Characters
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.
“Invention of Color” is back in stock as a 2nd edition! Grab it while you can , or be uncool forever. Maybe!
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.
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 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.
‘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.
These are my last two pieces of art for the Intense Titanium newsletter for the time being. Both pictures were done in Twistedbrush Open Studio at twice the resolution you see here. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to work with these folks in the future, but under their new name: Vurge Jewellery.
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.
This is either a deeply meaningful work describing through visual metaphor the complex nature of the human condition, or it’s a piece of silliness with no meaning to it whatsoever. You decide! This design was done in Photoshop, using a Wacom Bamboo Fun, and took too long. It was pretty fun, though!
Months of doing just a few minutes here and there and a new design is finally done! The process started as digital sketches, then went to pencil sketches, then pen drawings, then colouring in Adobe Photoshop, then conversion to vectors with Vector Magic, then tweaking in Adobe Illustrator. I also received advice from friendly people at Threadless. You can see their comments, and different versions of the design, in the design critique.
More art for the Intense Titanium website. The first and third pictures were done in Twistedbrush, while the second was drawn in pencil then coloured in Photoshop. I’m fortunate in having a bit of freedom in how I approach the pictures, although I still need to do them fairly quickly (about an hour from concept to upload, generally). So the first puts the priority on mood, the second on a joke, and the third on design.