School Arts

So I'm handing in some projects this week and I'm happy enough with them that I want to put them up on my blog.

This first one is for my core illustration class, we were told to write up a list of "guilty pleasures" and then to select one and create an illustration out of it. Needless to say many of my guilty pleasures should not be seen in the light of day so I went with "smelling books", which actually got me quite a few stares in class. Go figure

The second is for book illustration. We were told to illustrate an event either from the media or from our personal lives. I chose to draw up that one time I was on the register for 6-and-a-half straight hours with no break and no end to the line of customers.

There was a caption to go with this one but I left it out. Might re-add it later.

Dungeons and Malareth

I and some chums are trying to get into Dungeons and Dragons. We've only just finished the Red Box (starter set) and already I'm finding it amazingly fun to be the Dungeon Master. 

Anyway the Big Bad of the adventure that comes with the box is this necromancer guy, Malareth. The wizard of the party mixed some chemicals by way of levitation on Malareth's workbench, they exploded and the necromancer turned into two face. Oh yeah.

Game of Thrones

Over the summer I finally jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, I enjoyed it so much that I bought the book the other week. Both are absolutely amazing. To a nerd I would say it's the politics of Dune mixed with the adventure of Lord of the Rings and to a not-nerd I would say it's like the Tudors, but better and also snow zombies.

Anyway school started and one of the classes I'm taking is Book Illustration, I was sitting in the first class when I doodled the images bellow: 

Eddard Stark, Warden of the North is my favourite character with the most awesome of titles. I feel really sorry for him throughout both the show and the book, watching him struggle to keep doing the right thing is heartbreaking at times. The fact that he is also Boromir helps.

I feel like there is a jingle in here somewhere. 

Oh god I hope whoever is looking at these has already watched or read Game of Thrones...

This is only somewhat of a spoiler.

And now, for your viewing pleasure:

The last two are by no means my favourite part, just the images I felt worked really well in that kids booky style.

Tales from Sfera

some process

The comics in the previous post were made over a week ago, however I wanted to wait to post them so I could put up all of the Dragon Age II stuff together. This took longer than I thought though because the piece here took so very much work. I was working not only entirely on the computer, something I am not used to and which makes me more prone to want everything to look perfect, but I was also working in a colouring style I had never before tried.
I will now outline my frustrating, but ultimately successful journey of trying to draw a nice picture of my Dragon Age II party:

Alright so to start off I do a very quick sketch just to get the composition, the positions and poses of the characters. I was trying to get a kind of "V" composition going on with Hawkes Greatsword and Avelines sword and shield.

After the sketch I draw the lineart, and then redraw the lineart, and then redraw it again until I reach a point where I'm satisfied with it. I've added in Merrill's staff as well as made Varric a bit shorter (he is a dwarf after all). 

Now that the lines are done I do the shading in a nice, warm tone, adding detail and depth with the burn tool.

This is where I waded into unfamiliar territory: Going section by section I lay down ares of flat colour, then, like the shading layer, I go over it with the burn and dodge tool to add depth and highlights. It was at this point that I realized the afternoon I spent on the shading was made completely redundant.

Anyway I deleted the shading and carried forwards with the burn/dodge tool, then I made Merrill a bit smaller in the background, added in some minor details to Bianca, Hawkes sword and Merrills chain mail, then made the whole thing a bit taller, slapped on a background and, in the immortal words of Neil Buchanan, when you're done, you should get something that looks like this:

Reasonably happy with how it turned out.

some comics

I beat Dragon Age II last night and so for the past few weeks that I've been playing it I have been completely engrossed in the game. It does have a few flaws, all of which are picked apart by Yhatzee in his review. I tend to agree with everything that he has to say, but the world is so rich and engrossing and the characters are so well thought out that any flaws in the gameplay or story are, for me, made up for by the backdrop that it's set up against.

So anyway I liked the game and here are some comics.

