Blog o' the Baroness

Splash

2006-12-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

These are from a little ESL reader I did for Harcourt. The story is about a pig named Splash, trying to make a treat for his pal's birthday. Done all in photoshop.

Elf

2006-12-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

While working on some sketches for background paintings, I sort of drew a bunch of little elves (was listening to Christmas music) all over the edges of the paper. I liked this one, so decided to color it.

Below you can see the original sketch. I scanned that, and filled in solid areas of color below the lines. I did a little shading, then colored the lines a bit, and then flattened it all together. Then I did all the clean-up and details on the flattened layer. When I was done, I added a couple layers of textures over the top. Fun!

Nepotism is Fun

2006-12-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

This is a little piece of an illustration I did for Creating Keepsakes Magazine. It will be in the upcoming January issue, so I'll wait to post the whole thing until then. Oh, and did I mention my sister happens to be the magazine's Art Director? Convenient, ain't it!

I did the illustration primarily in Flash with a little finishing up in Photoshop. When I post the whole illustration I'll do a little tutorial with it.

Yesterday I did a few sketches for my brother-in-law, for his design firm Level, Inc. They are just comp place holders for a wine label to show the client. Below is a sketch of the ruins on the client's Napa Valley vineyard.

The Golden Astro

2006-11-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

Here's something a little different - photography! I just stumbled across this picture of Astro Boy that I took earlier this summer for our big annual conference. It's Astro Boy, spray painted gold, and part of the hightly coveted Astro Award, which each department fights for every year.

So, I thought I'd post a couple pictures of stuff from my house. Can't claim to know much about photography - I just like to play with the macro button. :o)

Soup Tomato Shell Shed

2006-11-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Um. So nothing super spectacular this post. I've been super busy making art, but I always feel funny posting anything before it's been published, so I don't really have anything to post at the moment. I think it's a throwback to my non-disclosure days pre-freelance. Anyway, in the meantime, I thought I'd post something (anything!) so I don't go another month before posting again.

At the dayjob, we have to make lots of icons for vocab words and other things. Lots as in hundreds. They are a nice break from time to time. Nothing special. Except that the tomato is plotting to take over the world.

Done in photoshop.

Illustration Friday: Wind

2006-11-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

done recently for a children's magazine - photoshop.

tiki two

2006-11-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

Guess I completely missed posting anything for the month of October. Such a slacker! Crazy month - it started with Jury Duty, then add 2 children's books on top of the full-time gig, and of course - The Party. I'll post pictures of that soon.

So to get started posting again, here is some more art from the tiki game I was working on a while ago. I completely changed the monkey from the earlier version since he didn't show up at all agains the busy backgrounds.

The other thing is probably pretty self-explanatory. Drop the ball into the correct slot, and a randomly generated path lights up and animates as it falls down.

Illustration Friday: Change

2006-09-20T21:15:00.000-06:00

This was a sample done for a possible puzzle. I wasn't sure how the whole engineering of it would work, but somehow you'd be able to change out pieces and change the doll's hair or clothes or whatever. Ended up the budget was cut, and therefore no project... This is kind of old, but I just double-checked and realized I'd never posted it here or at my regular site, so here 'tis.

Uh... let's see... technical specs: scanned pencil drawing, colored in Photoshop. Gotta love the Photoshop.

Ahoy Ye Scurvy Thieves!

2006-09-19T10:28:00.000-06:00

Arggggggggh... Just in case you forgot, a friendly reminder that today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

I gots no piratey drarwin's to be showin' ye today, but I've got a bit o' Treasure to share. (From a project I did this summer - above is just a little piece of the whole treasure chest.)

Fair winds me buckos!
-Red Mary Bonney

tiki tiki

2006-09-15T18:10:00.000-06:00

Finished these up this morning. Spent way too much time on them. Lots of trial and error trying to figure out the style and process. Finally bagged all the imported lines from Flash, and did everything by hand in Photoshop. Sore cramped hand by the end of doing all those black and yellow lines!

