as reference for drawing the lines on the wood. Each piece should butt up against another one to converse wood (in the event you muck up something and come out with a bad piece, like I did a few times.)

With wood and plans ready, all that was left was the hardware. I got everything from Home Depot, so hopefully finding these won’t be too hard for anyone else. Here’s a rundown of the supplies:

-3 pieces of Birch Plywood, 12” x 24”, quarter inch thick.

-Packet of small craft hinges (they’re brass colored, and are the sort of hinges that would go onto a jewelry box.

-4 packets of L-Shaped “Decorative Brackets”, to reinforce and strengthen the box.

- Bag of #10-24 x ¾” machine screws (Should contain both the screws and nuts)

- Bag of ¼” – 20 x 5/16” Tee Nuts (to attach the tripod to the box.)

- Box of ¾” brad nails (to reinforce the box while the glue dries.)

- Elmer’s Wood glue

- 2 3/16” x 5-1/2” Turnbuckle Eye/Hook (For holding the box open)

- Jigsaw or something else that can cut quickly and accurately

- Drill

- If possible, a Dremel tool with the small drill bits, or an equivalent type of tool (for pre-drilling screw holes.)

- Sandpaper

- A few hours of time

As I’m going over the construction, I’ll explain some of these supplies in more detail when we get around to using them.

In the next post, I’ll go over cutting and putting the two halves of the boxes together.

Building a Pochade Box, Part 1

2010-10-23T12:49:00.004-04:00

There it is. My homemade pochade box. It’s probably the ugliest box in existence (not to mention slightly wonky, as my woodworking skills are lacking,) but it’s a terrific solution for someone that can’t or won’t* shell out the big bucks for a professional pochade box. I’m still trying to figure out the total cost (on account of a few mistakes and jigsaw that needed to be purchased,) but I think for the materials the cost rests somewhere between $20 to $30.

*(I should note that I DO eventually plan to get one of those wonderfully handcrafted pochade boxes…it’s just not in my budget at the time, unfortunately.)

For the unfamiliar, a pochade box is a portable outdoor painting kit - developed as a convenient way to carry supplies out into the field to perform plein air painting (French for “in the plain air”.) There’s a wide variety of pochade boxes in use today that fulfill different needs of an artist. It’d take a whole post to go into this, but fortunately Charlie Parker of the blog “Lines and Colors” covered this topic before when he was purchasing a pochade box. For the curious, here’s a link to the exact article: Lines and Colors' post about Pochade Boxes.

I would also recommend that if you haven’t seen his blog yet, I heartily recommend it – it’s easily in the top ten of art blogs on the internet.

So what made me decide to build a pochade box and try my hand at field painting? Vacation.

I went up to the Smokey Mountains this past week, and after looking at some photos of the area, I decided that it’d be a perfect place to give field painting a try (as a forewarning, I should mention the results were a bit atrocious, pretty much because of my lack of skill in traditional painting AND landscape painting. But it was a great learning experience!)

My budget wouldn’t allow me to actually get a nice pochade box, but I was able to construct one. In the end I think it’s design is somewhere trapped between an Open M box and an All-In-One (though if it had to be categorized, it’d fall into the latter.) And I decided to go over the construction in the next few blog posts to hopefully help some other people that are curious about how to go about it.

So, onto the first step: Figuring out my goals!

I made a short list of things I wanted out of my box – these were going to help me figure out the design and dimensions of it:

-Light, but sturdy

-Cost affordable (it should not be more expensive than $50, even that would be pushing it.)

-Able to hold a 9 x 12 watercolor block in portrait or landscape orientation

-Able to hold most, if not all, of my painting supplies

-Mounts on a camera tripod without modifying the tripod itself.

On Tuesday, I’ll go over the plans and supplies.

World keeps on turning...with sketches!

2010-10-02T14:48:00.004-04:00

As is often the case, life gets in the way, which can hold up something like blog posting. Fortunately it wasn't anything terrible, just the usual hustle and bustle of things.

Most of this stuff is digital this time around, and in color! There's a few things here and there that are observational paintings (a panel from Batman: Year One and a 10-minute still life study), and a few imaginary things.

Studies...Studies...Studies...

2010-08-31T21:37:00.004-04:00

If you're wondering what's up with the mitten hands... It's based around an idea I heard in a Glenn Vilppu lecture once...to figure out the hand, you need to treat it like any other thing - Simple ---> Complex.

Don't go at it worrying about all the little forms (even as cylinders,) that'll just muck it up and stiffen the gesture. Instead, work up to it with practice.

-A mitten with a thumb,
-A mitten with a forefinger and thumb,
-A cartoon (3 fingered) hand,
-A fully human hand.

By doing it this way, you're realizing the major forms that the hand takes on, and as you move up in complexity, you retain that information.

Whoo...

2010-08-24T20:27:00.005-04:00

This is what happens when your day job gets too busy...you end up neglecting your favorite things! Fortunately things are winding down a little, so I'll be able to post more often.

Expect to see some more color work out of me soon, as I'm taking my first oil painting class this Thursday! Somehow, I slipped my way through art school without ever taking a painting class...and it's been the one thing I've seriously regretted. Now that'll be changing, and I'll get to learn that fine craft for the first time! I'm quite excited.

In the meantime, here are some new sketchbook doodles from the past few weeks.

Blegh...

2010-08-02T21:22:00.004-04:00

Work was busy this past week, which meant not a lot of personal stuff to do...ah well, at least there's still something! It's a random smattering this week of life drawings and concept stuff.

Art Dump

2010-07-18T20:36:00.004-04:00

Another plethora of Sketchbook pages, as well as two little things I'm working on - an illustration involving a troop of angry gorillas, and a build-up of the ogre sketch from before.

More sketches and an illustration!

2010-07-12T21:54:00.004-04:00

Haha, it seems all I ever do now is dump sketch pages then quickly leave in a hurry....

Well, this is more of the same, sorta. Here are more sketchpages and a BC page, but I also left a treat! Below is an illustration I'm working on recently. Ultimately, it'll be finished in watercolor and gouache, but at the moment it's a tight underdrawing. The next thing will be value and color studies, then I just transfer it to watercolor paper and go to town!

Big ol' Artdump.

2010-07-02T23:46:00.005-04:00

Here's a smattering of random stuff from this week - sketchbook pages, and digital study stuff. I still don't quite get digital art...as in, I'm still having trouble disassembling the hows and whys of it to make terrific art with it. I feel like I'm slowly circling the problem, but I haven't nabbed it yet and smothered it with a solution...but I think I might be close. Or really far away. Hard to tell.

Sketches and Paints

2010-06-27T16:34:00.003-04:00

A few watercolor sketches and a few sketchbook pages...

Sketchbook pages!

2010-06-16T21:26:00.004-04:00

Well! A week and a half after Heroes and I decide to update. Heroes Con went very well. Once again, I got to meet Sanford Greene and Guy Davis, both swell guys that I'm a huge fan of, and got to chat them up a bit. Chris and I also met some readers of Border Crossings, snagged a few new people, and I even got lucky with a Mark Chiarello portfolio review (the level of excitement I had for that was immeasurable.) In anycase, I'm now backed and pumped to keep working on Border Crossings, drum up some more freelance, and keep churning out art. Speaking of, here's some new sketchbook pages.

