Landscape Studies

Just some landscape studies I did in preparation of what might be an alien landscape in a new illustration that I'm working on. The first is after a painting by David Drummond and the other two are from photographs of the Grand Canyon.

Experiments with Corel Painter

I've seen some illustrators use a combination of Corel Painter and Photoshop with exceptional skill, so I downloaded a free trial of Corel to see if I could incorporate its tools in a similar way. I proceeded to make a little sketch to test out the brushes and their various "sliders".

There are some things that I like and things that I don't like. Of the few weaknesses in the program, I think there are some that I can get used to. For example, increasing and decreasing the brush size takes forever when using the shortcut keys, so I found it easier to go up to the size slider and drag it. Now, the good thing about the added hurdle to changing brush size is that it forces me to continue painting with the same size brush. This is a good thing if you are going for an effect with expressive brush strokes. One thing that is less beneficial are phantom brush strokes that appear out of nowhere while you're painting. Not the end of the world, but they can be annoying, especially if you don't notice them until later.

The strength of the program as many know is its ability to simulate traditional media. For me, it's not so much it looking like traditional media as behaving like traditional media that I enjoy. I love the way the oil brush settings smear your previous brush strokes with each new stroke, preventing the straight-edged overlaps you often see in digital paintings made with Photoshop.

Hide your Dwarven kids. Hide your Dwarf Wife.

The Tomato Wyrm Project continues. I have a couple shots that give you an idea of how I went about adding color on this one. 

Here is my finished grayscale painting. I rendered it pretty tightly this time before moving to color.

With green being the primary color for my wyrm, I used it as the base color. I put it on a gradient map on an adjustment layer that sits on top of my grayscale rendering. The gradient map ranges from dark brown to green to white, which gives you a much more natural range of colors as the values change. If you look closely, you can see brown in the darkest occlusion shadows. No ugly gray values here!

The additional colors were added on new layers, which vary in layer mode (overlay, multiply, and color mode). Multiple layers tends to get things messy, so once I was happy with the colors, I merged everything and did a little bit of painting clean-up. I went with a more modest color scheme than my original plan involving stripes and eyespots. It just was too much. The gradual shifts in color do a much better job of showcasing the Tomato Wyrms lovely lumps.

Jelly Sketches

Some delightful jellyfish in pencil and gouache. There are some really freakish ones out there...

Tomato Wyrm Project

In an effort to tackle more character design, I have decided to create a detailed reference sheet for a creature I call the tomato wyrm. 

 

This my initial sketch. He's a flightless dragon, which are sometimes called a wyrms, but not always. I am fusing together a tomato caterpillar and a gecko to get a balance of wormy and lizard.

The next step (after amassing a pool of reference photos) was building the maquette. I'm using Sculpey as usual, which is built on top of a foil and tape skeleton. I photographed the maquette in direct and diffused light. The direct light I will be using more frequently to get those dramatic cast shadows, but the soft light is nice to refer back to since sometimes dramatic light can make it hard to read the anatomy.

I'm not one to create very detailed under-drawings, but I've learned my lesson that taking more time at this stage is going to mean less corrections in the future. The little circles help with imagining the the creature standing on a flat surface in perspective.

In this next stage I'm painting in occlusion shadows, which are the shadows you see when two surfaces meet and there's a gap between them. I like to think of what a 3D model looks like before you add "lighting". This is the first time that I have tried this technique, which is the method that illustrator Sam Nielson uses.  After the occlusion shadows are painted, I will move on to the cast shadows and color!

Thumbelina Final

The entry deadline for Jon Schindehette's Personal Poster Challenge was today. I finished my piece just in time!

I have a couple more process shots: 

 

 

 

Check out all the other spiffy entries at the Infected By Art website.

Thumbelina WIP 2

Some progress on a small part of my Thumbelina illustration:

I'm using a basic round brush with canvas texture built in and then a mixer brush made of several parallel lines, giving it a nice brushy look. It seems like I'm using a different tools every time I paint digitally, but I think this combination might stick around.