Art: 2007 Archives

Spur-of-the-moment idea...

YO HO HO.

cafepress 10 pk

This is my latest acrylic texture painting. I made it using a soft gel base streaked with a comb, then repeatedly glazed with green and gold. The ornament was made with my usual modelling paste medium, colored and topped with metallic and a "powdering" of iridescent to give it a little extra sparkle. As usual, it doesn't come through well in the photo, but here is a detail shot to bring out some of the glitter:

No fondant, this is homemade fudgey frosting and impromptu tube of frosting white decoration. That store bought stuff is crap: my hand hurts now.

I am thinking of having this be my Black Cat Ball charity auction item this year. As always, I am afraid of being the one piece no one bids on.

I painted this more than a decade ago in oils. I remember it took forever. But it is really beautiful. The photo reference was from a Victoria's Secret catalog.

Another painting of my cat. This one looks more like him than the last. Except that he really isn't that brown, haha.

Damn, it's been ages since I drew one of these jester dolls. This was for my website redesign (I know, it's an addiction - I need therapy to keep from constantly redoing my site). But this wasn't quite right so I had to do a second one.

Just another practice painting. This is my cat, orpheus. I can tell I need a lot more practice drawing (realistic) cats. But the cement looks great, IMO! ;)

Modeling paste, ceramic stucco, pumice gel, glass beads. A bit of gold paint and gloss top coat. I didn't use a guide sketch or color comp (my normal process), and just kinda threw the thing together on the paper.

A drawing for my parents 50th anniversary, just four different memories I have of them.

I used to draw a lot of these little yarn/stick spells when I was bored. This is the first one I've painted. It turned out pretty cool, although you can't really see the textures and layers in the photo.

Used: modeling paste, blended fiber medium, glass beads medium, ceramic stucco medium, pumice gel.

I made this for my family's 50th reunion, sort of as penance since I am not going. It was pretty tricky, since all 11 of us look *exactly alike*. And I wanted each picture to represent a sort of remembered version of each person, rather than how they actually look today (for instance, my hair has not been that color since 1993).

Sketched in pencil and scanned in and then photoshop glossed/colored. I'm getting a lot better at the colored lines layer. Yay!

Oh - and may I say how much I love my new porta-trace light pad. I only wish it were battery-operated.

A quick experimental painting that I liked a lot. It was made using thick gel medium and a final wash of black wiped into the crevices.

Another Warcraft comic. This one was actually easier than the last, despite its more polished look and greater complexity. I think the figures turned out nicely, especially the girls. And I love the expressions. The close-up is all Tank Girl-y and wonderful!

Technical Details:

I did all the images as 4" pencil sketches. For the repeat images, I just sketched the bit that was different and pasted it over once it was scanned in.

I smoothed the sketches out in Photoshop. Top layer: I took the scan and gaussian blurred it twice at 2.0 and set the layer to multiply at 50%. That kinda blurred out the roughness in the middle layer. Middle layer: I did a color-range select on black with 150 fuzziness on the original scan and then pasted that in a new layer, and locked transparency (this layer was used to create the colored lines). Bottom layer: I just filled in the other colors underneath the other two and I was done. Note: this only worked because I started with such a relatively large sketch and shrunk it down after (something like 400%).

In Illustrator, I added all the text bubbles, which I made with a slightly stylized rectangle (rounded corners filter and a bit of stetching to make it look more interesting). I added the little swoopy pointers and bubble joins by simply creating another filled object, grouping it with the rounded rectangle, then using the Add filter, then flatten transparency. There may be a better way to do this, but those steps work fine for me.

It took me about three to four days, start to finish, but most of that was in figuring out the best techniques to get it done. I'm normally more obsessive and spend way too long making sure I color within the lines, but this time I really got sloppy because I knew it wouldn't really show.




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07/16/2007 - Yay! I got an honorable mention from Blizzard! [link]

I had a few humorous WoW sketches lying about, and I thought I should finally get around to finishing one. This one started out as a 5-panel comic, but this was the funny bit so I just cut out the extraneous four other panels.

You'll need to fullview to actually see the details (sorry).

It was just sketched out in pencil and colored in photoshop. I'm not so great with colors, and they didn't come through too well in the web version anyway. But it was nice to be working with Photoshop again - it's been a long time.

There are a few tiny funny things in the picture that I thought I'd call to your attention. On the left in the gift shelves are fire demon and hound stuffed animals, as well as a snow globe (or fire globe, really). And the female night elf is waiting in the men's room line... haha. Some people didn't get that one right off.

Afterwards I joked that there should be more restrooms - you know, one for monsters, one for undead, one for demons, one for giants.

Update 2008-06-08:
I just finished reading the first collection of The Order of The Stick... and, yeah, so he beat me to this idea. :P Meh, great minds and all...

I've been wanting to do this particular stripe painting for awhile, but I just never got around to it. I'm not good at doing "practice" paintings in general because they seem like such a waste of my very scarce time. But I needed a birthday box and I hate going shopping, so I figured it was a way to kill two birds with one stone, eh?

It turned out very nicely and I am a little sad that painted functional objects are viewed with such disinterest when compared with painted canvas, because I actually find it much more enjoyable to paint some existing object than a boring flat piece of paper. C'est la vie, I suppose.

(The scanner clipped one side, so you are missing a bit of the painting - sorry!)

I am trying to experiment with skin tones. I think this one turned out very well. I haven't scanned in the source image, but it was an old garden shot she did for a magazine - you can probably find it online if you look.

I didn't quite get the lips right (I can never get Natalie's lips right, dammnit!), but the eyes and hair turned out great, IMO.

I have been experimenting with skin tones lately. This one isn't quite what I wanted (a very pale tone with purple notes), but the original was just so very different: