Evening Goo... or something

Anyone else's opinion aside, my take on this is as follows: A mix of a watercolor layer, a layer with a pencil/pen tool, and disaster.

Overall it's a take on a pencil/pen drawing I did in my sketchbook. One of a very few I finished in my sketchbook over the most recent long period of inactivity present in this blog. The original drawing was my personal favorite combination of black ink over pencil layout. Problem was the sense of perspective was non-existent and it fell flat and looked dull.

While I feel I did a better job with the composition and the brick walls, I honestly can't stand anything else about this. Lessons learned about color theory and getting used to working completely digital I hope. Also digital coloring is hard to tone down with complimentary colors; everything is still coming out as a high-intensity blob of color. Nevermind my red/green colorblindness kicking me in the pants... I'll find a way to at least partially overcome it yet.

On to more backlog posting...

Arid

Returning to this blog since it's been too long. The point of this was for it to function as both a portfolio and a way for me to keep myself drawing. That both has and hasn't been the case. Also helps that my last post was from right before I took my last job as a night-shift forklift driver.


My gradual return to Painter

While I carried my sketchpad with me to work for the 19 or so weeks I was at the forklifting job, I never really finished anything I started. Nothing but loose doodles as I got rustier and rustier over time. This drawing is one of the few I've taken to what I felt was a completion or stopping point for what it was. Originally it was just a loose scribble in a stack of unrelated layers to chronicle the day's drawing, but the forced perspective turned out to be a real pain in the backside for me since I hadn't done it in a while. That alone caused me to casually spend a handful of days staring at it and eventually taking it to where it is as a forced exercise to just stop the universe and troubleshoot my drawing memory.

While I wouldn't call it a resounding success or anything, it did feel good to work on it regardless of how long it took.

Random Painting #1

While I'd rather title this "NUCLEAR CHICKEN/COCK", it's a random digital painting I did back in March of this year for a draw daily thread on a forum. Not sure how long I spent on it, but the legs make me think I was watching a lot of Futurama at the time.

Minimal as it is, the background still shows more purpose than some of my earlier works, an ongoing struggle of mine caused by being a character doodler first, painter/illustrator second.

That's it for tonight. This dilapidated blog has just been given a handful more updates, in burst form as usual, but hopefully I can start updating this thing weekly or bi-weekly.

A digital painting that's dated late September '08. The painting went through a series of problems and successes, as can be seen by the guy in front, who doesn't look half bad, and the guy behind him, who looks more like a rigid joke. This piece is important because it was my first post-college painting that really highlighted my need to think through my environments better. You'd think that this would be something I wouldn't want to show off, but really, I find the opposite effect.

Truth be told, even "Random Drawing #4"'s environment needs work, but that one, admittedly and sadly, wasn't an afterthought.

Pixel Monkey

A friend wanted a company logo for a side-project of his, and he was fixated on the following citeria: 1 monkey, 1 apple and 2 sandbags. Preferably with said monkey sitting on the sandbags. The bite taken out might not have been a requirement, but I ran with it from the get-go.

It took me a week or scribbling on my tablet and in my sketchbook to even angle myself towards putting the elements together into something cohesive. I even spent a few hours just searching over Google images for pictures of monkeys and chimps while trying to decide what to do.

T-Shirt stencil

A little over a week ago I decided I wanted to try stenciling, and spent an evening flipping through my old sketchbooks trying to find an image that was thought out enough that I'd be able to re-draw it digitally and vectorize it instead of starting from scratch and having to spend even longer figuring out the light/dark details. Early on the original drawing (not pictured) popped into mind. It then took me 30-60 minutes to find which sketchbook it was in, since I couldn't remember what year it was originally done (SP06), or where over half of my sketchbooks were (garage in a filing cabinet). I spent about a day re-drawing, polishing and vectorizing the original into the above. Then I got some feedback from some friends, most of which liked it, but changed it to below when two friends had very strong opinions about not liking the simplistic background.




This became the final design when I realized the bullet holes looked better as snow, and that the black background was more dramatic. As you can see two sheets were used: 1 for the guy, and 1 for the snow/breath. Here's the first printing of the stencil on 25lb. normal printer paper--something I will never use again, it barely avoided melting when it got wet. The slipping of the registration was actually caused by the whole issue with the paper nearly melting.

Run for the Billions

Requested logo for a programming project for someone I know on EFnet. He didn't want a total rip-off of the Monopoly mascot, but he did was it to be inspired by that visual aesthetic.

This is actually not the version I submitted to him just over a year ago. That one is as follows:




You can see that the "RUN" is emphasized instead, and that was a grave mistake on my part and solely based on not wanting to warp "BILLIONS" at the time.

Thinking about whether or not it was used, I'm quite sure I actually missed his submittal deadline by nearly a whole hour. So here's a tip: if your pro bono logo artist does everything last second, don't figure that the artist will do the piece any sooner if you refuse to say when the deadline is and assume this will make he or she take it as initiative to do it hours or even days sooner.

Random Drawing #4

Drawing done mostly at a coffee shop. 2B pencil, .5mm black ballpoint pen (non-waterproof) on 9x12 60lb. sketchpad. The rough pose of the character had been done a week or two prior, but was tossed aside until earlier when I was at a coffee shop and itching to do some cross-hatching. No rulers, just an eraser pencil to guide the edges of the light beams, which is why the rest of the lines drift and change angles so much.

Photographed, 256-greyscaled and brightness/contrast adjusted.

(Was photographed because my now-ancient scanner has no Win7 drivers.)

"Ahead of it All"

A self-portrait painted digitally. Done achromatically, the second image is the color overlay used on it. While the second layer looks far from refined on its own, I still like the look of it and posted it along with.

Fish Edit

If you've used any of the Windows 7 RC's, then you'll recognize the image immediately as an edit of the default background. Alright, so fancy as the original is, it's too bright for my eyes as a background, and of the images packed with the OS, it's the only one I liked.

Rather than look around for a replacement image, or an idea to create one with, I opted to abuse filters, layer modes, and quick masks with it because I honestly do like it, but needed a darker image. Little projects like these are great excuses to mess around with tools you want more practice with. At the most basic it's an inverted color scheme with a quickmask to pluck some of the fish's highlights since the fish looked downright ugly when completely inverted.

I can't credit the original image's author because I have no idea who it was.