Digital Colour
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.
Left: E-book cover Right: 1989 novel cover by Debbie Connors
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!