Doctor Doodle

2006-09-11T18:10:00.001-06:00

Just a random little doodle I liked, so decided to throw some color on it. Sketch and color done in photoshop, just using the standard round brushes.

Particles are your friend

2006-09-08T15:38:00.000-06:00

Play Quicktime version - Warning: It's Loud

To rid this blog of the bad aftertaste of the bitter disappointment, I think I'll kick off the weekend with some happy fireworks. This was a fun little project I did earlier this week. Quick background painted in Photoshop. The fireworks were made in Particle Illusion. Had to figure out how to use Particle Illusion first, but it was pretty straightforward. Then I added some sound in After Effects, and here 'tis. Happy 8th of September!

Bitter Disappointment

2006-09-08T14:05:00.000-06:00

I really haven't started planning yet for this year's Halloween festivities, but I had stumbled across this test tube thing online, and thought - that would be so cool. It arrived today, and I've been whining to everyone who has had the bad fortune to get within conversation distance to me. It really isn't all that cool after all - no actual rising bubbles, no moving dials, and lots of cheap looking plastic. Although, I do commend the photographer for making me want to buy it. Guess I'm just gonna have to figure out how to build the real thing....

Monkey Time

2006-09-06T15:24:00.000-06:00

Hey! Two posts in a day! Since I apparently was sucked into a black hole for the month of August, I figure I should try to make up for it. Here's a quick little character I drew for a design meeting. My next game is all about the Tiki. It's gonna be fun. So naturally, gotta have a monkey in it.

I drew him in Flash, and then exported the solid shapes as .pngs. Once he was reassembled in Photoshop, I turned on the Preserve transparency, and did some quick shading using a dry brush sort of brush I made from one of the Spatter brushes. You just need to adjust the spacing and the angle jitter in the brush palette.

Unfortunately he didn't pass muster - "too young looking" - since it's a game for tweens. I'm not sure I quite agree, but I might tweak his face a little so he's not so "sweet."

"Inking" in Flash

2006-09-06T15:00:00.000-06:00

More Decodables! Here are a few pages from my latest little book - The Toy Robot. These things are all about trying to get something half-way decent-looking in as little time as possible. The finals for this one were done in Flash.

The process is pretty straightforward. I have a sketch imported from Photoshop to use as reference, and draw all the lines using the pencil tool. Then with the little ink pot tool I go and change all the line widths for thick and thins. Then I convert the whole thing from Lines to Fills (you can do this in the Modify menu), and I clean up corners and edges to make the transitions between line widths nice and smooth. Then I used the paint bucket for fills, and the paint brush for the little highlights (the robot is supposed to be Gold Foil.)

This next book is done in a similar way, but there's some photoshop work at the end. After cleaning up the black lines in Flash, I export the lines as a .png at 300dpi and open that up in Photoshop.

Since the lines are so nice and clean, I can use the magic wand tool and select the areas I want to fill in with color, then I go up to the select menu and choose expand, and expand the selection by 2 pixels, and then on a layer below the lines, I hit alt+del to fill in the color.

I wanted to spice it up a little bit without having to do much shading so I brought in some patterns I got from wallpaper samples. After making a selection (and expanding it) I go to the layer with the wallpaper, and hit the mask button (it's at the bottom of the layers palette - it's a little gray box with a white circle.) I suppose you could just reverse your selection and delete the extra wallpaper, but this way, you can unlock the mask and move the pattern around and make adjustments.

I only have these two done so far. The rest I've sort of been stalling on because it means I have to try to draw a fishing boat. Ugh.

Shiny Happy Faces

2006-07-28T17:19:00.000-06:00

Just thought I'd post what I've been doing for the past couple days. These are from a little computer activity. I drew everything in Flash first, then exported the lines to Photoshop to do all the coloring and shading. I'll put together a better tutorial later... I had lots of fun making everything as shiny and obnoxious as possible!