Holes

a comic

Been working trying to do a comic to prove to myself I can actually finish something, today I decided that rather than do the whole thing, then scan the whole thing, then colour the whole thing, I would do it a page at a time, so here is page 1:

sick, so sick

may contain dreams

For my end-o-year illustration project we were given the guidelines of "do anything". A kind of project I have never liked and which is so obviously a trap for the unwary art student.
The original concept popped nearly fully formed into my brain back when I thought I had only a week to complete it. Thankfully this was not the case and I had time to make it look all pretty.
The idea isn't terribly deep but reflects my experience with illustration, just images from imagination and daydreams.
Anyway it's three images that are meant to be viewed one over the other, like so:

art weekend

I am at the end of a weekend consisting of nothing but work, me sitting at my desk working on projects and essays and all manner of unpleasant things. At the moment I am assigning myself a tentative "done for now".
Here are some photos, you wouldn't be able to tell from looking at them, but on the other side of that camera I am holding my aching back and sobbing quietly.

Here I'm working on the pieces for a Lord of the Flies cover.

A closer look...

Another piece, my intention was to make as much as I could traditionally then put it all together and pretty it up some with photoshop.

Now a project where we were called to make a spot illustration for a New York Times article on the Financial Crisis Inquiry report.

On to a different class now, a self portrait using all the colours in the  we use in class.

If anyone can guess what movie I'm watching then they win the Internet.

A closer look at those soulless eyes...

And now lets see the finished products:

Lord of the Flies cover. While I'm happy with the pig head and the flies, I'm not terribly satisfied with the background, I had to put it through some filters because the scan was too high contrast and it over powered everything else.

Spot illustration. The article it relates to concluded by saying politics were to blame for the sloppiness of the Financial Inquiry report so I have the donkey and the elephant going around each other trying to do their own thing. A couple minutes ago I added the text in because I'm very worried that I totally missed the point of the article (the text is from the report).

I hate politics.

Oh god what is it?!

While my self portrait didn't turn out... awful, I've decided to take a prolonged break from it, I'll try and work on it more later in the week. The glasses definitely need work.

So thats that for now, I also scanned a bunch of sketchbook pages but they may have to wait, while pretty much all of my work is now done I still have my illustration culminating to tackle.

Fun times abound.

Man and Machine sketches

The last project for one of my classes has the theme of man and machine and the course of technological evolution and so on and so forth.

I've done a couple more sketches for it, but I'm happiest with these, I'm not sure what kind of paper it is, I use the backs of those big comic layout sheets and find they accept markers beautifully.

I also find they look better IRL, though they always do.

The idea for my take on the project is based off of William Gibsons "Neuromancer", which is amazing, as well as Aaron Diaz's incomprehensible and wonderful "Dresden Codak"

flying pirates

I've spent the last few months going from sketchbook to sketchbook and never managing to get very far in any of them. I don't know if it's motivation or an unease with the books themselves, but I finally seemed to find a nice thin 8.5x11 sketchbook that I'm liking so far. Anyway I led this new sketchbook with drawings for a pirates-in-airships idea I haven't really touched since high school that I called "Freebooters". And now here they are, scanned and coloured for viewing pleasure.

I started of with a few sketches of the captain, the main hero of this story, cpt. Marcus, as well as a drawing of his ship, the Sparrow. I can't even count how many versions of the Sparrow there are spread across however many high school sketchbooks I kept. They range from more ship-like to more plane-like but the design I always liked was almost what I have drawn above, with the sails on the side and that lowered area on the deck.

Sketches for the longboat and how it would work, as well as a cityscape from the world of Freebooters. I had this really impossible idea that in this universe, the earth became unstable and shattered into millions of chunks that were somehow held in place, rotating within the still-intact gravitational field. Things would fall to the center, where there would be like, a small moon or planetoid comprised mostly of fallen objects. This would have been one of the major plot points of the story.

