Ben Hartnett

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Watercolour Test

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For a long time now I’ve been struggling with arm pain while drawing on paper, and eyestrain while painting digitally. I’ve also had trouble getting the results I want, so with all that in mind I thought I’d try the unthinkable (except it’s not unthinkable because I clearly thought it. Anyway…) and pulled out a tube of black watercolour and a couple of old brushes that had been lying around in a drawer for years. Here are the results! Nothing too fancy, just a test to see how my arm handled it (it was much better than when drawing) and to see what sort of control I could get (good enough to play with it further).

Not great art, but a useful experiment! I think I’d be a much better artist if I experimented more, just trying things out and pushing boundaries to see what different tools and methods do.

Tigers vs Butterflies – Photo Art

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Photo-based art can be a lot of fun, and after browsing through some photos taken by myself and immediate family members I decided to have a play with it again, on a bigger scale than I’ve done before. The photos were taken by my Dad, sister-in-law and younger brother as well as myself. They (the photos) were mostly shot in Thailand although the butterflies are far more likely to be found in Queensland, Australia (they’re big butterflies, I’m sure they can cross an ocean or two…)!

I put it all together in Adobe Photoshop CS3, where I found I had to do a fair bit of painting to improve some of the tiger photos since they were taken on a variety of cameras, and they definitely weren’t shot with this kind of thing in mind. It was enjoyable, and I wouldn’t mind working with photos more often!

Prints of “Tigers vs Butterflies” are available at Society6.

Shirt Design – Muscle-Building Quiz

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And now for something completely different! The new-look Threadless came up with a themed challenge called “Threadless Loves Taking Leaps”. One of the categories was for regular submitters to use a very different style to what they’d used before, which is certainly true of “Muscle-Building Quiz”! For ages now I’ve wanted to try a very simple style but my ideas just didn’t work that way. Fortunately this idea popped into my head just in time for the challenge. I did rough sketches in Photoshop and the final art in Illustrator.

Animation Degree – Anniversary Celebration

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My Dad (author of “Dewthor”) and myself in front of “Sloth Darts” (I wore the only animation-themed shirt I had: “Invention of Colour”)

My old university course, the Animation Bachelor Degree at the Queensland College of Art, had a 25th anniversary celebration last weekend. My health nearly kept me from attending at all, but thanks to my Dad I was able to get to the exhibition and part of a screening of student short films from years past.

The best part was catching up with a handful of folks I haven’t seen in many years, including John Eyley (who has been with the course from its humble beginnings), Damian Pin, and Joe Brumm.

Sow & Reap

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I wanted something to remind me of the positive or negative outcomes of my choices, however small those choices may be (and however long the results take to appear). This can apply to the major issues of life but it can also apply to things like learning a new skill. The idea of using two different types of crop came from a section in the Bible (Galatians 6:7-9), although I’ve obviously (and maybe foolishly!) tried to use some words of my own to keep things short and simple.

– Read More –>

Threadless Tee Design – Skin-Swap Safari

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Skin-Swap Safari - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

A good dose of African animal silliness for this shirt design! I don’t know where the idea came from but I thought it was fun and that was a good enough reason for me to do it. At least we all know what an elephant looks like with a baboon skin, which people have been curious about from the dawn of time (possibly). This was drawn in Photoshop.

Rapunzel in Boots

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Rapunzel in Boots

I had a couple of pleasant surprises recently: the CG animated movies “Puss in Boots” and “Tangled”. I confess I didn’t expect a lot from either of them and in some ways they met those expectations pretty much exactly, but they both had some really funny moments and some enjoyable character animation. I actually liked the character animation in “Puss in Boots” more than the “Shrek” movies, with some natural, fluid motion and subtle, character-specific body language.