Illustration Friday: Sacrifice

2006-07-17T20:45:00.000-06:00

Um, okay, maybe a stretch for the theme, but look at the people willing to sacrifice all their monetary assets for the chance to have that really cool bike. Or maybe... it's the girl, sacrificing the possibility of having all that cash for the sake of loyalty to that crazy red bike. Or maybe it's all about the fountain pen the monocle guy is holding: giving up its lifeblood, its very ink, so the man can write a check.

But ultimately I think it's all about me: because I had to sacrifice some good sleeping time to get this done!

I've already posted some other pages from this same little book: What a Bike! I didn't explain much by way of a tutorial, but I illustrated The Crook Book in much the same way, if you're interested in tips and tricks.

What A Bike!

2006-07-16T16:30:00.000-06:00

I haven't done much by way of any illustration the past couple of weeks. I work inhouse at an educational software place, and I was the chair of this year's committee for the annual Vision Conference. Tons of work, never done anything like that before, but lots of fun in the end. My favorite part was the Urban Challenge - a big kind of Amazing Race/Scavenger Hunt/GeoCache monstrosity we put together. I kinda want to do it again next year.

But I digress, I try not to ramble on too much about non-illustration stuff in this blog, cause really, who is really all that interested! ;-) I'm trying to get myself back into a illustration frame of mind, so I thought I'd post a couple pages from my most recent Decodable. This one is called "What A Bike!"

This one was done basically the same as the Crook Book - done almost to completion in Flash, then imported in to Photoshop. I did a little bit more fussing in Photoshop with this one, which meant I imported layers so I could do a little shading on each of the sections. Like with the one above, the flowers and the girl-on-bike have a bit of Drop Shadow added from the Layers Options. And then there is a texture over the top of the whole thing, again, just like the crook book.

These books are all about shortcuts, so it was pretty handy to be able to just copy/paste and transform the girl and bike for this book. Only had to draw the bike once, and for the girl I think I ended up with two poses (a side view and a front view) that I tweaked for each page. Another fun little project. And it made me unreasonably happy to have lederhosen and a Kaiser helmet in there... heh...

Illustration Friday: Rain

2006-06-28T09:53:00.000-06:00

Nothing too exciting, just a little spot I had to do at work. This is from a little adjective type activity - wet and dry. I have to do little spots like this all the time. Done in photoshop. And so you get the matching set: Dry!

The Crook Book

2006-06-27T00:10:00.000-06:00

bigger version

So have I mentioned lately how much I like Flash? Here are a few illos from a little book I recently finished. All the drawing and color was done in Flash. (It is so fast and slick to draw in there.) I basically drew everything with the pencil tool, did some flat fill style coloring, deleted all the outlines, and then exported the finished pic to Photoshop. (Export image as a .png)

Here's what it looked like coming out of Flash:

Once in Photoshop, all I did was add a few layers of textures, just to spice it up a little. A long time ago I had used a toothbrush to splatter india ink all over a piece of paper. This scan has come in pretty handy over the years. The first layer of texture is of the black splatters, and the layer property is set to Overlay. Then a second layer, in which I've changed the black splatters to white splatters, is set to Soft Light. The third layer is from a scan of a piece of fake black velvet paper - I think it's for scrapbooking or something. I increased the contrast, created a channel that got rid of the white, and changed the black to a nice tangeriney orange color. This layer is set to Soft Light as well, and all the blues change into these nifty purples and raspberry colors.

Close-up of the textures:

And a couple other pages from the book:
(d'oh! I just noticed his hand is backwards in the second one down - I'll fix it later... heh... or maybe it's a special crook lock-picking tool attached to his wrist. Yeah! That works!)

Chicken ball

2006-06-14T11:21:00.000-06:00

I was looking for some files, and stumbled across this on my hard drive. Whatever this was supposed to be for, guess I never finished it. Anyway, thought it was funny in its randomness, and so I'm posting it in celebration of the World Cup. Here's to hoping the ol' US team steps it up a bit this weekend. :-)

Pop-Up Book

2006-06-11T14:22:00.000-06:00

About a year ago I did two flap/pop-up books for Reader's Digest. Looks like Simon & Schuster is selling the Backpack one, can't find the Closet one anywhere... Anyway, I kind of forgot about them, and when I got an email from the art director about another possible project, they were surprised I'd never seen the final product. It took some digging, but my copies were found with my rep, and now I've finally seen what they look like all put together with the pop-ups and flaps working. Kind of fun.

This project was a little different. The art director had made really tight comps for me to follow since there was all that die-cut business to worry about. The final spreads were the most fun - the paper engineer sent me a template with all the pieces already figured out, I basically just had to draw inside the die-cut lines.

Sorry about the bad photos, but those are supposed to be little happy maggots on the chocolate bar. That was a fun project - got to draw stinky fish heads, maggots, slugs, moldy sandwiches, slime and lots of other gross things.

Stop it!

2006-06-03T00:42:00.000-06:00

Can't believe I haven't posted for over a month. Ooops. Been doing lots of miscellaneous things lately, both at the day job (I work at a software development company) and with the freelance. I thought I'd show what we're working on at the moment at the ol' job. We're illustrating these little readers called Decodables and are budgeted to get three pages done a day. I went a little over on this book - I was averaging about 3 to 3 1/2 hours a page. (I have horribly unsteady hands when trying to draw clean black lines, so I'm a little slow at it.)

Everything is done in Photoshop. Since I knew I wanted some items to have different line colors, those lines are each on different layers - that way I can just turn the Preserve Transparency on, and fill the lines, faster than painting them. The solid filled-in colors are on separate layers, with just a tiny amount of shading here and there. One of the benefits of those clean black lines, I can use the magic wand tool to select an area, and then up in the Select menu, choose Modify > Expand... and expand the fill area a few pixels, then on a lower layer hit Alt + Delete to fill in my color with hardly any touch-up.

It's fun to whip out these little books, but I wish we had just a *little* bit more time to spend on them!

Illustration Friday: Under the Sea

2006-04-28T22:12:00.000-06:00

Another letter of the alphabet - this time O for Octopus. (B was posted earlier.) I guess I was thinking of old Mary Blair illustrations and vintage Golden Books when I did this. Done all in Photoshop, I made the textures by making a custom brush. I started with a Spatter Brush (my favorite brush, and it's in the default palette.) Then I adjusted the spacing and played around with the jitter stuff and you get a brush that has a kind of chalky dry brush effect.

Here's a close-up of the effect. This ended up being a super fast way to do some shading. I had a lot of fun coloring this.

Egypt and China: Flash/Photoshop Mutation

2006-04-27T23:23:00.000-06:00

Finally, got around to posting another tutorial. This is basically an extension of a previous tutorial I posted in January - just a bit more detail, and a bit more redundant rambling. But who knows, there might be something worthwhile in there.

Click on the images to go to EGYPT

or CHINA

I've been a little slow answering the emails lately, but please feel free to ask if you have any questions, I'll get back to you... uh... eventually!

Fabulous Flash

2006-03-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

I have a new favorite tool - the paintbrush tool in Flash! If you have a Wacom tablet, the paintbrush tool does a pretty good job with pressure-sensitive thick and thins while drawing. Flash 8 also has the added feature of a Smoothing setting (in the Properties panel), so you get really nice smooth clean lines.

Since we are going to be using Flash a lot more at work, we spent all of last week training. I sorta did the teaching the first three days, and then we had a real trainer come - Ryan Simmons. He taught us some great tricks for character animation. Check out his site for some fun animations, tutorials, characters you can download, etc.