Some drawings of the bad guy and his ship, originally based on Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman from the Pirates movies(the first drawings had the bad guys ship actually be some sort of literal plague ship and all covered in organic growths. A concept that was almost immediately abandoned). Also included are quick sketches of the captains sister, another major character, and another cityscape. 

An interior of the Sparrow, the crew quarters facing the prow. Usually when I draw a ship of any sort, spaceship, air ship, submarine etc... I immediately start thinking about how the interiors would work and so most of my ship drawings are accompanied by quick doodles of floor plans, which lead to interior drawings like the one above. I've also sketched details of the crew members featured in the interior shot, as well as another sketch of the sister.

a quick something

I was talking to a friend and he mentioned a dream he had where something sort of like this happened so I quickly made an art of it.

some sketches

Scanned some pages out of my current sketchbook so I could play around with a new colouring style, I think they turned out pretty well.

Stay tuned for more! Or don't!

Some arts

Innocent child tries to catch snowflakes seconds before impending doom? Or giant child saves city? YOU be the judge.

I just had an idea that I thought I would work with, mostly to mess around and teach myself some more photoshop.

For one of my classes we were told to make a painting of a mythological creature, I chose the biblical leviathan and but a kind of Mike Mignola spin on it. However I really do not like painting so I wanted to do a second version with tools I'm more comfortable with. Again, this was mostly just to mess around in photoshop.

more inks and watercolours

I've been playing more with inks and watercolours, just messing around really:

Not sure about this guy, at first I liked the look of the negative space in his cloak... thing, but after getting it scanned I'm not so sure.

those crazy things you Cthulhu

So I was working on my Funeral for a Magician assignment for school (http://halftonepixels.blogspot.com/2011/02/funeral-for-magician.html)
and decided that I wanted to do some more with all the inks and watercolours strewn about my table. Now the day before while in lecture I had been reading up on H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos and decided I'd try my hand at a Cthulhu.

I really like how it turned out. I had done all the colour first and really liked it, I new I had to add some lines in there but I was so worried that I would completely ruin it. Finally I did and and I'm happy with the end result.

That night though, as I was watching some TVO documentary I started doodling more weird Lovecraft-inspired creatures:

I like this guy, the mountains around him turned out a little screwy but that's only because I coloured them in like, a minute after I was done colouring Mr. Fleshymountain. I had originally intended him to be a kind of mottled green to blend in with the other mountains but the near-flesh colour looked so gross I couldn't resist. And you think those are normal, Earth birds flapping around his head?

WRONG.

I filled the background in for this guy in less time than it took to do the mountains, I just didn't want to leave him on a blank white background. The colouring for the bird itself I think turned out really well.

While I coloured this guy first I'm posting him last because he's probably my favourite. I had an idea for a show/movie/comic/book where aliens attack the human empire in the future and I wanted the aliens and their technology to be these weird sort of biomechanical things, this horsey evolved from the original sketches for the aliens.

Funeral for a Magician

That is the theme to a project I'm working on from school, we're meant to be using watercolour and inks which is amazing because they are great to work with.
Now the quality is kind of... well awful because my scanner isn't great and I'm scanning from a large illustration board. I really do need to get a camera for larger stuff.

This one is probably my favourite, this is why I like the way the inks and paint work together, it gives a really nice effect. Now yeah, it is really cliché, but not quite so much as my first idea where there's just a coffin cut in half (get it? ha.) Also this guy kind of reminds me of Uncle Sam.

This one I really like, it as a nice stylized thing happening. However it doesn't so much say "funeral for a magician" as it does "brutal slaughter for a magician".

This is my least favourite hands down though I do like the concept. In case you can't tell it's a wand broken in half and bleeding. Again it's less "funeral" and more "murder" but I'll probably kep going with this concept.

Ech, again, sorry for the quality of the scans.

These sketches are really only experiments so I'm not to worried that the concepts are pretty weak. The class this is for is called "Media Studios" so it's more for being exposed to new mediums and ways of working than it is about creating deep and thought provoking illustrations.