Painter Portrait

2010-06-02T00:01:00.002-04:00

Another little paint study...like last time, it was done in Painter, and I focused on developing the light forms out of the dark. If there's three things I can take away from all this new stuff I've learned about painting (and still applying!) it would be these three things:

1) If you think your values are pushed enough, push them some more. Chances are you're lingering too much in the halftone (middle value), which is why your picture looks muddy. (I'm still struggling with one.

2) Don't paint objects. Paint shapes. (This rule alone has gone a long way for me in making me aware of how to paint stuff. Thank you, Richard Schmid.)

3) Don't paint/draw what you know, paint/draw what you see. This is something that I think a lot of beginners (myself included,) don't realize: If you think you know how to draw an arm, I guarantee you that you're forgetting 70% of the visual information (landmarks, how the form rolls, angles, shadows, etc.) Maybe after years and years of drawing it it'll become committed to memory (and even then you should still double-check once in awhile,) but until then, ALWAYS use reference to build your visual vocabulary. It's funny how often this gets overlooked.

On a side-note, I'll be in Charlotte, NC for Heroes Con this weekend! As usual, I'll be selling sketches and issues of Border Crossings, as well as some watercolor pieces! Stop by table 336 (I'll be across the guys who make the terrific book Owly,) and say hi to me, Chris, and our tablemate Eric!

Another Watercolor for Heroes...

2010-05-30T14:50:00.002-04:00

...plus some sketchbook doodles and a paint study!

The Glassman...

2010-05-21T01:32:00.003-04:00

Or Frabel, as they're really called. It's a creature from Border Crossings (I've done sketches of them before,) done in watercolor and ink. I've been creating some small, 5 X 7 artworks for Heroes Con to sell, and this will be one of them.

Crud...

2010-05-17T22:19:00.003-04:00

It was a crappy week of drawing...everything felt very forced, which meant in the end there weren't as many good little nuggets to harvest. If I can take anything away from this week, it's that bristol paper is NOT a good substitute for extensive watercolors. If you're ever thinking about it to save some money, just do yourself a favor and get some nice watercolor paper. It'll save you some hairs on your head.

More Heads

2010-05-12T19:45:00.002-04:00

Some new pages out of the sketchbook, pretty much all disembodied heads...

Sketchbook dump...

2010-05-02T21:14:00.002-04:00

A new batch of sketches, mostly of disfigured, horrid hands...

More pages from the Sketchbook...

2010-04-24T11:22:00.004-04:00

A few more doodles from the course of the week...Some colored stuff will get added later.

Studies

2010-04-16T23:38:00.003-04:00

Two studies done from still-life objects in photoshop. I've been thinking lately about ways to improve my skills, and what better way than to go back to basics? So here's some relatively simple shapes.

Gestures and Dragons...

2010-04-12T22:05:00.004-04:00

Like any other artist, gestures are an important exercise I keep up with. It's a great way to warm-up and get your mind into the right mode of thought, and it helps you hone your ability to not make your drawings suck or be as stiff as board planks.

Even though doing gestures of everyday events and people (parades, malls, etc.) are a vital thing, for warm-up purposes it doesn't quite work out. There's not many options, to be frank, that can let you replicate the timed sessions a class or life drawing session gives you, beyond using a stopwatch and some self-control.

That is, of course, until I found out about irfanview. I knew about it for sometime, but I didn't know it had a pretty damn extensive slideshow feature. This, coupled with the terrific photos from Character Designs, makes for an great way to get into a warm-up routine (To me, at least, it beats posemaniacs out of the water.)

So to tie this all into some new art to post, here are some gesture sketches I did using this set-up, as well as a little dragon sketch I did the other day (if for no other fact than "How to Train Your Dragon" is still fresh in my mind.)

Sea Monster Studies

2010-03-31T20:49:00.004-04:00

Some doodles out of the old sketchbook of a sea monster...the face was a blend of these two fish I saw on Discovery Channel's "Life" last Sunday...

Post-Megacon!

2010-03-20T22:54:00.003-04:00

Geez, at the rate I'm posting here I'm in the running for longest time between updates...

Well then! Time for some art!
Chris and I last week were at Megacon last weekend (what with it being not more than 30 minutes away from me,) and we had a great deal of fun! It's not as artist friendly as some other conventions (Read: Heroes con,) but like any other one it always ends up being entertaining in one way or another. We had issue 01 of Border Crossings printed and on sale there, and we were able to sell quite a few copies (enough to cover parking, at any rate, so yay!)

There's gonna be some brand-spanking new art up here soon, and to kick it off, here's a warm-up doodle I did one evening before sitting down to ink. It's some sort of lizard fellow, near as I can tell.

Landscape WIPS

2010-02-27T10:56:00.005-05:00

Wow, you go and move and next thing you know there's a month between posts. Apologies for that.

Here are some things that I started randomly making a few afternoons. They more or less started out as some blobs of color without any direction, then as more marks were made I started to refine them up to the point where I could put down some lines to differentiate some stuff. The fun part was that these were all made on an old intuos tablet, which was refreshing after being used to drawing on the cintiq for quite some time.

The purplish/blue one with the big tree balls (I don't really know how else to describe them,) has been taken one step further at the moment, with tighter linework put down ontop of the rough stuff. The ultimate goal will be to have three finished works on my hard drive, so we'll see where they end up!

A new Year...

2010-01-25T18:48:00.004-05:00

Well! It's been a looong time since my last post. This year, the holidays were extremely busy for me, and this has been about the first time in a long while where I felt like I can at least take a minute to breath and catch some of you wandering readers up to date. I think I can be safe to promise that I don't intend to have this long of a lapse again for a long, long while.

Border Crossings, for those of you who don't read it regularly, has kicked into Issue 02 last fall, and has been steadily updating. Not every page has been a winner in my eyes, but overall I think it's shaping up to be a stronger issue than the last one.

Here's one of a few sketches I did of Venetia as prep work for the second issue. There's about a two week gap in the timeline between the events of the first issue and the second, so I felt that by that point Venetia would have tried to get herself into comfier clothing. She still retains part of her wetsuit, but you can also see that she's started to adopt the Island's culture. By the time I started drawing her in the comic, she acquired some sort of dreadlock hairstyle, capped with metal bits.

Here's some other random sketches as well, of various things that had just popped into my head over time.

A quick little BC illo...

2009-11-13T10:50:00.003-05:00

As Chris and I move to update the site and churn out issue 02, we still made plans to make sure our weekly content update continued. This little illustration of an Annelid is one of such updates that we've done when I was unable to update a page (between issues, or previously, when I was moving. Never for anything else!)

I wanted to talk about this piece because it's an example of happy accidents. Originally, it had a lightsource from above illuminating the creature. It was alright, but it felt like the drawing wasn't working to the best of abilities. So I took it out of Painter, moved it into Photoshop, and began playing with some layer modes. After some weird result of difference and/or exclusion, the light source became inversed, giving the drawing a much needed boost.