The rabbit started out as one of many silly doodles while we were practicing using the different drawing and coloring tools. Then I ended up using it when we were learning some lip syncing tips. (Click on the rabbit to see the animation - you'll need Flash Player 8 if you don't have it already.)

The robot was from earlier in the week when we were trying out different motion tweens. Never got around to finishing it - I wanted to have the arms moving, and lots of other stuff, but we moved on to other things. Jim, one of my co-workers, looked over from his menacing-looking robot that ate ball bearings and said - "You live in a happy world, don't you..."

Illustration Friday: Monster

2006-03-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

Click on the Swampy guy to go to the Monster Flipbook!

I'm actually working on a Frankenstein illo tonight, but I thought the flipbook would be more fun to post for Illustration Friday. This is for a little computer game, you can pick to build either a monster or a robot. (Those glamorous buttons are obviously temp.) So you get Robots too - extra special bonus!

Survey Says!

2006-03-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

Finally got back the results from the character survey. We sent it to schools here in Utah, some in California, and even to one school in Japan.

Style 3 was the clear winner 2:1 over style 2. Style 1 hardly any votes.

The kids also picked natural skin tones over the wacky colors, by a landslide. (I was a little disappointed by this - I like the rainbow skin colors!)

The survey was 12 pages of questions and choices. Overall, pretty interesting to see what kids actually like vs. what we adults *think* they'll like!

Illustration Friday: Insect

2006-03-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

My ever most favorite insect would be the fabulous Bee. Dunno why, but there ya go. I was supposed to do a little animation for the letter V, but after some whining and bribing, got to do B. I'm not going to post the movie, but basically, Bear swipes at honey, Bees swarm from hive and chase poor hungry Bear as background pans, and then after Bear runs off screen, big letter B made of Bees pans on.

There were some actual sketches buried in the photoshop files. I think I was trying to figure out a watercolor type look, that I gave up on and decided to go with what I knew since I had a tight deadline. I also found another quick sketch for figuring out how the pan would work here. Gives you an idea of sloppy I am at the start of a project.

I decided to draw the final background lines on actual paper. Since the pan was so wide, it just was a little easier to handle, plus I like the softer line you get with a pencil. I usually draw with a blue or red Colorerase pencil (I like the texture), and convert it to grayscale after scanning.

The next step is about the coolest photoshop trick ever. Open the Channels palette. At the bottom are a few icons - click on the dotted circle - this will select the WHITE. Go back to the Layers palette, make a new layer, then INVERT the selection. Then fill the selection with Black, or whatever color. This will give you your lines, in beautiful grayscale, on a transparent background.

Now that your lines are on a transparent layer, you can turn on the Preserve Transparency button (it is the little checkerboard near the top of the Layers Palette) and color and shade your lines.

When coloring this background, I had a ton of layers. I like to fill in a solid color for each different area - for example a tree trunk layer, pine tree layer, foreground grass layer, midground grass layer. I turn on the Preserve Transparency, and then shade away. Next, I go to the Line layer, and color the line to match the shading below. Then I usually have another layer above the Line layer for fixes and touchups.

The bees and the bear were drawn directly in Photoshop using default brushes. I turned on the Drop Shadow in Layer Styles on the Bee layer to make it pop a little from the background.

The Mighty Cree-A-tor

2006-02-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

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

2006-02-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

"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

2006-02-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

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

2006-02-13T13:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-02-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

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:

Illustration Friday: Cats

2006-01-26T00:21:00.000-07:00

I figured I had to have done something with a cat in it at some point, and this is the first thing I stumbled across still languishing on my hard drive. This was one of those deals where I got an email from an art director with the character description asking for a sample sketch. I can't even remember who this was for, so, uh, as you can guess, it never went any further.

But it's got a cat in it!

ps - scanned pencil sketch, color in photoshop

fla's and png's and psd's, oh my!

