Alien Dino Redux

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

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!

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...

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

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

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

Brush Tomfoolery

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...

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

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

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!

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

Gestures

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

Morning doodle

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

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

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

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.

Random Fun

Best fun is always with abstract perspective boxes...'cause who knows where it'll lead.

Some more BC sketches

Hey all, So, come next week I'll be hitting the pages to start penciling Border Crossings. This week I've been spending drawing and tweaking designs and getting the feel for the world itself. I still have to do some environment studies as well as thumbnails for the pages, but no worries. Anyway, here's some stuff from that, of the local fare that inhabit the Last Island of the world. The weird gnarly fella that's been colored? He's a glass being of sorts, so I'll probably need to find myself some nice lighted references of glass sculptures by Chihuly or something.

Sketches

Hey all! Monday's are always a slow start, so here's some sketches from earlier today. They're some ideas for a comic book project I'm working on. Even though it's really unfeasible, I like the idea of a large beast of burden being a taxi cab of sorts.

Also, giant cephalopods shopping is a funny idea.

Expect some more stuff from this later in the week...

Alien Life, Part Trois

Hey! I'm back from NY Comic Con! It was a blast to be there, and I met a lot of great people. Hopefully it'll generate some work for me, but if not, then the experience alone was worth going for it.

Anyway, back to the grind. Here's an alien mockup I did to test out a process method of using a grayscale drawing and then colorizing it. I think it'd work great to quickly get something out of the way (at least for me, since I am lacking in the painting department) but it'd be terrible for doing a final piece.

I've been reading up on evolution theory and all that, and I find it fascinating how most life on land came from fish...It certainly brings up ideas of what could happen if another creature was the mother archetype for everything, and considering how varied our own history has been with species, the possibilities are endless...

Which is sad then that this is pretty tame considering what sort of genetic playground a creature artist could play in. But that just means I gotta up the ante for the next critter drawing.