If you're ever stuck on a piece, (especially a digital one,) sometimes all you need is to change something dramatically on it, whether it be the color scheme, the lighting, etc. Often, happy accidents emerge which push you past the block, and gets you moving again.

And so it begins...

2009-11-09T09:51:00.002-05:00

Today, I sit down and begin thumbnailing the pages for Issue 02 of Border Crossings. This isn't the first itme I read through the script though. I received it a few weeks ago from Chris, and gave it a quick read to get an idea of the story and what I might have to draw. Without spoiling much, there's a lot of great stuff in it, and I think this issue will be much better than our first one (which I'm still proud of.) I've taken a lot of guesswork out of my process over the course of the first issue, so I expect things to go smoothly this time around.

When you read through a script, whether it be for comic books, or in preparation for storyboards, the more times you read through it, the better off you'll be. The biggest benefit you can have is it'll cut down on continuity errors throughout the story. I like to spend about a day reading and re-reading through the script, taking breaks occasionally to read the news or other articles online, look up some reference depending on what the script may call, and of course, draw. I'll start thumbnailing about halfway through the day, and revise it one or two times before I start doing my roughs.

The next couple of posts will be Border Crossings-centric, with some sketches and other goodies from the next issue. Stay tuned!

Toadbat...DONE!

2009-10-29T11:54:00.003-04:00

Here's the finished Toadbat piece. Towards the end of it I began to try different ideas to make it stronger, but at some point I realized I was just pushing pixels together, so I decided it was high time to call it done. In other news, Border Crossings is towards the end of its first issue! Tomorrow will be page 21, then after that will be the last page of issue 01. Chris and I are planning to take a two-week break between issues, but it won't mean we're resting. Instead, we'll be redesigning the site to make it more friendly for first-time readers, while doing a marketing blitz for the webcomic. I'll be taking the time to also work on building up a buffer for issue 02, so I'll have a little more free time for other projects.

Paint Paint Paint...

2009-10-03T14:51:00.004-04:00

Here's an update on the Toadbat, now with color! Right now, the color scheme is being glazed over the grey values. You'll notice that it muddies the colors a bit, but that's fine, as right now this is just to get a general idea of color and lighting. Stay tuned!

Also, here's a little warm-up I did this morning. I was reading through the illustrated edition of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (by David Chauvel and Enrique Fernandez) and I forgot how incredible Fernandez's work is in it. So this is a sort of practice in that thick paint style of his. Not nearly as nice, but it's always good to do stuff you wouldn't normally tackle...

It's a bird, It's a plane, It's a...Toadbat?!

2009-09-29T10:51:00.002-04:00

This is the full image from the last post, with tonal values splashed on there. It's still a work in progress, but at the moment I'm working up a solid value relationship before I start to tackle color. This was a tip I learned from watching one of J.P. Targete's videos from The Gnomon Workshop (quite possibly one of the most helpful videos I've ever seen from them.)

The actual idea for this came about from listening to one of Bobby Chiu's video streams. Somebody suggested he draw "a toad crossed with a bat," and when he decided not to take it, I thought it'd be a waste to let a weird idea like that slip away. So that's how this came about!

It's a bird...it's a plane...

2009-09-24T22:20:00.002-04:00

It's...well...what the heck is it? It's a peek at a little illustration I'm doing...a shiny ha'penny to the one who can guess what it might be.

Painting fun...

2009-09-17T01:14:00.002-04:00

Here's some late night screw-arounds in the painting department...

Market Square

2009-09-10T11:43:00.003-04:00

Here's a teaser for this coming Friday's NEW page of Border Crossings. For anyone that had been following, there was a two week break as I made the move from Atlanta BACK down to Central Florida. But now we're settled in and work has returned to a steady pace.

I'm really happy with how the inks on this page turned out, and you'll get to see not only a confident, inked page, BUT a new attempt at coloring, one that's taking a cue from the lessons learned from Mark Sweeney's blog about ink limits. His little corner of the web is more than helpful: It's a damn goldmine that's free to the public. Ya can't find this stuff in books!

Mark Sweeney's Blog: Link

Silhouette Doodlin'

2009-09-02T20:39:00.003-04:00

Here's some creature doodles that were done as warm-ups recently. Sometimes it's fun to just take a big, fat brush and see where it takes you on the page...Especially when you know you aren't trying to achieve anything beyond letting your mind wander. Done in Alias Sketchbook.

Ligan Square

2009-08-18T22:53:00.003-04:00

Above is from the latest page of Border Crossings, which, if you follow the webcomic at all, you will get to see come Friday, when it's updated. It depicts our first view of The Last Island, where all the land-dwelling races have converged upon (either by choice or by force) as the landmasses have sunk below the ocean. If you notice, the Rhizome is sporting a funky pattern on its camo-sheath, something that was spur of the moment and that I really enjoyed compared to my previous solution for depicting the swirling, psychedelic colors of the sheath.

I wanted to talk about this panel for two reasons. One, because I'm actually quite happy with it as a separate little piece of work, and two, the inking on this is FAR different than what I've done since my process post about inking a few weeks back.

Ever since I did page 9, I've grown unhappy with using rapidographs as my inking solution. I never felt totally happy with it, and often I noticed I moved veeeeerrrryyy slowly when inking. So, since then I started an experiment of inking digitally. Remember the Frog Grazer illustration a few posts back? The reason for that piece existing is because I was testing out a new brush that was to become my standard inking tool for BC. I figured if it was a bust, no one would be the wiser, and if it worked out, hey hey, I have a new thing to practice.

I've noticed lately that I've been inking faster now, mostly because of a boost of confidence (probably because I always know that that ink I'm throwing down isn't permanent.) At some point in the future I'd like to switch over to traditional brush, but while I continue to practice with a real brush, scrawling mishapen characters with the permanence of Higgins Ink, I'll keep going along with this digital solution.

Not Dead Yet...

2009-08-17T23:44:00.003-04:00

...Life's just been busy! I've been gearing up for a move out of the current apartment that's taking place in about a week, so between that, keeping stuff going for Border Crossings, searching for more freelance stuff to take on to earn a little more income, and some personal projects, I've been quite neglectful of all my haunts on the internet. In the meantime though, I thought I'd throw out two things for everyone to see, one as a preview and one as an in-progress shot.
This first one is a color rough done awhile back for an illustration piece I've yet to have time to tackle. As with all things I've been doing lately, it's an exercise in learning new things, and I'm actually quite tempted to do this up completely traditionally. I actually really like the composition and colors for this, and think when it's completed it'll look pretty good as an illo.

Remember this? With whatever free time I've had as of late, I've been working on this bit by bit. I had started to record the process, but quickly after finishing the grayscale stage it seemed to go by the wayside (mostly because running the software AND painter was making everything slow.) In anycase, I'm at a crossroads with this piece -- while I like the idea of it, I'm not sure if the composition (and, by extension, the POV choice) is as savvy as it can be. I think this little bit has been nipping at me the whole time through the piece, since I've restarted it from scratch a few times now, this being the fourth iteration. So I ask the folk of the internet of their opinion, whether it be a suggestion to improve it, a Yea or Nay to trash it and start anew, or otherwise.

Keep tight folks, I'll see if I can squeeze another post in before the move.

Frog Grazer

2009-07-26T14:36:00.003-04:00

I've been playing around with making brushes in photoshop look and act a bit more like real brushes for inking purposes. I made one that I think worked pretty well, so I did a small illustration to try it out.

Later on, I decided to color it, just to bring it all the way to completion. I'm not really sure what this critter's deal is, but he's got a colorful butt.

Colors.

2009-07-23T22:38:00.002-04:00

The next, and near final stage of making a comic page is coloring. If you do a quick search on the internet, you'll find TONS of information and ideas on how to go about it. Like most everything else in life, there's not really a wrong way to go about it. The method I use I actually learned from the DC Guide to Computer Coloring and Lettering, written by Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein. If your linework was done in ink, I'd advise to follow this method, as it seems to work pretty well.

Most tutorials I've seen out on the web tell you to take your linework, duplicate it onto another layer, then set it to multiply. This lets you color underneath the linework without disturbing any of your hard work. That's all well and good, and it has its uses, but for me, I actually prefer to use channels to separate my lineart. I work in CMYK mode for all my comic pages, since I always assume that at some point or another these pages may be in print (this is something that if you ARE actively doing a webcomic or something else you intend to publish that you should take into account.) Working in CMYK let's me do a couple of things: I can separate my lineart onto a whole different channel away from the artwork, check my colors to see if there's too much (if any) black (otherwise known as K) in them, and it cuts down on my layer use (at most, I end up using 4 or 5. Most of the time it's around 2-3.)

So, the first step in all of this is to separate shapes in the lineart in a process known as "flatting." At this time, I'm not worrying about the correct colors. I have two goals here:
1) Cover all the white of the page
2) Make sure all my colors are distinct enough from each other that I can select them with the magic wand later without any problems.

Whenever I do any color fill-ins, I always use the Pencil tool. Why? Because it's aliased, just like my lineart. Why in the heck would I work mostly aliased? Because it actually helps in keeping stuff fairly sharp when you scale down. If it was all done aliased, it can have the potential to become blurrier than you imagined.

This is what the page looks like if I were to close the document and open it back up. Notice there's no white between the colors? This ties into a later step, called "trapping."
Now comes the time where I start to lay in the actual colors that will appear when the comic gets put on the web. I lock the layer that had my selection colors (all those ugly colors we saw earlier,) and start a new layer on top of it. Then, I usually use the rectangle selection tool and throw in large expanses of color to set the main colors of each scene. The top panel's color was blue, while as you can see, the bottom panels were a purple color for the Rhizome's airlock chamber. I'm still using the pencil tool.
Here are all the base colors laid in with the pencil tool. You might notice on the top panel there's some fancy textures going on. Any sort of extra detailing that isn't just blocks of color, I'll do with a brush, since the brush will handle that sort of thing A LOT better than the pencil tool ever could. In some areas you can see I colored while thinking about shadows, but most of that work is saved for the next step.
I create two new layers, one for shadows, and one for any sort of lighting effects (like the top panel.) The shadows are mostly handled with either the Multiply or Darken mode on, but the lighting effects can vary, depending on what's needed. The top panel's light effects were mostly done with the brush in Color Dodge mode, to get that super bright effect.

I should note, during all this, and especially towards the end, you should have color theory in mind. If your light is a cool green-blue, then you can expect your shadows to actually be something like a warm red-violet. There are a ton of places to learn about this sort of thing, and it's really a subject that goes beyond just this one post.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand: I have all my coloring done, and I flatten the image. Remember when I mentioned earlier about "trapping?" Well, I need to make sure my lineart has a deep-rich black, and there will definitely be NO WHITE between the lines. So, I copy my lineart (that was on a separate channel, remember?) back onto the main page with a color of 60C/40M/40Y/100K.

Why that mix? Because straight 100 percent black isn't really black, it looks more like a dark muddy grey. That mix above actually gives a deep, rich black.

Once the lineart is copied, I delete the extra channel, and save it. Now we take it into Illustrator, letter it, then save it as JPEG to the web! Then come Friday, you have a new page of Border Crossings!

Okay, now a few end-class notes: I really recommend picking up the DC Guide to Computer Coloring and Lettering. The other DC books are alright (I feel there's probably better material elsewhere,) but the Coloring guide is a BIBLE. All these steps I glossed over are covered in pretty good detail here, and it's definitely worth your money to have it with you if you do this regularly.

Now then, here are a few links that talk more about coloring and lettering:

Mark Sweeney's Blog: I actually found this about a half a week ago, but it answers a lot of questions like, "Why shouldn't I use black in my colors," or "Is RGB and CMYK really different?" Consider it supplemental reading to your DC guide.

Balloon Tales: This site goes into MUCH greater depth on lettering than I ever could. Worth a read to learn how to do lettering properly and why(something that most people who self-publish don't really take the time or care to learn.) Seriously, you want to look amateur? Don't read this site, and use Comic Sans or (god forbid) Arial for your lettering. You want your work to actually look professional, READ THIS SITE.

Inking.

2009-07-22T22:38:00.004-04:00

A'right, now that the pencils have been scanned, we move onto inking! I wouldn't be honest if I didn't give this disclaimer before I get into this post: Out of all the phases in my comic-making process, this is the one that is still fluctuating and changing wildly. Inking isn't my strong suite, and my method is NOT the best, or even one of the better methods out there. Now then...

I'm a little hesitant to ink over my original pencils. I have too much pressure attached to the whole thing, so to take that away I actually print out my pencils onto a separate page. If anything goes wrong, hey, no big deal, right? Just print out another, or even better, smatter the page with some white touchup and I'll be good to go.

Most of my lines are done with a Rapidograph Koh-I-Noor technical pen. I used Microns and other disposable tech pens in the past, but I don't care for them. The ink fades, and they never last long enough if you're inking more than 2-3 pages, 4 at best. I was fortunate though, that my family had a full set of Rapidographs just sitting at home for years, well before I actually went to use them (my Mom, who is the ever vigilant coupon-saver and sales watcher, probably grabbed them from Michaels at a liquidation sale or something else that had them immensely cheap.) I actually use Higgin's Drawing Ink (I think it's called Black Magic?) in my tech pens, something that has some advantages and disadvantages.

Pros:
-It's a thin enough ink that it flows through the pen without gunking it up too much
-You're able to buy the HUGE bottles of it and keep your pens topped off for months, if not years.
-It's a decent ink that you know what's in it.

Cons:
-It probably does cause more maintenance for a pen that already requires quite a bit of maintenance. I think these things have become a little more finicky since using Higgins in them, and I've noticed times where they'll vomit ink in their caps or all over the tip.
-Unless you have an eyedropper or even better, a pipette, it can become a REAL hassle to fill them.
-It doesn't nearly have the same line variance as a nib pen, or even better, a brush.
-It's a decent ink. It's not the best ink I've had (I actually prefer Bombay Ink,) so you have to take into account all the qualities that comes with a decent quality ink.

That third Con is a big thing This is another thing I wanted to mention about tech pens, that could either be a pro or con depending on how you look at it: All the pens are fixed width. Microns at least actually have some flexibility to them, albeit very small amount of flex. The way Rapidographs are designed, they can't take advantage of a felt nib for that flex. It's cold, unbending metal. The plus side is that you're inking a lot of technical things, say buildings, machinery, or vehicles, you have an unyielding line that can offer a smooth, mechanical look to them. The downside? If you ink anything else with them, you get a smooth, mechanical look that's hard to shake. Not only that, but if you want to really take advantage of inking theory such as line weights, you need to buy several of these pens. I think now is the time I should mention one of these fellas runs about $25. Yep. Just one.

To fill blacks, I've ditched using a regular brush to using a Niji waterbrush filled with Higgins ink, something that I learned from James Gurney (though he uses it for far better endeavours.) It saves time going to and from the well, and if you don't have a crappy enough brush for black fill-in or you can't fit your wide brush into the ink well, these'll do nicely, and cost about as much as a cheap brush. They have nylon fibers for the bristles instead of felt, so you'll actually be able to do some brush effects with them (go on, try it!) I ought to note that I haven't gotten a rich, even black from them yet, it comes out more as a really dark grey. It might be the paper I'm using to ink, which is some leftover Blueline paper (something that doesn't seem to suck up ink well at all.) So once I run through that and switch over to decent paper, this may not be the case anymore.

Anyway, at this stage there's two big goals: Determining my spot blacks to make compositional elements work better, and to refine my linework once again and add all the necessary details.

There are not many people in the world of comics that I think can pull off good artwork without spot blacks (Cheeks immediately springs to mind as being one of the top guys who can do such a thing.) I can tell you right now, good spot blacks on a page can make a page. A good rule of thumb that one of my professors use to tell us was "It needs to look good as lineart. If it doesn't look good as lineart, or even worse, it reproduces terribly, you're artwork isn't doing its job." If you shy away from spot blacks, I urge you to reconsider. They don't have to be used as shadows, and infact, you shouldn't think of them that way. I should probably give another post solely on this.

Anyway, as I said before, this stage in my process is right now always in flux. What I do on one page may not be what I'll do for another, and the page after that might be different too. In fact, I'm actually trying out digitally inking my next page of pencils in photoshop to see if I can get a more sensitive line quality. I've picked up the brush again after nearly a good year and a half of neglecting practice, and I'm starting to do that again. I hope one day to actually be able to ink most of my stuff with a brush. I've also been looking at nib pens again after a few helpful suggestions from old friends and professionals. Maybe someday once I'm a little more experienced and not as wet behind the ears I'll be able to do a more proper post on all this.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the next process post. Once the inks are all dry, we take it back yet again into the computer, and begin the coloring/lettering process! I should also mention that come this Friday, you'll be able to see the finished page in all its glory on the webcomic Border Crossings, which can be found riiiiiight over here.

Random Art

2009-07-21T21:20:00.002-04:00

Since it's been awhile since artwork has actually been on this blog, here's two things that have already made the rounds in other parts of the Internet. One was a creature study/paint exercise, while the other is some linework for an illustration I'm working on. Enjoy!

Penciling.

2009-07-21T21:08:00.003-04:00

Above are the pencils for page 09 of Border Crossings. There's not much to say, but I'll see what I can muster:

A few of the pages I did for Border Crossings were actually penciled digitally -- if you can figure out which ones they are, then I didn't do my job well enough. This page is actually the second iteration. The first version of it was done all on my Cintiq a while back, and while it was alright, there were underlying storytelling issues, which got compounded by my tightening of the pencils (which showed my frustration with the storytelling A LOT.)

I should mention that at this stage, I actually have a pretty good idea of what the page will look like, and not much is actually drawn on the fly. By the time I'm done with layouts and getting to this stage, the page is complete in my mind, it's just a matter of getting it onto the paper.

There were a few problems to solve though during it. A few of the things were realizing that I hadn't designed the tattoos yet for the Pnaiki and some background item designs. For the Pnaiki, I did a quick sketch to get the general tatoos down, while for the background items, I went through my morgue file to find some exposed engines and other objects with big, huge pistons, gears, etc.

My setup for drawing is probably pretty average: I have a drafting table (though I've been thinking of getting a new one - I'd like a table I can stand and draw at,) a good light source, an eraser, pencils, and of course, rulers and other drafting tools. It was drawn with a col-erase blue pencil, which I rather enjoy for penciling because it's a good mix of hard/soft lead and I can get a good line out of it. I imagine there's an equivalent for a regular graphite pencil, I just never looked hard enough.

From here, I take the pencils, scan them into Photoshop, then I move onto the inks phase!

Digital Perspective Tutorial!

2009-07-17T12:50:00.004-04:00

The next process post will be up tomorrow (could very easily have been up a few days ago, but life gets in the way...)

Chuck asked me about how I go about doing my perspective work digitally, I thought I'd take some screenshots of Photoshop to explain exactly what I do, since just words will probably make it far more confusing. I'm also thinking of doing a future post that shows some analog perspective tricks, for the folk that sit more at the drawing table than the computer desk.

Anyway, let the screenshots flow forth! You'll probably need to click on them to view some details in a larger screen.

In your new document in Photoshop, enable Rulers (by going to View, show> Rulers.) From there, drag out some guides, you'll need at least three if you're doing two-point perspective (one to represent your horizon line, one to set as an anchor for your right vanishing point, one to set as your left.)

Once you have your guides laid out, click on View, and then select "Snap." Make sure the option for Snap to Guide is on, as this is how you'll make sure all your lines converge on the same point. For the sake of simplicity, I'd also make sure snap to grid is off.

Select the shape tool (I think it might also be called the polygon tool as well...) and change it to Line. Now, here's an important step, which I've highlighted in the screenshot: Make sure the option is set to Paths, and not shape. This prevents it from actually showing up on the canvas until you're actually ready (I should note that this version is CS4, so earlier versions might have this placed elsewhere. Refer to your help manual to see how your layout is set up, though if you're on CS3 it's probably the same.) Also note where you see the line show up: It's under a tab called Paths, which is usually grouped with the Layers and Channels tabs. Most likely, your line right now labeled as "Work Path."

When I laid down the line earlier, I thought I had Snap turned on, but it turned out I didn't. So in this step, I selected the end point (I'll explain later how to do this) and dragged it to the right anchor point. It should snap into place where the two guide lines meet. Congrats! Your first perspective line is made.

At this point, repeat the previous two (one if you had snap on and made it go to the anchor point first time through) steps to make as many more perspective lines as you want for the right vansishing point. Don't worry about making correct perspective, what we're doing is making a quick template that you can alter and change later. What you want right now is a bunch of lines that converge on the right anchor point. I'd try and make sure the other ends don't snap to any other guide points.

Once you've got a healthy amount (you can always add more later), double-click the name "work path", as if you were renaming a Layer. Incidentally, the name window pops up! This is how you save your path. If you left it as Work Path, next time you boot up PS, it'll disappear. Poof. Gone. Plus, we can't have the left and right VPs in one path selection (we could, but it gets messy.) So rename this one "Right VP" or "Right" or whatever else that will remind you that it's the right vanishing point.

Now that you've gone and finished up the right vanishing point, it's time to do the left one. See the little button on the bottom, same place as where the button for "new Layer" is one the Layers tab? Click it, it creates a new path. Rename the path to be "Left V.P" or "Left." From there, repeat the steps you did to create the perspective lines for the Right V.P., but this time anchor them to the left point.

Okay, you've got both your V.P.'s lined and you're ready to make perspective. Using the Direct Selection tool (refer to the screenshot,) select end points to drag them around. I should note that even if you're selecting one line, you should do a Click-Drag method, since simply clicking on a point and moving it can create...problems. So just trust me on this. Pull out the lines to where you want them to be. This is also when you set up your V.P. in its correct position. Just click-drag to select all the end points on the V.P., then start dragging it around (you can take the time now to also adjust the guide if the Horizon line is too high up for you, or too low, etc.)

For the sake of this demo, I'm being really arbitrary about it, but of course in your own piece this is where you actually use all that knowledge you have of perspective to have CORRECT placement. I should also point out you can pull these lines well off the live area of the document, and they still show up, so you can gauge how far away you really need that V.P. Go ahead, try it, I'll wait.

Finished? Good, because we're going to actually draw the perspective lines now. You see, the joy of Paths is that you can alter and change it before you actually decide to commit it to the page. Once you're ready though, here's what you do:

-Select for your foreground color the color you want to use for your perspective lines. I like to have each V.P. have a different color, but whatever doesn't confuse you, go for it.

-Select your pencil tool, and notch the size down to anywhere between 2-4 (you'll probably have to play with this, more in a bit.)

-create a new layer for your perspective

-Select the V.P. path you want to commit to the document.

-Right-click it, then select "stroke Path." Set it to Pencil, with "simulate pressure" OFF.

Voila! Your lines are now drawn on the page for one of your V.P.'s! Repeat these steps for the remaining ones, and your perspective grid is good to go for your drawing.

Regarding the Pencil Tool: you might have to do a few Ctrl+z's before you actually find the right size that works for the piece you're working on. Paths have a tendency to stroke a bit larger than what the tool actually does. So that brush size 4 may actually look like a 6 or an 8, just to give you an idea. Play around with it a bit.

I should also tell you that this works best for pieces that don't involve a Dutch Angle (titled view.) Anything that alters the horizon line from being a straight horizontal obviously can't use guides as the horizon line, but it is possible to still use this method (just some creative thinking will have to take place.)

Hope this helps out some folks, and of course, if you have any questions, feel free to ask away.

Layouts.

2009-07-14T20:57:00.003-04:00

Above is the layout pencils for page 9 of Border Crossings. I thought I'd make this into a whole start-to-finish series of posts, so hopefully somebody gleans something from all this.

My process back in college was pretty varied, and fluctuated as often as the tide does. Early on, I used to do thumbnails, followed by roughs (on 6 X 9), followed by blown up roughs that I would tighten (11 X 17 at this point!), followed by lightboxing the whole page to clean it up.

I hated it, to say the least.

It took too long, and involved too much running around (popping out to Kinko's to make copies is never a good step to have...it just seems to slow down everything.) Once I got to drawing the actual page, I hated the page, and felt like I had drawn the damn thing several times over (which I did, more or less.)

So I switched it up in my Junior year. Two big things changed in my process that I kept with for a while: I penciled entirely in blueline (used to do tight blueline, then clean it up even further with a dark graphite pencil,) and I dropped doing the 6 X 9 roughs.

I was happy with it, it gave my work some much needed life in it, and kept the whole process fun for me, which was important.

There was a drawback though, which was the fact that lacking those roughs meant that I jumped straight from 2 inch high thumbnails to 11 X 17 comic board. Yikes.

Needless to say, I often erased and redrew stuff a lot. And I had some occasional problems with perspective.

Anyway, moving on. When I first started penciling Border Crossings, I kept it entirely digital, which was great! It brought back the rough pass on my pencils, which meant I could refine stuff without getting too detailed on everything. I blew up my thumbnails in photoshop, then started to refine right on top of them. My compositions were in place, I had rough perspective lines in (so I could lay down perspective that was right according to my original camera angle,) and all that other good stuff.

Unfortunately, after doing a few pages entirely digitally, it was tough. The pen felt really slippery against the tablet surface, so I didn't feel like I had too much control, which meant there were times of "Eh, it looks alright. It's not great, but it might work."

So, here we are. To be honest, this is the first time I'm doing this new step, but it worked out fine, and I think it's a good blend of all the pros of the old techniques:

I took the thumbnail of page 9 and scaled it up to 11 x 17 (remember how the thumbnails were already accurately proportioned? This is why.) From there, I ruled out the panel borders, and loosely defined the staging a bit better. If you notice in the second panel (it might be really hard to see, I think the opacity was turned down a bit too low,) there's some perspective lines gridded in there. These were done using the paths tab and the line tool to make sets of perspective lines for the left, right, and top/bottom VP. This allows me to accurately get perspective lines in there quick and painless, and to start to lay in some basic environment ideas. I actually have a digital template saved that has all these lines ready to be used, so I don't have to spend time recreating them for each page. I just select the right workpath, and set it in place.

You might notice the bottom right panel is different from the thumbs. This is another great part about the layout stage, I can change around some stuff and still keep it loose, and see if it'll work. In this case, the original idea in the thumbnail didn't seem to stage the reveal too well, so I altered it to bring us down near Venetia's viewpoint.

I should note this whole stage is done digitally. The point of it isn't to refine, but define some areas that were a little iffy in the thumbnails, and get things locked down that I know will be vital, like perspective lines.

From here, I flatten the whole image, and to make it easier to pencil over, switch it to grayscale mode, then to duotone mode. In Duotone mode, I set it to monochromatic, then give it 25% cyan only. This gives it a really light blue color that I can still see, but when I pencil, won't show up much in the finished pencils.

From there, I sit down at the drawing table and get started on actually drawing...

Thumbnails.

2009-07-05T16:28:00.003-04:00

Above, are thumbnails for upcoming pages for Border Crossings, which you can find right here. If you can make out my little scratchings, some of the pages up there (most notably 9, 10, and 13) have an alternate or two, in the event I didn't think a panel was working as well as it could have been.

This is actually a pretty recent trend for me in thumbnailing for my comic pages. Before, I would often scribble directly on the script, often right beside the panel description or near it. It was great because I could immediately map out what I had in mind, or I could try a few different variations and then notate which one I wanted to use later. Eventually, I'd reference them for them I start laying in my pencils, or I would scan them in, and stitch them together into a frankenstein Photoshop file, then pencil above that.

Unfortunately (at least for me, as all artists have different quirks to them,) it wasn't ideal. I often ran into the problem of having panels that didn't mesh together well enough, or were a lot more out of proportion with the comic page than I actually thought. What was once a great composition for the panel would have to be readjusted, or completely rethought if it turned out not to work as well.

So I made up a little thumbnail contact sheet in Illustrator, something even the simplest of graphic program users can do. From there, I still will occasionally scribble an idea directly on the script, but now I thumbnail directly into the little boxes (which, if you notice, are proportionate to a 10 x 15 live area of comic board, which is what I most frequently use.) Everything's in proportion, it's a small enough space to prevent too much noodling (though you might notice I couldn't help myself here and there,) and it lets you see a set of pages all at once to see if they work together or not (an incredibly important notion regarding any sort of sequential pages.)

