Friday, November 4, 2011

Aeon Flux



I've drawn her a few times now, and I still struggle. I'm sure most people find it tricky to handle those wiry, elongated proportions, but tall figures are hard for me at the best of times. My Aeon is still way too short. Guess a runt like me just doesn't empathise ;)

Marker with Photoshop colours.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Friday, September 23, 2011

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Monday, September 19, 2011

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Commission Inks





Now I just need to apply my 'one colour fits all' process.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Sunday, August 28, 2011

L'orrore dei Morti Viventi

Another entry for the Screeners group's 2011 Epic Movie Poster Contest on DeviantArt.

A mock poster for a fictitious 1975 B-grade Italian film about Roman gladiators fighting zombies. How the hell could I pass that up?

Shame about the 'fictitious' bit; this is movie I'd love to see. I wonder if Robert Rodriguez has anything in the pipeline at the moment...

(I don't speak Italian, but unless I'm mistaken the title translates as 'The Horror of the Living Dead'.)

Painter 8 and Photoshop CS2.


Sunday, August 14, 2011

Obsidian Blade complete



-

Obsidian Blade

I sorely need some practice using pixel paint, so I thought I'd throw a few pieces together. And since I haven't been doing nearly enough sword & sorcery stuff lately I thought this'd be a good chance to remedy that. And I figured, while I'm at it, I might as well kill two birds with one stone and enter this. Far as I can tell, it's a mock book/film treatment; the story doesn't actually exist, it was just thrown together for the contest (but please correct me if I'm wrong).

Film posters aren't really my thing; my mind has always been more geared to book covers. So I'm not sure how well this works in it's designated application, but what the hell, it's always fun to try something new.

Anyway, I thought it might be neat to document my progress and show it here. The whole piece was done digitally, mostly in Painter 8 (hey, I like old-fashioned tools).




















Monday, July 18, 2011

Friday, July 1, 2011

Outlaw



The lines were inked on paper with a brush. The colours are all digital, and believe it or not, that was the tricky part.

The first colour version is all just flat colours. I laid it down in a matter of minutes, and I like it, but I got to thinking that I'd like to really push the retro look by using halftone . Then I decided it'd be fun to see if I could get it to look the way I wanted using only halftone. It's odd that once halftone was used simply because it was the best option at the time, yet now crazy buggers like me go to great lengths trying to replicate the effect. All in the name of nostalgia.

I've added really basic halftone areas to images before, but this was the first time I'd tried to layer it to create the illusion of certain shades and colours. Like I said, the first version took a matter of minutes. The second took hours. Hours of research and experimenting. But I'm thrilled with the result, and if I ever attempt it again (which is more than likely) hopefully I'll have a better idea of how to do it, thus reducing the time factor immensely.

I won't go into the details of how halftone works; I think that link above gives a pretty clear and concise explanation for those interested. Needless to say, there are only four colours used in this: Cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

The animation below (click on the last image) is by no means an indication of the actual progression during the construction of the piece. I was constantly jumping back and forth between layers, adding layers, deleting layers, and moving things around to get the desired effect. It's amazing how little it takes to completely alter the illusion. Even something as simple as switching the order of two colour/halftone layers can change the resulting illusory colour/tone. The way I've structured the animation is simply to give the clearest indication of how all the layers work together.












Sunday, June 19, 2011

Sydney Supanova 2011

Well, we survived our first con.

It was exhausting, and I'm glad it's over. Sales sucked, but it sounds like no one did particularly well in that department, and we did learn a lot from the experience. So I guess when all's said and done it was probably all worthwhile. We saw some really cool (and really weird) stuff, and met some really cool people (most notably Nikki and Chris of The Impossible Place). Will we do it again? Probably. Might even visit another state.

Below is day one, before the con opened. Sammi (all dolled up to push the book's noir theme) and I were already a little strung out after a frazzled Friday spent collecting last minute necessities and chasing up overdue deliveries. Perhaps a little of it rubbed off on Nathan. Not that it bothered me; I was perfectly happy for our cash manager to look as intimidating as possible. I think the star of the show was Sammi's bright red Valentine typewriter. Having that at the con was great; it meant we could both contribute to sketches :)



Day 2. The reclusive artist of Valentine's Dei and a less intimidating but more attractive cash manager in Lauren.



And some of the stuff we scribbled across the weekend.







Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Playing Frankenstein - Experiment 4 - Conclusion

Well here's Susan, a week late. Apologies for that.

The game's resurrection has turned out to be a bit of a non-event, so I'm going to put it on hold. Maybe it'll work better once I get some more activity on the blog. In the meantime I'll continue to post random bits and pieces, hopefully on a fairly regular basis. In the last couple of weeks I've spent most of my time editing, so haven't been drawing much.

Susan reads while tanning.
She lies in poison ivy.
Luckily, she's a metallic robot.
Several fey massage her.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Playing Frankenstein - Experiment 5

I haven't had a chance to finish my drawing of Susan yet, but I should get it finished during the week. In the meantime, on with the game...

The rules:

1. Five words or less.
2. Complete sentences.
3. One entry per player.
4. Present tense.
5. Compound words acceptable so long as they appear in the dictionary.
6. Focus on given character (no addition of third uncles etc).
7. Avoid contradicting previous entries.
8. Only five entries after Tenzil Kem's (subsequent entries will be deleted).

(For an extended explanation of the game see HERE.)

Tenzil Kem proclaims:

Athena dresses in bunny suits