My entry for Parka’s second contest: “Unusual Cowboys”. The standard of entries is already high, but the subjects (so far) are fun enough that it’s kind of like art playtime and winning is secondary! Follow the link and check out some of the other entries. There’s some good stuff there.
The process: I started with a pencil sketch of a lemon being chased on a desert plain with Monument Valley-style mountains in the background. After looking at some reference photos, I liked the mood of morning mountain musters so I switched to that, and red seemed to stand out better than yellow so the lemon became a tomato-like thing. For the final painting, I used a Wacom Bamboo Fun and hopped back and forth between Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Twistedbrush Open Studio.
Tags: animals, cartoons, colour, digital painting, illustration, landscape, photoshop, realistic, twistedbrush
‘Parka’, a noted art book reviewer at Amazon, decided to run a small art competition with the theme “Animals in Competitive Sports” on his blog. I like his site so I decided to enter with an action-packed sloth picture. Maybe I should’ve gone for something more dynamic but this one was fun anyway! I used Photoshop for the intial colour work, Twistedbrush Open Studio for the painterly stuff, then back to Photoshop for a bit of detailing. I used a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet. I’m not sure how long it took; maybe 4-5 hours. Unusually for me, I didn’t use a pencil sketch.
Parkablogs.com – Animals in Competitive Sports
Tags: animals, colour, digital painting, illustration, photoshop, realistic, twistedbrush
Time passes so quickly! Three more months, marked by one Intense Titanium picture per month. Each time I’m given a general theme, and occasionally a specific ring, earring or pendant model is mentioned which I include in the art. The software used: Twistedbrush Open Studio. Timeframe: roughly one hour each from concept to upload. The thumbnails show the pictures at the size they are actually used at.
Tags: colour, digital painting, illustration, intense titanium, twistedbrush
“Do Not Enter” is a Threadless collaboration with Evan Ferstenfeld (known as Frickinawesome at Threadless and Emptees). He did the brainy stuff while I did the arty stuff! He wanted to play with a concept that uses both sides of a shirt and I wanted to draw a silly number of classic villains, so it all worked out pretty nicely! He’s an old hand at tees while I’m still pretty new, so there was a fair bit of communicating (online. We live in different countries) as we tried to get the most out of the idea.
The art was sketched up with pencil then scanned into Photoshop, where it was finished off with a total of eight colours. Shading and extra colours were created by partially erasing colour, so if it ends up getting printed it will still only need eight inks to produce the full range of colours in the design.
You can find Evan online at Threadless, Emptees and his shop.
Artist Santiago (santo76 at Theadless, Emptees) kindly did the fancy Threadless presentation.
Tags: cartoons, colour, drawing, illustration, pencil, t shirt, threadless
Invention of Colour product page
Note: The model in the photo isn’t me (I have shorter hair. And I’m male).
Good news for me! My t-shirt design “Invention of Colour” has been printed, and released for sale at Threadless.com with a change of shirt colour. If you like, take a look at my first post on the design.
Update: The first (but hopefully not the last) print run has sold out in all male sizes and there are just a few left in the female sizes. In a common Threadless practice, some people have posted photos (on the product page) of themselves wearing the shirt. Maybe I’ll have the chance to get used to it, but at the moment it’s all enjoyably weird!
Thanks to people who’ve mentioned the design on their sites. Some examples:
Tags: animals, Animation, black and white, cartoons, colour, drawing, illustration, pencil, t shirt, threadless
More Threadless tomfoolery! This is quite different in style to my previous efforts but is more like the non-shirt illustration art I’d like to play with in future. I used Twistedbrush Open Studio to digitally paint over a scanned sketch.
Tags: animals, colour, digital painting, illustration, landscape, t shirt, threadless, twistedbrush
Three months’ worth of Intense Titanium art. As usual I tried to do each in about an hour, though I didn’t always manage it! The first one was early marketing leading up to Christmas and I tried to give a sense of celebration that wasn’t too specific to a particular culture or climate (although it’s obviously not too cold!). The second was the primary Christmas one and was to include a gentle reminder of what Christmas is supposed to be about; the ultimate gift. The third was to represent the idea of exploring new ‘looks’ for a new year.
The three pictures were painted in Twistedbrush Open Studio. I didn’t use pencil sketches this time, choosing to go 100% digital. The pictures are shown at the size they’re actually used, although I paint them a bit bigger.
Tags: cartoons, color, colour, digital painting, illustration, intense titanium, twistedbrush
WARNING: Although these animations are all family-friendly, the business has added other markets since my time there (the site is now blocked by some Internet filters) so keep that in mind if you follow the links below.
General Silliness – Gullibility Test
Grandparents’ Day – Groovy Grandpa
Grandparents’ Day – Groovy Grandma
I used to work at “Oska” in Brisbane, where I did old-fashioned pencil animation, cleanup, inbetweening, and occasional basic character design. Some of these animations are still online, which was a fun discovery for me! They’re not classics of animation craft but I have good memories of the work and the workers. The above animations are ones which I’m almost completely sure I did, but less sure with some than others! I did all the pencil drawing stuff and none of the digital tracing or colouring. I’d like to animate again. Storyboarding is fun, too. Actually, most things to do with animation are enjoyable… or at least they were where I studied and worked!
Tags: animals, Animation, cartoons, colour, digital colour, drawing, pencil
Another strange Threadless submission up for has finished scoring! I got past a score of 3 again which I’m very happy with. This design started on paper and ended up being remade from scratch as vectors (in Adobe Illustrator). Once again the critique process helped me along.
Thanks to SingulariTee for noticing my design (along with some other quirky ones) and writing good stuff about it!
Tags: cartoons, color, colour, t shirt, threadless
My second Threadless submission is up for scoring has finished scoring, with a very satisfying result! The critique process was really positive, so take a look at that if you want to see the journey of this little picture. The background was drawn with pencil on paper and altered digitally. The characters started as pencil on paper and ended up as vectors (in Adobe Illustrator) with some digital painting in Photoshop for the shading. The colour parts were vector.
Thanks to Super Punch for linking to my design, alongside another design called “Iwo Jumpa” (check out the number of votes on that one!)
Tags: black and white, digital colour, drawing, pencil, t shirt, threadless
This comic page was done in late 2008. It was drawn on paper and coloured in Photoshop. I actually drew it back to front initially. I’d read that it’s good to see a mirror image of art to help reveal flaws. Good advice! My way of applying it wasn’t so good: I drew the page layout on the computer, flipped it horizontally, then composed my rough comic page based on the reversed layout. Then I turned the page over on my lightbox so that it was back to normal and drew the clean line drawing on the back of the rough! It was a brain-bender and didn’t seem to help much. I recommend sticking with the occasional mirror check!
Tags: color, colour, Comics, digital color, digital colour
This was my first submission to the threadless.com t-shirt design competition site. This design was entered in a “Geeks” contest as well as the ongoing, unthemed Threadless contests. The score was low but the educational level was high, and overall I was happy enough. The scores are out of 5, but I haven’t yet discovered a score over 4 and a lot of designs have been selected for printing which scored not much over 2. All part of the education!
Tags: color, colour, digital color, digital colour, t shirt, threadless