“Invention of Color” is back in stock as a 2nd edition! Grab it while you can , or be uncool forever. Maybe!

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.

“Dewthor” at Amazon

The original cover:

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.

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.

I’ve finally got some artwork available for online purchase in a variety of forms, through two print-on-demand sites: Zazzle and Society6.

Zazzle tends to focus on an amazing variety of products and styles and the ability to customize items, so that’s the place to go if you want heaps of options and a good quality result. Society6 aims for even higher quality, on a narrower range of item types (especially art prints, including stretched canvases).

So far I’ve been impressed with both places, and not a week goes by without me cheering up my workspace with the Zazzle mug you can see in the picture (believe it or not, that smiley face design took as long to do as some of my fancier digital paintings!).

Another bit of teamwork between myself and the thinker Evan Ferstenfeld. It may not be a scientifically accurate depiction of space exploration but I like it! It was fun to play with the idea of adding a glow ink to it as well. It was another good experience and I’m happy with the design, so let’s see what it’s future brings!

It’s the same as the old one, but different! It was also a very slow process, with a little bit here and a little bit there… much like a sloth, in other words! Some minor things had bothered me slightly about the original Sloth Darts, so I decided to increase the size and fine-tune it a bit. I ended up painting over the whole picture!

Process: Though I’d used TwistedBrush for some of the original one, the remake was done entirely with Photoshop. I can’t remember why I did that. The brushes I used were mostly the really basic round ones, and I tidied up some of the blending with the smudge tool.

It’s finally here: a remake of the popular but unprinted “Do Not Enter”! After a lot more communication with the brain of Evan Ferstenfeld, the two-sided design has become one-sided, the level of scariness (and the number of characters) has been increased, and the colouring technique has been changed. We managed to get it done in time for the Threadless “Horror III” design challenge. Strangely enough, I’m not a fan of horror but it can be great source material for some silly shenanigans (does anyone else use the word ‘shenanigans’?)!

Big thanks to Reags for doing the Threadless submission’s Flash presentation!

Check out Evan’s online store.

Edit – I’ve removed the technical notes from the post and added a more detailed version to the tutorial section: Shirt design process.

A painting, with real paint! I did this quite a while ago but it wasn’t exactly cheerful so I delayed posting it. I’d been wanting to paint on wood for some time, so after the picture came to mind I a piece of 435mm x 240mm pine, then prepared it with a textured primer to try and enhance the wood grain (which worked, kind of). Finally I pulled out some haggard old brushes I’ve owned (and abused) for years, plus some “Jo Sonja’s Artist’s Gouache”. I didn’t know if that was a good brand or not (I still don’t) but I had some, so I used it. For the obsessively curious, the colours were: Carbon Black, Titanium White, Paynes Grey, Pthalo Green, and Burgundy. A friend took a photo of the finished painting, and I altered the contrast and sharpness in Photoshop. I added the text there as well.

Why the words from Psalm (song) 69? Well, that part came after the painting. I once read a complaint that people usually make posters with the nice Psalms from the Bible and avoid the less pleasant ones. I thought this picture was ripe for a few depressing words so I scoured the Psalms for something suitable. I had quite a few options to choose from! The ‘word-picture’ of the flooded soul stood out as connecting best with my ‘picture-picture’, so that’s the verse I chose.

A bit of geek humour for people who enjoy science fiction and fantasy. The initial idea was to parody those video game characters that can carry an impossibly large amount of items in their inventory but then I got a bit carried away myself! There were another couple of movies, tv series and video games I wanted to reference but couldn’t find a way to do it. Oh well, I had fun with the stuff I did manage to squeeze in! I did a pencil sketch for the character then did all the finished art in Photoshop.

It’s good to get out the coloured pencils and paper again! I tried different brands than I’ve used before: coloured Stonehenge paper and Prismacolor Lightfast pencils. There’s a nice moment in drawing a pet portrait (or any portrait) when it stops being layers of colour and starts becoming a friendly face! Then the focus can be on personality instead of technical details, although the technical side can be satisfying as well.

‘Life stuff’ has kept me away from art for a bit, but here’s something new at last! Threadless had a design challenge going, with the theme “Character”. The goal was to develop a fun character that could also be made into a costume. Unusually for me, my entry was done entirely digitally from sketch through to completion. I used Photoshop CS3 and a Wacom Bamboo Fun, using the hard round brush.