2006-01-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

I was thinking I haven't posted any illos for a long time, much less a how-I-done-did-it. I've been using Macromedia Flash quite a bit lately as a sort of drawing tool. It makes nice clean lines and shapes, which I am dreadfully slow doing freehand in Photoshop. (If you're wondering why I'm not using Illustrator, Flash is ten times faster and easier if you are doing simple outline drawings like I have been.)

So here are a couple backgrounds for a computer game I've been working on. I started with a rough sketch in Photoshop. Save that as a .jpg and import it into Flash.

From there I start making all kinds of layers. I use the line and pencil tools and draw each *thing* on a separate layer. For this activity, I had to be able to put objects in front and behind the bushes, rocks, etc, so there are a bit more layers than I would have needed if it was just a flat illustration. Each layer is shown in the sample as a different color.

Then I save out each layer separately - exporting as a .png to keep the lines on a transparent background. I open the .png's in Photoshop, and then arrange all the layers into one big ol' .psd file. Below each line layer, I have a fill layer of the area of the object. Once the object is all shaded how I like, it's a toss-up what to do with the line layer. Sometimes I delete it, sometimes I turn on the preserve transparency for the layer, and shade the line to blend in with the shading of the filled area. I don't really have any good logic to back up when I do one or the other.

So that's basically it. It's a fast way to get a tight final drawing and nice crisp edges in the painting, if that's what you're looking for. Sorry this isn't too super in-depth and technical, but I'd be happy to explain more details if people want.

Another example:

There are lots more line layers, but it was a bit too confusing, so just the basics are in the above sample. The checkered floor, stones on the walls, patterns on the pennants, etc. were all done in Flash as well, and then exported over to Photoshop.

I did the same deal with all the objects that fill up these scenes. I don't always follow the imported lines exactly, but they make a nice place to start. Here are a few:

I still have two more backgrounds I'm working on - I'll post them when I'm finished: an Egyptian tomb, and a Chinese courtyard, which got crazy complicated. These have been pretty fun to work on, as well as make all the zillions of little objects that go everywhere in the scenes.

And there ya go! Whew! Hope there was something useful in all that.

Nifty Nixie

2006-01-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

For lack of anything really terribly interesting to post (beyond a Merry Happy New Year to everyone), I thought I'd share my latest object of grand covetousness. I really really REALLY need one of these Nixie Tube Clocks...

I'd try to build one, but I just know I'd somehow electrocute myself or blow up the house or something.

Anyway, that's all. Pretty action-packed new year so far, eh?
heh...

Halloween 2005

2005-11-18T01:47:00.000-07:00

Click on this happy skull from my front yard if you'd like to see more pictures from Halloween. I finally got around to posting them!

Illustration Friday: Broken

2005-11-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

The other day I was offered a job to do a poster about Ben Franklin, so this is the first thing that came to mind for this week's IF topic. That, and I've been building little dudes like this in Flash for the last few days. So there ya go.

The Lair

2005-10-25T14:34:00.000-06:00

Since I haven't done a piece for this year's Gallery of Terror, I'm using my house as this year's entry. I had a bit too much fun decorating for this year's big Halloween Soiree...

I have more pictures coming, but a sneak peak:

Illustration Friday: COLD

2005-10-14T16:56:00.000-06:00

The Cognomen of Crane

2005-09-22T21:53:00.000-06:00

Plans have begun in earnest for this year's Halloween extravaganza. The ghastly festivities are planned for Oct 22, and I only hope I can have everything ready in time! I was trying to think where I could find some great hi-res victorian portraits to print and frame (going with the Victorian Haunted Mansion theme this year), when I remembered years ago doing a ton of research at the Library of Congress (online). Great, GREAT resource for reference if any of y'all need it! And the best thing, uncompressed archival TIFFS for download. Takes a bit of effort to search around in there, but well worth it.

The image above is of none other than Ichabod Crane...

OK, so not THE Ichabod Crane. This guy was a Colonel, 1st Artillery, US Army, died 1857. You think his parents were Washington Irving fans? Cool picture nonetheless...