Alien doodle

2009-06-29T22:18:00.003-04:00

A quick little pattern/color study on an alien doodle...Photoshop.

Back from Heroes Con! ...Just a week late.

2009-06-27T11:12:00.003-04:00

So this post is going to be ridiculously stupid, because A) I can't show any of the artwork I worked on this past week or week before (and I didn't get much sketch time in that yielded any good nugglets) and B) Because it's a week later than I meant to post.

So we have some writing time instead! I got back from Heroes last Sunday, and all in all I can safely say that it's one of the best conventions I've gone to yet (and it brings my tally up to...3.) I loved how big "Artist's Alley" was (which it's almost a misnomer, since it takes up half the dang floor,) and I got to meet a lot of great people from the Sidebar Forums (anyone from there following this, I'm registered, but I can't post yet...) as well as from the Drawingboard.org, which was a great treat. I also got to meet one of my industry heroes, the always-talented Guy Davis, who was cool enough to give me a portfolio crit. The dude is seriously THE nicest guy I've met. Great talent and great personality.

In other news, Heroes also marked the launching of the comic I've been actively working on for a couple of months now! Border Crossings, which is written by my good friend Christian Sager, is a dark fantasy steampunk story that takes place in an alternate world with all sorts of monstrosities, water, and zombies. Think 20,000 leagues under the sea, mixed with H.P Lovecraft, creatures from movies like Dark Crystal, and you're more or less on track.

For all interested, you can check it out at www.thelastisland.com. Right now, we have 5 pages from the first issue and all 8 pages of the promo comic up, and we'll be updating it at a page a week. So check it out, leave a comment, and enjoy!

And I swear - I WILL have some new artwork up very soon.

Photoshop Sketch

2009-06-14T01:43:00.002-04:00

Trying out some new techniques when I should be in bed sleeping...approximately 1 hour.

Donovan's Basilisk

2009-06-11T14:59:00.003-04:00

This is a painting I did for ConceptArt's Creature of the Week (CoW.) I think it's about 2-3 hours put into it? Maybe less, maybe more, I dunno. It's not perfect on the painting side of things, but I like the idea of it quite a bit. Here's the description I put in for it on CA:

Supposedly discovered by a druid in medieval England, Donovan's Basilisk is a large, cave-dwelling reptavian. Unlike other breeds of Basilisks documented, it doesn't possess the ability to paralyze by venom or stare, and is considered one of the more 'docile' varieties of Basilisk to be found, if such a thing can be believed. It possesses an oily, slick coat of quill-feathers, which seems to aid in retaining the creature's unnaturally high body temperature. Large bioluminescient skin tags line the creature's back, and seem to vent much of the heat off of the creature, while a smoky discharge continuously emanates from the creature's nostrils. This combination of sweltering heat and stifling air gives it a huge handicap when it hunts, often suffocating its prey simply by laying in wait while it pours out this noxious concoction.

Rien Poortuliet Study

2009-06-05T11:05:00.002-04:00

Here's a paint study I did from Rien Poortuliet and Wil Huygen's book Gnomes. Great book with some fantastic illustrations done in watercolor/gouache from what it looks like. I did the study in Painter, and since Painter's watercolor features aren't as great as some of their other media (Artist's Oils come to mind...) It's not recreated using similar media materials as Rien. This was a pretty fun exercise, as it teaches some mindful color picking, and using brush strokes to their full effectiveness. Maybe I'll try somebody like Leyendecker or Sargent next...or if I'm stupid/brave, a Bierstadt! Obviously, original image and IP is copyright Rien Poortuliet, Wil Huygen, and Abrams Publishing.

Creature Doodle

2009-06-03T11:30:00.002-04:00

Hey All,

Here's a quick little doodle I did during lunch yesterday. I named the critter "Ploorg."

Alien Dino Redux

2009-05-28T11:58:00.003-04:00

I decided to apply what I learned from the Candy Demon to my previous painting attempts, so I figured I'd restart that alien dino drawing from before. I didn't particularly care for where it was going, and I didn't have much of a clear idea of what the colors on it were going to be. This time around I came prepared!

I made a mockup of 8 color/pattern variations that I thought were the best out of the ones I brainstormed, and just have to pick out of those now...right now, I think E or F might be the best to go with, but maybe someone out there has a different opinion.

Candy Demon Progression

2009-05-27T10:39:00.003-04:00

My friend Errol asked me how I went about the last painting, and after flubbing it trying to explain it entirely in words over the phone, I thought I'd put together this.

The process I took is a weird combination of Ryan Church and traditional oil painting, apparently. So I'll try my best to explain it clearly:

The brushes I used for it weren't any special, custom brushes (except for a minor one!) With the lineart opened in Painter, a new layer was created, set to 'gel'. From there, I started to lay in monochromatic washes with the broad water brush (found in digital watercolor), making sure that whenever it couldn't get any darker, I'd dry the layer, drop it, then make a new one to keep going until I got the right range of values I was looking for. This process was repeated probably 3, maybe 4 times in total.

Once that was done, a new layer was made, set to colorize. Here, I took the scratchboard tool (found in pens), and set the opacity to something like 15-20%. This when you can experiment with different color schemes and see what work in terms of temperatures and hues. Since this was the first one I tried this way, I used really saturated colors to make sure the colors came through, since the colorize layer is treated like a glaze almost.

After this, I only used four tools from here on out: an Eraser (I sometimes used a scratchboard variant that I turned into an eraser, but it's usually too hard of an edge at this point,) scratchboard tool (this time with opacity at 90-100%,) Artist's Oils Drybrush, and Artist's Oils Blending Brush. The Drybrush was the most used tool, and most of the gruntwork was done with that. The scratchboard tool was only used for small details, like making the teeth, refining some edges, and doing the swirls on the tusks and claws. The Blending brush didn't come in until way towards the end, when I need to smooth out value transitions in some areas and clean up the roughness of it all. At some point early on, I used the water rake (found in blenders) to smooth stuff out and also start to get the feel of fur going on, but it was the only time I had used it, and I probably could have skipped it altogether if I just kept blending and refining with the tools above.

Once it was finished up and posted on here, I thought it might have looked a little too even in values, so I took it into Photoshop and punched up the values using Curves.

Well, I think that answers all of that! Hope it wasn't too confusing, Errol!

Candy Demon!

2009-05-25T22:12:00.002-04:00

So I took the demon to completion in Painter! Happy with how it came out, though I think I might add some markings to him or something...

Monday block-ins...

2009-05-18T22:31:00.003-04:00

A relatively quick update as I take a break from coloring comic pages...

Here's the color block-ins of the previous two sketches. They're both done in Painter, and pretty much approached from different directions: The Ol' Troll is getting a smack of Artist oil's on him, while the alien dino is getting transparent glazes of the scratchboard tool (I think this is the way Ryan Church builds up his paintings...hadn't figured out where he goes from here though...). It's been tortuously slow as I try and mesh my need to learn how to paint with my stubbornness (Or is it fear?) or losing my lines...but I'll get there. I'll get there.

