Some older and newer stuff

Working on some personal projects, haven't posted in too long, and figured I'd share some things, 'cause why not, right?

A character I tend to doodle when I'm either having some fun for myself or trying to figure something out.

A very rough version of what was going to be the cover for one storyline, but I decided to go with something else.

A single page made up from a bit of a story a friend sent me - the first couple of paragraphs, anyhow. Apparently I got right into my friend's head of what they were thinking of when they were writing.. which, to me, is a good sign.  I tend to think in cartoons / animation, so I guess it helped for once!

Idle painting

Just a l'il skully design I thought I'd paint up from an idle sketch.

Tattoo design - from text to doodle to digital

A friend of mine on twitter had mentioned wanting a tattoo, and had something in mind but couldn't quite get what was in her head into the world, so I offered to design a little something-something for her.

So I quick whipped off a design on some paper with my very limited palette of Copic markers. This was done on a sticky-note style pad of paper. Same general size and all that, it just wasn't sticky, so a non-sticky sticky-note, right?

Not exactly what my friend was looking for, but she liked it - said it was a spin on the design she hadn't considered before. I'll take that as a compliment. Below is the digital version.

If you're unfamiliar with the character, it's a representation of Richard the Undead Warlock from the webcomic Looking For Group [LFG for short] by Ryan Sohmer & Lar deSouza of   Blind Ferret Entertainment.

Retouching old works

Sometimes, some things that were created years ago should be left alone, for a semi-current example, the Star Wars movies [Episodes 4, 5 & 6] are ones the many people got upset over when George Lucas went back and tinkered with them.

And there's nothing wrong with tinkering with older works, to want to improve them.
But sometimes, one can tinker too much, or the current technology\ability  / skills doesn't mesh well with the older style.

I've been going through some of my works lately, and wondering what I could redo, touch-up or what I should just leave alone. The Death Beckoning I should have left alone, and when I went to redo it, I was happier with the original.

With this, the Alseid, a woodland nymph of mythology who lured men into the forests to devour them, souls and all, I originally tried a few techniques that seemed to have worked.  Yet I was never really satisfied with it - I like it enough I'm planning on making a print of it, but I thought I'd try touching up a few spots that always drew my eye to and I wanted to fix.

So here's the original, with the touched-up version below.

Old and New with a touch of advice

I painted this a few years ago:

And I painted this last night.

As an artist, it's easy to look back at previous works and want to improve something. And sometimes, in the trying, you recognize that it doesn't need to be improved and is fine just as it is. ...and sometimes when you try to improve on something that's fine as it is... the results are less than satisfactory.

Art is art is art - and sometimes, as an artist, you gotta just like your own work, slit that inner-critic's throat to silence it long enough to like your own art.

Gold Iron-Man helmet

Working with lighting - absorption, refraction, reflection - on metals.
Gold is... interesting. It absorbs light, but reflects more than enough to be able to have a mirror-esque finish. Soft and malleable, easily dulled and dented, but capable of a fine shine.

These may look "okay" at a casual glance, and maybe I'm my own worst critique
[no internet, that is not a challenge], but there's something about these that doesn't feel right to me, and I'm not sure what. Going to try and get one more attempt done before class tomorrow, maybe finally nail it down.

This is shading with colours, instead of lightening or darkening an already coloured section.

And this is using the lighten / shadow brush in MS5.  The shadow brush takes a really light touch to us it without 'burning' the colour.

Update:

A 3rd attempt - about 50% done, ran out of time before class [and dinner].  I like this one much better, but it's still not where I want it to be [but I think I may have found some brushes that'll get me closer to it]

]EDIT[

Here's the 3rd attempt - finished.

Mjolnir Homework for ComicExperience

So, this is my homework for the Intro to Digital Painting course taught by the amazing Scott Johnson.

Not familiar with his work? Google-image "Palladium books" or "Rifts RPG" He painted up some of those covers, notably the shiny armour ones.

Anyhow.. homework was to pain Mjolnir.  I managed to squeeze this out in the 3 & 1/2 hours I was listening to Lar de Souza's ustream. Done in Manga Studio 5 with a variety of brushes.

It was supposed to just be the hammer - painting planes and angles without lineart, but I couldn't help but add some effects.

Here's Mjolnir without the effects.

Spider-Man flats

I was making some decent time on flatting this and the day got away from me. Phone calls, laundry, errands... and now here I am, 12 hours later, finishing *just* the flats.

And that's fine - for now. Because it's not a job, I'm not paid to do this. [yet]

Normally I'd leave colouring effects - especially text effects, until last, but I was curious if my initial idea for the 'thwak' would balance or further unbalance all that sky.

Fantastic Four page - coloured

Aaand here's the flats all coloured up.

Initially saved as a 17meg+ jpg, I resized it down to about 130kb. Gotta love Irfanview.

So the costumes are different from the norm, or any of the redesigns I'm aware of [all-white with some black, and red & black].  I think it works okay - not great or amazing, but it works okay.

The Thing is often orange-y/brown..supposed to be all rock-like. So I spatter-flecked him out with some lighter & darker shades ...pondered trying some marble-style vein/slash designs but it just didn't look good.

Johnny's almost always on fire.. so that's half the team being red[ish] / hot coloured.... and they also tend to be the hot-heads. [moreso Johnny than Ben].

Sue and Reed are the scientists of the team.. so I kept their costumes similar to help balance against the reds/oranges.  Sue's a biologist if I remember right, and would know the value of letting your skin breathe. Yeah, Reed designed the costumes out of ...unstable molecules?... so I'm sure it breathes better than cotton, but nothing breathes as easy as no impediments at all.

