Tgirl WIP

My very first, free hand drawing on the Cintiq 13 hd... so far so good, though I can feel its not going to be as nearly as easy as it would have been twenty years ago. Drawing on the Cintiq compared to drawing by hand, is a bit like the difference between walking on grass and walking on ice.

Second school background

This is the finished background tile for Kalø Vig school's webpage. It took while to make, since it had to work convincingly in Firefox, Explorer and Chrome.

School backgrounds

I am currently working on some school web pages, most of which involves setting up html documents and taking photographs of school children. This is not the most artistic work, but it does have its points of interest. Here are two images I have made/am making for two different web pages. The image above is a horizontal tile, made for Sølystskolen and designed to show the sea in Kalo Vig fjord.
The pictures below are WIP images of a beach leaves tile, and will be used on a different school page. My idea is to make a tile which conveys the impression of either leaves against a darker, unfocused forest background, or a summer sky. I'll post more pictures of this tile later.

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Firebird

This is an illustration of a pheonix I did for a web page. Its the first digital painting I've done in almost two years, and hopefully marks my return to the medium. The painting was done with multiple layers, which were then compressed to create a PNG with a transparent background. The clouds were done as a seperate image. The red bird below was my first attempt. 

Fantasy maps

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These are maps made for various role playing and skirmish games. They were all drawn by hand, scanned then coloured in photoshop. The first six are loosely based on English maps from the age of Elizabeth I. The last three are loosely based on early maps of the twentieth century.

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Adventures in Art

A caricature of myself and my friend, based on a Tintin cover. Painted with photoshop of course.

Car chase update

The finished car template. It has about twenty five layers and each contains multiple objects. Some will get used as masks but others are merely guides. Since this image is a png, the background is transparent. The cockpit is empty because it has to contain the driver and his passenger and I'll paint in the details later, when I do the rendering. I'm not sure yet what the passenger will look like. I was going to have him shooting back over the rear of the car with a revolver, facing outwards, but then I realised that would make him left handed. That doesn't matter too much, except that if the passenger is meant to be Daniel Mansfield, then he can't be left handed. Another option is to have him firing back with a submachine gun, that way he could still be turned outwards and be pulling the trigger with his right hand.

Car chase

This is the first stage of an image I am working on for fun (I'm hoping its going to be a Rocketman illustration). So far all I have is a simple sketch and a vague idea of what the finished image should look like. I've found a decent reference picture of a superb car (an Alvis Special from 1935) on Wikipedia (so no copyright infringement) and I've used it to make the set of templates you see above. The idea being to eventually use each vector shape made in illustrator as a mask for painting in photoshop. Once I've finshed the template, I'll have to work out the rest of the image, and draw the people riding in the car. The idea is to have one them driving (of course) and the other firing a gun at another car behind them (of course). I haven't quite decided about the back ground yet, but the car is meant to be travelling at very high speed so the road and back ground will have to convey this.

Oh, and the whole thing should have a 1930's feel to it!

DSB illustrations

These are two 'fast' wargaming illustrations I did for one of my other blogs. They are both hand drawn line art, vectored in Illustrator then rendered in Photoshop just like mos of my previous figurative digital paintings. At some point I'll make the next step I think and start doing fast, fully digital illustrations for my games. The best part about images like this is I odn't have to please any one but myself.

Post apoc city square WIP

Digitial painting of Århus city hall in a post apocolyptic setting. So far only the base colours and composition are in place. I did this in photoshop using the lasoo tool and a photograph for reference.

Forest background image

This is an experimental digital painting designed for use as a 'flexible' background image for a web page. The idea is as you scroll down the page, the back ground image shifts in perspective. An example page can be seen here.

Gaia WIP

My Father's death put a big damper on my enthusiasm of late, so this painting got shunted into oblivion. The idea was simple enough, its a figurative study, based on the idea of the Earth Goddess. Its gone kind of stale now, so I don't know if it will ever get finished, but in the mean time here is the painting presented as a work in progress

Medusa revisited

Currently just playing about. Trying to get the hang of actual virtual painting... cogs and abstract textures are one thing. Figurative painting is a whole other. Thank goodness for online tutorials! I used to think I was quite good with photoshop, but the more I learn the more I realise how much I don't know. The one on the left was done first, its painted around the original sketch. The right hand painting was done without the original sketch. I want to do a lot more figurative free hand painting like this, so this is practice.

Previous examples of this idea can be seen here

JRC-1138 background tile part 2

I've now finished most of the textures and I'm working on the shadows. The image above shows some shadows which have since been removed. The biggest problem is getting the various layers to mesh without causing double shadows. A lesser problem has been distractions caused by work, and the summer weather which lures one outside (and makes drawing with a wacom rather a sweaty affair). I've still not decided whether or not I'll make a second 1800 pixel wide tile.

JRC-1138 background tile part 1

The initial template, about half way finished

What began as an experiment to offset a single cog, soon became an entire cog assembly

Things are heating up now, both literally as the summer approaches and figuratively as I spend more and more time playing with my new computer and wacom tablet. Drawing on the computer never really appealled to me as I had so many other projects that were more interesting, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to draw 'third hand' as drawing on the computer seemed to me. The fact of the matter is, I am becoming quite fond of my wacom and I've even taken to drawing things in Illustrator. Since Wednesday (26th May) I've been painting a thematic background for my primary blog. In previous attempts at making a tiled back ground, I'd floundered, mucking about with layered montages and drawing with a mouse. Now, I've made my shapes in CS4-AI, painted them, and made the tile in individual layers using the offset tool in CS4-PS. The result is very satisfactory, though I'm not finished yet.

The initial tile design was just going to be three cogs on a 900x900 pixel tile, but this developed into a complex pattern of interlocking chains. This then turned out to be unfeasable however as I'd not fully understood the nature of the repeating pattern. Instead of two chains I settled instead for one and I also began to add a lot of other curious details, inscriptions, a gauge and various feed lines. The idea became to create a repeating 'machine pattern' of some complexity, without losing the sense of an actual machine, though with a touch og age and decay about it.

My primary inspiration, though I have deliberatly not consulted any of his pictures since I began this project, was Oscar Chichoni.

Sabadilla

Character study for a role playing game character. Meant to be a Half-Elf, she has some Human characteristics and some Elven. I'm using this project to get used to working with my new computer. I've already finished one illustration on it, and now I'm using my free time to develop my skill with the wacom.

By Night WIP

Yet another attempt at digital painting, this time with some moderate success, but still finding it slow and painful. This is the second, larger Cafe Kaffegal facade image, its the same size as the Hans & Greta picture, 90x60cm, at 300 dpi, but differs in that it is not predrawn by hand and then scanned. This image is a pure digital painting. The four images above show the first attempt, with roughly six hours progress before I decided to start again due to the perspective being too skewed. The problem, as ever is diagonal lines which I find very difficult because I'm used to simply turning paper to accomidate my hand.

The second attempt in progress. Having learned from my mistakes, I managed to do in two hours what had previously taken me almost two days.

Edit; 8th April. I haven't had much time to work on this picture, but its coming along slowly. Things may pick up soon as I am in the process of buying a new home computer, one big enough to handle files of this size. In the mean time I've been chipping away at this when ever I've had some spare time. Since my last edit I've added some figures to the cafe interior and I've begun to work on the exterior wall base colours. The top half of the image has to be much darker than the bottom, giving the impression of light and jovility contrasting with the night time darkness. I may add more figures, possibly a guy lighting a cigarette outside in the rain. I haven't decided yet.

Cafe Kaffegal facade

One of my upcoming projects (By Night) is the facade of a building which houses a local cafe called Cafe Kaffegal (Kaffegal translates to 'crazy about coffee'), but a smaller monotone version was needed in a hurry so I did this one by hand then scanned it and added the tones in Adobe Illustrator.

Hans & Greta

The Wacom adventure continues, this time with a big poster sized image, as a 300 dpi PSD file this image takes up 353mb. As before, I'm still playing it safe, drawing the image first by hand then scanning it at high resolution. In this case, the drawing is a four part composite; the background, the witch, the children and the foreground. Each scanned seperately and then placed into the image using the free transfer tool.

Adding base colours. There is quite a lot of compression in these examples as they have been considerably reduced in size and saved in Jpeg format. Below is the finished version which due to side tracks, was posted 26th May.


Below is a web graphic version, heavily 'vectored' and with a slightly different composition. This was the original brief, the poster version is just me playing with my Wacom.


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