Illustration
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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!
Time passes so quickly! Three more months, marked by one Intense Titanium picture per month. Each time I’m given a general theme, and occasionally a specific ring, earring or pendant model is mentioned which I include in the art. The software used: Twistedbrush Open Studio. Timeframe: roughly one hour each from concept to upload. The thumbnails show the pictures at the size they are actually used at.
“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:
More Threadless tomfoolery! This is quite different in style to my previous efforts but is more like the non-shirt illustration art I’d like to play with in future. I used Twistedbrush Open Studio to digitally paint over a scanned sketch.
Three months’ worth of Intense Titanium art. As usual I tried to do each in about an hour, though I didn’t always manage it! The first one was early marketing leading up to Christmas and I tried to give a sense of celebration that wasn’t too specific to a particular culture or climate (although it’s obviously not too cold!). The second was the primary Christmas one and was to include a gentle reminder of what Christmas is supposed to be about; the ultimate gift. The third was to represent the idea of exploring new ‘looks’ for a new year.
The three pictures were painted in Twistedbrush Open Studio. I didn’t use pencil sketches this time, choosing to go 100% digital. The pictures are shown at the size they’re actually used, although I paint them a bit bigger.