Cow Eyes

2005-09-09T17:05:00.000-06:00

Still working on those icons, amongst other things... One of the cool things about this project is I can paint any icon in any style I want, so I've been having fun experimenting. This is my I-must-have-looked-at-too-many-of-those-Margaret-Keane-paintings icon. I actually kinda like it... oooo, so soft and fuzzy.... well, truth is I was just happy not to paint any ears.

Avast Ye Scurvy Landlubbers!

2005-09-07T22:00:00.000-06:00

Click on thumbnail for larger image

Ahoy me Brethren of the Coast! Just in case you forgot, a friendly reminder that International Talk Like A Pirate Day is just twelve days away on September 19! Arrrrrrrr....

"But I don't know me some Pirate Talk," ye say. Well, here's a good place ta start me bucko:
Pirate Dictionary
Or ye can try me translated Blog:
Sweet Bonny Blog O' The Baroness

A wee note on the sketch - 'twas some concept art done years ago for a project that never happened. No quarter given. Arrrrr.... curse those bilge-sulking blaggards!

Fair winds me hearties!
~Red Mary

Icons - part two

2005-08-14T14:38:00.000-06:00

One of the projects I've been working on lately has been a big ol' pile of icons. Meaning: Lots and Lots. More literally: A gajillion.

It's been fun, I'm getting some good practice doing things start to finish digitally, since no time to bother with sketching on paper and scanning and all that nonsense.

Quick process: rough sketch on one layer, once that's kinda worked out, I drop the opacity pretty low, then on another layer do a rough tracing. Under that sorta nice line drawing, I block in colors, some quick shading. I might do a little coloring to the line layer, and then I merge it all. Then I clean it up and add details, working on it more like I used to paint with acrylics. Haven't been using any fancy brushes or anything, just the defualt psd ones at varying levels of size and opacity. I did have to reset my Wacom tablet to a firmer pen tip setting though, to get a little more control over thick and thins.

The cats and girl probably took me about an hour and a half each start to finish (at 600x600 dpi) which is still a bit too long. (Duck I think was under an hour.) I'm spending a bit too much time fussing with the details. I'm hoping to get these things down to a half hour/45 minutes max. This week I'm supposedly going to get a nice demo on working in Painter, so we'll see how that goes. Kinda excited about it.

Icons - part one

2005-08-14T14:09:00.000-06:00

Who knew when I took a break from working Saturday to go junkin' with my junkin' pal Bill, that I would discover I could absolutely not live another day without a 19th century Russian Orthodox Icon. Well. It happened.

I don't know much about it, just that it is called a Mary Mother of God of Iver, the region it's from in the former Republic of Georgia. The dark box around it is called a Kiot, which was used to hold the icons when the priests would carry them around.

Deciding to make an orthodox day of it, on the way out of town, I took Bill to see the "Virgin of Guadalupe" tree. Sorry to report that we could not see the Virgin Mary in the tree knot. Didn't look like much of anything to me. It must have changed over the years, cause it currently looks nothing like this picture.

Anyway, a fine day had. My icon now happily hangs in my studio next to a Mexican marionette bought across the alley from the Alamo.

Super Important Announcement

2005-07-20T23:47:00.000-06:00

My pirate name is:

Red Mary Bonney

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Muggins

2005-07-07T00:29:00.000-06:00

Here's a fun little project I did awhile ago. I had to sign non-disclosures while working on it, but since it's on the web, figure it's ok to talk about now. American Greetings asked me to design some avatars, I guess they are used for MSN Messenger. I'm not really sure of the details. And since I have a Mac, I can't actually use them, but you can try them out here at this link:

Blue Mountain Muggins

It was a fun job. I built all the pieces in Macromedia Flash, sort of like a flip book. I delivered everything grayscale and the fabulous folks at American Greetings did the backgrounds, animations and colors (since you can change the colors of most things.)

Where the term Muggin comes from - no idea.

