The Crook Book

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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:

Illustration Friday: Cats

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!

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

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

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

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

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

The Cognomen of Crane

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

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!

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