The Mighty Cree-A-tor

So here's a little piece of nostalgia, or humble pie, or maybe just a good laugh - however you want to look at it. My grandmother passed away a few days ago and on the practical side of things, that left a big house full of a whole bunch of stuff to sort through and disperse. I got a few pretty darn cool things my mom picked out for me (thanks grandma!), as well as any gifts I had given to grandma over the years. This painting had been hanging on the wall for the past 18 years. Pretty wild. I'd like to think I've learned a thing or four since then....

This was among the first oil paintings I think I ever did. You can see the strong William Alexander influence with the tap tap tap of the mighty fan brush, and the signature Alexander palette knife mountains. Classy! He was the mastermind being the whole "wet-on-wet" technique - of which Bob Ross was a disciple. If you never saw his show, just imagine Bob Ross-ism's shouted with a Prussian accent. My favorite as he slapped on some fan brush blobs that resembled pine trees: "You are the Mighty Creator!"

Illustration Friday: Song

"She's a little bit country....
He's a little bit rock 'n' roll"



So, a few years back I worked at Lucas. And once there, one cannot quite help but be sucked into the whole universe. So this picture was from my Star Wars obsession days. At work, we had always done Prequel stuff, so when it was my choice, I preferred the Original. This was just goofing off - having fun with the Disco theme. The first is Luke and Leia - à la Donny and Marie, natch!

Also did little sketches of Roller Derby King Chewbacca, Pimp Daddy Vader, Lando - who needs no enhancement to be Disco, and Han Solo - who simply doesn't *do* Disco.

Anyway, just silly little drawings I did a long time ago. Rough sketches scanned in with some simple photoshop color thrown in under the lines. Well, and sparkles on top. Gotta have the sparkles!

Queenie

So here's what happens when I have plenty of time to do a picture. All I had to do was paint a Queen, however I wanted, and I had 2 whole days to spend on it.

Done entirely in Photoshop, sketch to finish. Once I had the sketch, I worked it up a bit to more of a value study. Then, under this layer, I filled in the big solid areas of color. Once that was worked out (what color to make the dress, the throne, etc.), everything else was painted above the value study layer.

Most of it was painted with a mix of the default Spatter brushes and Soft Round brushes - usually at 10-20% transparency. The texture on the throne was some random swirly brush I found in my palette, to which I turned on the Scatter feature.

The little finger blendie tool (sorry, the Smudge Tool) is really great for making fur. I had the basic shading done on the fur trim of her cloak, and then used the Smudge Tool with a Spatter brush to happily smudge away - hopefully making it look like fur.

I used a lot of Layer Styles in this one. The patterns on the sleeves and the collar were drawn 100% opaque, then I turned on the Drop Shadow, changed the layers to Soft Light, and adjusted the Layer Opacity to make it more subtle.

Used the Drop Shadows Layer Style on all those crazy jewels and pearl clusters on the dress. I used the Bevel feature on all the tiny pearls so I didn't have to shade them, as well as adding a Drop Shadow. That saved a bit of time.

And finally when all was done, I had a huge light yellow soft round brush, set to Color Dodge to brighten a few spots like the crown, her face, hair, a little bit of highlight on the dress.

So that's basically it. Had a lot of fun going crazy with the detail on this one.

Illustration Friday: Simple

I thought these characters would work well for this week's theme of Simple. They were all designed and made in Macromedia Flash, which helped me to keep everything down to simplified shapes.

These guys were all designed to be the staff of a museum. There's the museum director with the peg leg (arrgh matey), bunch of tour guides and docents, the janitor, some misc. curators, head of security, the guy in the orange space suit is the conservationist. And natuarally, after drawing all of these, they were scrapped. We decided to simplify, and cut it down to just 4 kids. You can see the latest version of the kids in the previous post.

Style Survey

I've been doing concept design for some educational software, ages 8-12 (the infamous Tweens). This latest batch of characters I tried three different styles to see which direction we wanted to go. Which is your favorite?

Style 1:


Style 2:


Style 3: