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.

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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Wacom sketch 1

This is only a doodle, but its essentially the first thing I've ever drawn on my recently aquired wacom board. Its pretty much naff, but using the device is like learning how to draw all over again, only this time with experience. The biggest drawbacks so far are the full arm movements for the bigger areas, and drawing diagonals which are amazingly difficult to control.

The experience reminds me of the first time I used an airbrush.. That was also a mysterious and expensive device which promised wonders if only I could get the hang of it. The difference is, with all the masks and scalpel work, an airbrush takes a long time to use, where as this is much quicker by far. I'll post more as I learn.

Beastmen sketches

Inspired by my friends role playing game, these are based loosely on the Broo from Runequest (very loosely since I haven't played Runequest since I was 14 and I don't remember anything about it)

Hunters

This, and the two images below are inspired by 'The Hobbit' by JRR Tolkien. They are part of a planned series of images which just got more and more ambitious as time went by. Originally I'd planned to do ten images, all the same size (62 x 44cm) but in the end I only made three such images and got side tracked into creating a massive 80 x 200cm image of the battle of five armies. This latter image never got finished. The ink line technique is simply too time consuming. An image, the size of the one above takes several weeks to draw and the big battle picture would have taken months to complete, even after all the sketching and reference images were done.

These days I would likely never do an image such as this again. The rapidograph pens (as used by architects) used are very hard on the fingers and the finished product, whilst being impressive enough in real life, is difficult to reproduce without commercial facilities at one's disposal. Attempting to transfer the image to a computer screen leaves a lot of the image
invisible to the eye.

The above picture has a hidden map of Denmark concealed within it (its not hard to spot if you know where to look).

Bilbo and the Spiders

The death of Smaug