Blog Fail

Following on from the last blog post... (WHINE ALERT)... I've neglected posting here because I'm not sure how relevant 'searching for a new style' is for me at the moment....

After finishing "11.04" - the coffin - I really struggled for a couple of weeks to even start working on something new! I got some ace feedback from people and was really pleased with the piece. I think that kind of put extra pressure on the next thing... so I couldn't get anything going!! Cue, self critical soul searching & work avoidance...gah! One of the things that had come up was that a few people had said that they liked my 'new style'... or I'd 'found my style'... and I was surprised how much that worried me :) Firstly, it kind of negates this site or the idea behind it... if I've already found a new style! But actually it started me thinking about the whole notion of having 'a set style' ... After all, I started this blog because I was worried about being stuck within the 'doodle' style.

So at the moment I'm not sure about the legitimacy of blogging here - at least in it's current form. I'm slowly realising that maybe I'm not interested in finding a style - I'm fortunate enough to not have to earn a living from the work I'm making, so why restrict it?! It's much more fun at the moment to experiment with as much stuff as I can... I can't get bored with it then :)

The latest thing was a slight return to a Posca/doodle style but with a bit more planning than in the past. Really enjoyed working in a single colour & finding a way to make that work....

Cough

It's been a while since I posted... Reason number 1, I was asked to participate in the launch of www.happyjourneycollective.com and I had to keep that secret until the launch - so that was a chunk of time!

There's not really much to tell about the process for this one - it was really a mixture of the techniques used in The Happy Trumpeters & Gone! that I'd made previously. Process-wise, I found a lovely little technique for getting the rough textures looking slightly different from previous work.

Normally, when adding shadow-texture details I would 'paint in' using the wacom, normally on a 20% opacity/multiply layer. This time round I used a solid colour for the shadows and details. Here I selected the face layer and created a new layer on top of it - took my solid colour and quickly brushed with a textured brush, quite heavily. I then played with the brush settings for the Eraser tool and took away most of the applied shadow brushwork. Using a textured brush for the eraser and working backwards in this way, gave me a much rougher/looser finish ... pretty effective methinks! :)

Gawn!

Gawn!

Posted using ShareThis

Texture nation

Finished up on this illo after it taking a while longer than expected! I have to say I'm really happy with the outcome - especially in contrast to the mammoth Trumpeters project. I think the simplicity is really successful & the textures are just about right. I'm reckoning that this only took 2 hours to sketch and then redraw in illustrator and then perhaps 6-8 hours of finishing (!) in Photoshop.

I've had quite a few questions from people about the texturing and how it's achieved so I thought I'd share a more detailed process description to clarify things in the hope that it helps some fellow arty types out :)

Step 1 - Composition

As covered in a previous post, this is how I'll be starting almost every piece from now on, start with small thumbnails to get the composition exactly right. It gives you more confidence in the piece from the start!

Step 2 - Into Illustrator

Pull in the scanned thumbnail and start tracing! In my case, I like to keep most of the shapes on separate layers to keep things flexible. I really like using the Blob brush in CS4 but for this illo I wanted more angular shapes so I stuck more to the Pen tool... Once the shapes are pretty much 'right' I export the document to a Photoshop PSD to retain the layers. I pop back to illustrator when I need more shapes but now it's time for a lot of Photoshop work. You can see that the colours are already pretty close to the final image but I'm not really worrying about that at this point.

Step 4 - Photoshop texturing and finishing

Personally, I'm not keen on how clean the finish is with vector images so I know the major work is going to happen in Photoshop.

Firstly, I want to break up the shape edges to make them look as natural as possible. It's quite laborious but I like to do this by 'hand drawing' ALL of the shape edges with a Wacom and Photoshops brilliant brushes...

Generally, I like colours to stay solid - so I have the brushes set so that the Wacom pressure only effects the 'width' of the stroke - NOT opacity or other stuff.

I start with a good natural finish brush. I then play with the parameters in the Brushes palette... As mentioned, set the Shape Dynamics to "pen pressure" to get the variation you want with the Wacom. I also like to add a little bit of 'Size Jitter' to add random bits outside of my control and I tend to make it a bit more haphazard by adding a fair amount of 'Scatter' here too - The beauty of this palette is that you can just PLAY and see a preview of what you're going to get.

I add on a 'Texture' ... I'm not sure exactly what can be achieved with these yet but they help get the feel I want.

The final parameter I rely on is 'Dual Brush'... It lets you add another brush to the one you're using to get really good natural effects. PLAY with this :)

Actually, what I'm doing is trying to take away a lot of the 'accuracy' that makes digital work so obvious.

Once I'm happy with the brush effect I simply trace over the edges of shapes I've imported from Illustrator. This may seem like a long-winded way of doing things - Ai custom brushes can do this at the click of a button! - but the finish is so much more 'natural' like this.

On this piece there are some subtle shading lines within the shapes too - I use the brushes here too - simply select the shape, pick a slightly darker hue than the one being painted on, create a new layer on top of it and set to about 20% opacity... and paint away...

Now, the final 'environmental' finishing textures. This stuff is made up of lots of scanned textures, overlayed, coloured, with different layer effects (mutiply, screen, opacities). It's a good idea to have a library of your own scanned textures - they're quite fun to make too... I used 5 or 6 different scans like this on the final illo:

It's a good idea to have these in simple black and white, it makes them easier to colour up properly inside your document.

Then it's all about adjusting colours, hand finishing/erasing textures and burning stuff in.

And that's about it! I hope that makes some sort of sense... apologies for the HUGE post, I didn't expect it to be that long :D

Feel free to drop me a line if I haven't covered something you wanted to know...

Sketches

Just a few sketches I squeezed out yesterday. I'm unsure what to work on at the moment, I might do some more sketches? I think I'm a bit intimidated by how long the last one took to do so I'm finding difficult to pick one to do...

This last "Fries attacked by mayo" one is the most fully formed - I've had this idea for ages but it's still leaving me unsatisfied... Anyway, I'll see what the evening brings :)