Envy

2005-06-02T07:51:00.000-06:00

cheating again this week - this is a bit old... hopefully next week i can start doing some new work for Illo Fri.

Why this for Envy? I have three books due this week, plus sketches for two more due monday which equals no sleep for me. I miss my feather bed!

-maryn

illustrationfriday.com

Harry & Ginny

2005-06-02T07:41:00.000-06:00

A rare moment of doing something for fun! I did this a couple weeks ago - a little birthday gift for a Harry Potter fan. I think this was one of the first times I did the linework right in Photoshop. I usually scan a pencil drawing, but I wanted to try a little experiment. Took a bit longer than if I'd done it with pen and paper, but it was a nice way to get clean, slick lines. I think I'll do all the linework this way on my next book.

(click on thumbnail for larger image)

-maryn

Aquatic

2005-05-24T00:43:00.000-06:00

I can't believe I haven't posted since February. Uh... oops. So I figured for the sake of getting back into the swing of posting, I'm cheating a bit, and using something I'd done a while ago for this week's Illustration Friday. Probably could fit the theme a bit better, but at least it's a little fishy!

-maryn

illustrationfriday.com

Nancy... redux

2005-05-24T00:35:00.000-06:00

Oh, I forgot about this. Here's a little more Nancy. After I did that Nancy Experiment, I found out I was supposed to be drawing Nancy as a pre-teen. Oops. Here's one of the color comps for that - done with the same process as the other Nancy illo. Needless to say, didn't get the gig. Ah well!

The Nancy Experiment

2005-02-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

I had a rough sketch of Nancy Drew, and decided to finish it off by experimenting with the same technique I tried with the rooster illustration . I've decided I like the method, but I'm not too happy with the way Nancy herself turned out. There's something that bugs me about her face especially. Anyway, I thought it'd be interesting to show the different steps...

click on thumbnails for larger image

This is the first sketch - done quickly with good ol' pencil and paper. Poor Nancy looks a bit crazed.

I scanned the sketch, and started making adjustments in photoshop. I have a tendancy to draw eyes too big, so first thing was to shrink the eyes. Once I was reasonably happy with the revisions, I printed this out.

Using a lightbox, I redrew Miss Nancy, and spent a while doing lots o' shading. I used a blue colorerase pencil, mostly because I had one sitting around (scanned grayscale...). Her face lost the original expression, but I didn't feel like trying to fix it.

After scanning the finished drawing into photoshop (and moving her left arm a bit), I made the lines into a channel, filled it, and made it the top layer. I made lots of layers underneath - one for hair, one for skin, one for her shirt, etc. and then did a little bit of shading under the lines.

The finish... After some basic shading under the lines, I colored the lines a few shades darker than what was underneath. Then on a layer above the line drawing, I did lots of touch-ups and highlights all over the place. I experimented a little with custom brushes, but I mostly used the Spatter brushes in the default palette. To finish it off, I put a texture of a piece of scanned velvety paper over the top of the whole thing.

So there 'tis. Time for some sleuthin'!
-maryn

Keane Eyes

2005-02-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

Had an exciting morning "junking" about some of the more uh... interesting... parts of Salt Lake City. We found lots of eBay potential - but I found the treasure of the day: stacks and stacks of (Walter) Margaret Keane prints. There's just something creepy yet compelling (in a black velvet painting sort of way) about them, that I just had to have one. For a hefty 4 bucks, I'm now the proud owner of a print of Big-Eyed Carolers. Some look as if yowling in pain, the others just sad, despondent with the knowledge that Santa has forgotten them yet another year.

So if you've never had the pleasure of experiencing the phenomenon of "Waifs," "Keanes," or "Sad Eyes," - here ya go. Enjoy!
Keane Eyes Gallery

Year of the Rooster

2005-02-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

thanks to otis for telling me about illustration friday.com - here's my first foray

-maryn

illustrationfriday.com