Drawing
“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 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.
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.
“Do Not Enter” is a Threadless collaboration with Evan Ferstenfeld (known as Frickinawesome). He did the brainy stuff while I did the arty stuff! He wanted to play with a concept that uses both sides of a shirt and I wanted to draw a silly number of classic villains, so it all worked out pretty nicely! He’s an old hand at tees while I’m still pretty new, so there was a fair bit of communicating (online. We live in different countries) as we tried to get the most out of the idea.
The art was sketched up with pencil then scanned into Photoshop, where it was finished off with a total of eight colours. Shading and extra colours were created by partially erasing colour, so if it ends up getting printed it will still only need eight inks to produce the full range of colours in the design.
You can find Evan online at Threadless and his shop.
Artist Santiago (santo76 at Threadless) kindly did the fancy Threadless presentation.
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:
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!
My second Threadless submission is up for scoring has finished scoring, with a very satisfying result! The critique process was really positive, so take a look at that if you want to see the journey of this little picture. The background was drawn with pencil on paper and altered digitally. The characters started as pencil on paper and ended up as vectors (in Adobe Illustrator) with some digital painting in Photoshop for the shading. The colour parts were vector.
Thanks to Super Punch for linking to my design, alongside another design called “Iwo Jumpa” (check out the number of votes on that one!)
This portrait was drawn from photographic references on very smooth, white paper. Not the best choice of paper when it comes to pencil stuff but it worked out okay!
This drawing was finished in December 2008. I’d planned to use it as a first step in the process of finding a good colouring technique. I was going to reproduce the same image in colour in both traditional and digital forms. This picture was the first thing that came to mind which had a variety of materials in it, including smoke, shiny and dull metals, grass, sky, and so on.
I ended up thinking through the various media combinations I was considering and decided that none of them would work as a long-term technique for the style I wanted, so this drawing is all there is of the series! I think it took about five hours in several small sessions (excluding the initial blue pencil rough). I used a 2B mechanical pencil and a black Polychromos pencil.
I’ve had a picture in mind for quite a while. It’s of a man walking uphill while dragging all sorts of heavy and painful things behind him. The picture is in colour, with heaps of detail including things which aren’t obvious at first, such as parts of the load pulling at the man’s skin and so on. I started sketching it, and it all seemed too hard! So I placed a sheet of A4 over my rough sketch on the lightbox, pulled out my Pentel brush pen (which I had no particular intention of using again), and came up with this simple, black and white little picture. I confess it was rather nice to keep loose and simple and get a result in minutes instead of hours. Both kinds of art have their satisfaction. I may do the ‘proper’ version of the idea one day but it doesn’t matter so much now.
More art for Intense Titanium (see the previous post). In case you haven’t guessed, the theme for this one was Valentine’s Day. I used some photo reference for this coloured pencil drawing, both for the rose and the ring (although I stylised the rose a bit). A look is still being developed for the art, and it will probably be a fairly organic process. Bolder colour work will be a probable next step. The picture is shown at the size it was used at.