“Tangled” had possibly my favourite CG human animation to date, as well as some superb timing and poses on one of the funniest characters I’ve seen for a while: Maximus the horse. Great stuff! To get the main humans so right, though, in both the subtle and the broad acting (along with appealing designs for the main two characters), well, the Disney folks really set a high standard with this movie I think. In fact, while I’ve enjoyed other CG movies more than this one in terms of their complete experience, I’m not sure that any of them have inspired me to just enjoy top-quality character animation like “Tangled” (although “The Incredibles” provides tough competition!).

I did the above sketch in TwistedBrush Pro Studio.

E-Book Cover – Dewthor

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Left:  E-book cover      Right:  1989 novel cover by Debbie Connors

“Dewthor” at Amazon

This fantasy adventure novel was first printed in 1989 as “The Fortress of Migdol”. The author (my Dad) later wrote an improved and expanded version and decided to make it available as an e-book for the Kindle. I went through various ideas, trying to play to my strengths with character-based ideas, but I ended up coming back to the same theme that Debbie Connors had used with the cover art of the original book.

Being an e-book, the new title art had to be legible in a thumbnail view, which influenced the thick lettering (done in Adobe Illustrator) as well as the strong contrast with the background.

I haven’t had much experience with drawing or painting environments and I couldn’t find good reference for the lighting conditions I was after, so I pretty much faked it! I needed the low lighting angle so the sword could cast a shadow over the landscape. The reason for the cross-shaped shadow being there (and being unrealistically large) is that there’s an allegorical side to the book, with Christian themes for those who want to read the novel that way.

Other parts of the cover are pretty accurate to their descriptions in the story, including the dam-like fortress wall and the plain sword with engraving on the blade. Hopefully I’ll get to do a cover for a sequel one day!

The picture was painted digitally at high resolution using TwistedBrush Pro Studio, mostly with a small handful of basic brushes.

Threadless Shirt Design – The Champion

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The Champion - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

Several years ago I experimented with some different drawing methods, using this one-sided ping pong game as the test subject. I have no idea where the idea came from! I’d occasionally toyed with the idea of turning it into a Threadless design but somehow didn’t quite get around to it. When the Threadless Drawing II challenge turned up it was this idea that came to mind the most.

I worked over the drawing to improve the clarity of both the concept and the  art, then added colour (always a difficult process for me, with lots of experimenting) with a textured brush in Photoshop. I’d considered painting the design from scratch for a ‘cleaner’ result but I decided to stick with the drawing theme and keep the original pencil texture as much as possible.

Moment of Change – 1-Page Comic

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This is another piece like Sloth Darts, where the journey matched the subject! For some reason I found this comic a tough nut to crack but I stuck at it. One challenge was that I wanted to fit it onto one page. While I could’ve done this by just having the stones and the puddle with some explanation, I felt that characters would help give a personal connection and make the comic more of an encouraging illustration rather than just an instructive metaphor.

There were several attempts at the comic before hitting on the final one, the main contender getting quite advanced before I abandoned it. I started the earlier one with a really rough layout, which I made some equally rough changes to (the three layouts reveal a secret about me: I’m left-handed! I usually work from right to left so my hand doesn’t cover previous art). I combined these in Photoshop.

I thought I’d try out MyPaint so I did the linework with it, designing the characters as I went. Then I shifted to TwistedBrush for the colouring, where I hit a road-block; I couldn’t seem to picture the background! A pro would probably make something up without even blinking, which I can do sometimes, but not this time. The result? I abandoned it entirely (I also gave up on MyPaint. I liked the feel of it but it was lacking some important tools and the brushes were weird when scaled up. It’s changed since then, though).

An environment came to mind along with an altered layout. I experimented drawing the final linework on paper (again designing the characters as I went along) with pen and then with pencil (which I haven’t shown here because it’s just more lineart), gave up on that, then scanned the mixed results into TwistedBrush where I retraced the line art and coloured it. The rest (such as speech balloons and text) was added in Photoshop. There are things I wanted to adjust further, and I like some parts of the earlier version more than the later one, but I decided to combat my perfectionism by calling it finished.

 

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