Break Sketches

2009-05-13T12:43:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the radio silence, folks. I've been working nonstop on the promo Chris and I are getting together for Heroes Con, and since we need to send it out to the printer really soon to allow breathing room for the covnention. So to keep the blog at least semi-alive until I'm done later this week, here's some sketches I did yesterday during my day break between inking and coloring. One's a troll, and the other is a...well...uh...an alien dino?

Gestures

2009-04-30T15:34:00.001-04:00

S'more gestures done this morning for warm-up...

Brush Tomfoolery

2009-04-27T10:44:00.003-04:00

Quick update since there's a bit of work I need to jump on today...

Here's a little morning warmup I did to loosen up my arm. I was testing out a new brush I made from a standard round, as well as some new keys I mapped to wacom pen (I feel kinda dumb for not realizing I can map keystrokes to the pen's buttons!) So now instead of having to reach waaay across the keyboard to adjust the size, I just click the little buttons instead. I lose my right-click, but only for PS.

Anyway, yeah, not the greatest of paintings, but hey, at least I tested out some new stuff!

Back to the drawing board...

2009-04-22T13:37:00.003-04:00

Well, after two weeks of being more or less out of town (a few days spent in town inbetween trips,) I'm back and the gears are cranking again! Some quick news, followed by sketches done this morning and on the plane trips...

If you've been following this blog for a bit, you know I've been working on a comic called Border Crossings. Well, we currently have a website up and running, which you can find over at www.thelastisland.com. Currently, we have the pitch up there, but as we get closer to June, the site will be transformed to support the webcomic, and we'll be updating it with new pages from the first issue.

Why June? Because we'll be at Heroes con and we want everything to be up in time so we can show off the goods and point as many people as we can to our product, that's why! We'll be having a table there, and as time goes on, I'll give out the details for that.

So for now, here's some sketches. One of them had my precious speedball pen vomit all over it, so just don't mind that. I think it was going through the same pressure stuff I had on the plane, cause my eyes felt like they were going to pop outta the head from sinus congestion...fun times, this allergy season.

Sketches

2009-04-13T12:40:00.002-04:00

Some stuff from the sketchbook while I was out of town...on a related note, I'll be out of town again this week! I'll be sick of planes by the end of it all.

Aquarium and Critter

2009-04-03T11:52:00.003-04:00

Well, it's my 60th post, so here's a mix of observed and imagined drawings. I went to the Atlanta Aquarium last weekend on a particularly rainy day, and got a slew of photographs, and when the crowds weren't thick, a few drawings in here and there. Here's a couple of them.

I also did up this little drawing of a critter the other day, then decided to bring him into photoshop to try and do some more painting study. I think it might be another step in the right direction, but still a long ways off to what I eventually want to be able to do.

S'more gestures!

2009-03-30T15:11:00.002-04:00

Some more from today's warm-up. Same as before!

Gestures

2009-03-29T17:29:00.001-04:00

Some gestures done today, 30-sec each, courtesy of posemaniacs.com

Morning doodle

2009-03-26T15:06:00.002-04:00

Here's a little watercolor sketch I did in Painter X. The lines were made with the scratchboard pen tool, and it's quite possibly my favorite tool in the world.

...Of course, it also proves how terrible I am at actual painting, but I'm trying, honest! I just see things very linearly instead of color and light.

Environment Building

2009-03-24T08:31:00.004-04:00

What do you do if you have a specific set of scenery that's going to show up frequently in your pages?

That's something I ran into this past weekend as I was prepping thumbnails for more pages of Border Crossings. Throughout the (eventual) 5-issue arc, the main characters travel on a Nautilus-like submarine called The Rhizome. Before I could start penciling any pages involving the interior of the Rhizome, I had to lay out a floorplan.

If you're faced with a scene you know you're going to visit frequently, or if it's a very specific place, you need to make sure you have the floorplan of the set planned accordingly. Otherwise, you'll run into the misfortune of drawing randomly placed things in the background, which throws off the disbelief of the artwork, and eventually you'll be called out for your laziness or ineptness (Not really, but considering how some readers are, you never know.)

This isn't a new idea by a long shot. Illustrator Frank Hampson used to construct scale exterior and interior models of the spaceships seen in his strip Dan Dare, ensuring that everything was properly in its place. It also provided him with a means to see how the ship would be affected by lighting schemes, so it provided a double-use.

Modern-day comic book artists like Paolo Rivera and Lenil Yu use similar techniques, using a program called Google Sketchup. It's all the frustration of making a scale model, without the cost of materials or storage! And it makes it incredibly easy to set up your shot, save it as a jpeg, then use it for reference or lightbox drawing, depending on your workflow.

TV and movies have been doing stuff like this for YEARS. Look at the floorplans for the Millennium Falcon, or the Serenity from Firefly. These were all designed so you wouldn't have reality inconsistencies. Looking at the blueprint above of the Serenity, how weird would it be if the characters left the cargo room and immediately showed up in the bridge?

I haven't reached this stage yet with the Rhizome, but here's what I have so far. The exterior needed to be tweaked a bit in its design from its days in the promo comic (which means when it comes time to ink that splash page, I'll need to ensure that I adjust the drawing,) but you can see what I have planned out for the interior. For me, this isn't enough. I still need to make more detailed floorplans of key areas (Engine room, Bridge, Holding Bay, etc), and I also need to design the interior aesthetics. But once all that hard work is out of the way, I'll have a very concrete set I can stage all my action on, which helps the believability of the story.

Digital Pencilling

2009-03-17T14:41:00.003-04:00

So, I recently started up work on Border Crossings. This was originally a comic that was pitched to Red5, but they decided (after a few drawn out weeks,) to not carry it. I suspect it was partly because at the time we pitched it, Diamond dropped their new (and stupid) shipping policy, and they decided to not bring on another new title. It's unfortunate, but to make up for it me and the writer Christian have started it up as a webcomic. Currently, the site only has the promo, but as time progresses (and before Heroes Con) we'll have a full site up and running with new content. You can view the current url with the promo here.

I bring this up because I'm taking a different approach to these pages than I have to comic work in the past. To help speed up stuff, I'm digitally penciling the pages first, then printing them out to ink them traditionally. So far, I've been having a blast, even though the surface of the cintiq screen is a little slippery for my tastes. That's why I hadn't bothered doing it entirely digitally, simply because I don't have nearly the same amount of control.

So here's the digital pencils from panel 1 of the first page...

And here's the inked version!

So far, I can't complain.

Painting Madness

2009-03-12T16:33:00.002-04:00

Whoo...bit of a while since my last post. It's not that I haven't been busy, just haven't had anything worthwhile to throw up.

So here's a WIP I have of a little painting I'm doing in Painter X. I've tried out Painter in the past, but never really took for it, and this time I decided to really sit down and do a piece from start to finish.

Here's a bit of the underpainting for you all to check out, sans the refining bits on top. I feel like this thing is nowhere near the end of it, but it's done at least for the day. Approaching something like this is difficult, for me at least, since for some reason I just can't wrap my head around color forms. When I see line, I feel confident in it, but the more that disappears, the more unsure I get... I guess what I really should be doing is finding my own style of painting. In the meantime, I'll keep flailing as I try to get a footing.