Anyhow.. team balance, brains & brawn.. blues and reds.

Fantastic Four page

I don't know about you, but FF means Final Fantasy to me.. probably because I've never been a fan of the Fantastic Four.

There's no script with this bunch of assorted Marvel pages, so I'm just winging it here, feeling a bit adventurous. Also playing with a lot of blue here.

Work in progress - flats.

Something old, Something new

So I bought a few more brushes that Ray Frenden's created. I have a hard time understanding how artists and colourists - any creative individual, really - are still working in Photoshop.  Manga Studio is a much more natural art program to work - a better ability to replicate real-world brushes and set up pages and such for printing in an easy-to-see / understand method.

Why am I so pro-Manga Studio? is it because Adobe screwed me out of my investment into their Creative Suite 3? No. ...I am still sore about that, coming on almost 7 years now.  But it's the fact that this is a program designed for people who draw, who create... whereas Photoshop's options often seemed like they were jammed in as afterthoughts or half-hearted appeasements.

Back to the point: I got playing with Frenden's Wash Brushes.. and figured what better subject than to remake an old Fallout Super-Mutant quick sketch I did a few years back. For those not familiar, the Fallout World is post-nuclear-apocalypse.  Think the version of the future envisioned by 1950s/60s sci-fi and fantasy.

But with no running water, and most of the water being radioactive, you can imagine the layers of grime one would accumulate whilst traipsing about the new-but-broken world.

Remember now - this is a recreation, not just colouring old lines, so there'll be some differences.

Original:

Coloured using Frenden's brushes - his Wash set, various Pencils and Ink Nib 2 and the Feather Fawcett ink brush. 

Colouring the Lartist

The always-a-great-guy Lar de Souza was kind enough to send me his line art & inks for a piece he's doing for a convention or some such thing - you can check out his own colours and such HERE.

I had no idea what colour scheme he would be using for anything, an didn't want to see his finished piece before I made solid commitments to my own colour schemes.  Thankfully, I only saw his after I'd already laid out my flats.

My only complaint is the line art & inks he sent weren't signed by him. I believe in giving credit where it is due, and this wouldn't have happened at all if not for his art.

So here's my colours on his awesome art:

First the flats:

And now the finished piece:

Character Design Version 2

Trying a different shading/colouring technique that, in my own opinion, I need more practice on.
I don't know the proper name for it, I've always referred to it as two-tone shading, or "Simpson's Shading".

Character design, Version One

Version One of a character design for a set of short stories that are brewing. 

There's a few other styles to try out before I settle on one. 

Quick sketch & colour

Whenever I doodle for myself, I almost always shortchange myself and run out of room for the feet. Makes me worry a little bit.

Anyhow, here's a gunslinger with some simple wash colour and even simpler gradient background.

Batman '66

So, via Greg Pak, by way of Brian Michael Bendis with a source of Alex Chung through the magic of Tumblr, I come across a black and white image of this awesomeness.  Classic 1966 Batman and villains as drawn by Kevin Maguire.

And it's just one of those things I had to colour. From memory, despite the fact the show is/was before my time, but reruns let everything live forever, more or less.

So.. some classic campy Batman, drawn by Kevin Maguire, coloured by me:

My only real concern doing this from memory is the Egg Master [Egg Man?..bald guy by the Joker, played by Vincent Price if I remember right], and the two top-corner villains, along with the prison-striped faceless guy behind the Mad Hatter.

And just because.. I even colour-doodled in Cesar Romero's white-painted mustache on the Joker.

Trying to think of the actors behind the costumes...  Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Julie Newmar \ Ertha Kitt, Vincent Price, Burgess Meredith, ... I can't remember who played King Tut, Mr. Freeze or the Mad Hatter.

Abominable Charles Christopher / Karl Kerschel contest

Karl Kerschel, creator of the entertaining The Abominable Charles Christopher webcomic has a colouring contest going on.

So I tried my hand at it.
I'm never a fan of contests that don't have easily identifiable rules for what would make a winning entry, but then again, this is art, which is always subjective. So there I go.

Here's my colouring over his lineart :

It's been submitted to the facebook page.  I'm not looking so much to win the contest [which hey, would be nice, don't get me wrong], so much as I'm pushing myself to submit things that aren't perfect in my own eyes, because none of my work will ever be perfect to me. I can almost always see something, look back at works, that could be improved. 

Goodbye 2013, Hello 2014

Normally I don't generally care, or celebrate things like the New Year... really, I mean, if not for certain Roman Caesars wanting to be immortal, we'd still have a 10-month calendar.  So it seems to me that the celebrating the change-over of one day into another because of the end of a numerically dated sheetbook seems kind of silly... but hey, any excuse for a booze-up, right? That's what people want, it seems.

so.. last sketch of 2013, first of 2014.. because hey, we have to mark these things down and take note, right? Right. Though a lot of days I wonder why.

Costume design & choices

Character design, to me, is always interesting. Even if I don't like what I see as the final design, it's always neat to see what designs lead up to the final choice.

Once again, the debate/argument about how vastly female characters' costumes/armours differs from their male counterparts seems to be raging.

Trying my hand at solid-colour shading instead of blending, and a thought on the above topic, below:

More from class

I actually own this comic, which is a little thrill - to me. 'Cause this means I can hold up [once I find it] the published article against what I've gone with and see the differences and all the rest of everything there on the pages.

I have no idea [off the top of my head] who the female characters are..and that bothers me.
Guess I better go look them up!