Ben Hartnett

Artwork & Play

animals

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.

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.

Sloth Darts Remake

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digital painting of sloth playing darts

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.

Pet Portrait – Toby

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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.

Threadless Tee – Two Wings and a Prayer

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Two Wings and a Prayer digital painting

Edit (August 15, 2011) – I’ve had this design removed from Threadless so I can have more freedom to use it outside of the Threadless world.

My second and last entry into the Threadless 10th anniversary tee shirt challenge. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while. A year or two ago I saw a photo in a book called “Miracles for Life!” (by Jonathan Krause). The photo was of a father and daughter in Tanzania. The daughter had hydrocephalus, but in the photo it was the father who seemed to carry the pain; the daughter lay completely happy and trusting in his lap.

I soon remembered the photo when the bird idea came to mind, and tried to let it influence the heart of the picture. The design doesn’t have the added context of serious illness, but the birds allow an extra bit of symbolism that’s thousands of years old and which possibly comes from the humble chicken! It’s used in the Bible like this: “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust…” – Psalm 91:4.

The picture started with pencil sketches but ended up all digital, painted in Photoshop with the basic hard/soft round brushes using a Wacom Bamboo Fun. There are some subtle colours in it which were kept on separate layers in case it gets screenprinted.

Strange Mountain Muster

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Digital painting of unusual mountain muster

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.

Sloth Darts

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Sloth Darts digital painting for Parka blog competition

‘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

Edit – Take a look at the new version of Sloth Darts!

“Invention of Colour” – Printed at Threadless!

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Invention of Colour Threadless t shirt design

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:

Geeksugar

The Blot

Shirtoid

T-Shirts Mose Likes

Meme

WeHeartIt

Old Pencil Animation – Oska e-Cards

Animation, Blog, Cartoon, Digital, Traditional , , , , , , , 0 Comment

Edit: These links seem to be dead now. I’m leaving the post here anyway, as a reminder to myself that I actually did these animations!

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

Wedding Anniverary – Husband

Wedding Anniversary – Wife

Grandparents’ Day – Groovy Grandpa

Grandparents’ Day – Groovy Grandma

Mother’s Day – Koala

Romance – Koala Cupid

Romance – “Bee Mine”

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!

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