Finished: The Last Unicorn

A book cover assignment I recently finished for The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

Dancing Sketches

Just a few studies from the beautifully choreographed music video for Chandelier.

Of Unicorns and Malacandra

I have two book covers in the works. One is for The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle and the other for Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis of his "Space Trilogy" Series.

Three semi-loose thumbnails for each book.

 

Tighter renderings of the two thumbnails I've decided to proceed with. I posed some Daz3D models for reference on the figures and looked at several different deer-like animals for the unicorn.

I made this little maquette of the giraffe-like alien for the Out of the Silent Planet cover. I made sure to make the limbs free-moving so I could use one maquette for all of the different poses the creature appears in. To make sure that I got the right angle in all of the photos, I created a reference point for the horizon line. I made a blob out of foil and tape that is a stand-in for the human character that appears on the cover. The blob is scale-wise the correct height that the character should be in comparison to the giraffes. When I took my photos, I made sure the "horizon line" (in this case, the end of a ironing board covered in green towel) ran through the lower half of the blob, just like it does through the character in the thumbnail. This trick would not work so well with a higher horizon line since the end of the ironing board would be visible and not represent the true vanishing point.

After taking my reference photos for the creature, I combined them into one image to continue working out the composition. 

Using the previous photo and several others for more detailed reference, I created the current composition with yet more changes. Most striking is the greater presence of the tall pointy things or Malacandrian "mountains" in the background. With a tight drawing in place, I can move on to rendering with a very clear direction.

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...