Welcome to your Fuzzy Friday Coffee Hour where all are encouraged to share their thoughts, their causes, their projects, their problems and their triumphs-- or just their desire to sit a spell and sip a comforting beverage and relax. It's an open thread which means you can ignore my fluff and be free and uninhibited in the comments.
This weekend I'll be visiting my garden so I hope to have an update on how well the appetizers I'd set out for the slugs were received but perhaps that can wait for next week and a proper photo diary. Nothing like pictures of cute, contentedly well-fed slugs to take your mind off the world's troubles for a brief while ...
So instead, this week I'll be bringing you my latest self-improvement project. I'm working on a digital painting using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and a tiny, old Wacom tablet. If you step over the permed orange hairball I'll share a bit of my step by step--
Incentive:
Of course the first and often hardest step to creating anything is actually starting. It's all fine to have a brain full of ideas but if they never get out into the air and sunshine it's like they never existed-- this has been a constant problem for me, getting beyond thinking and wanting-- to doing.
I've been depressing myself all week by posting my drawings on various dark corners of the internet and looking up old school chums and their work online in hopes of scrounging a few new connections. I was unlucky enough to go to school with some astoundingly talented people who make my artistic struggles look pretty pathetic. It doesn't help that those wretches are actually wonderful people. I mean, I could have chosen practically any field of endeavor and somebody from my high school would make me want to curl up in a corner and sputter and froth with seething envy of their talents. It takes a bit of effort for me to step away from the walls and jump into the middle of the dance floor.
I have my moments-- so much of my professional life though has been taken up with illustration work of the quickest and dirtiest variety, namely, storyboards. I just don't have a lot of recent, high-quality illustration work that I can show to potential clients. I see the brilliant work of my classmates and cringe, knowing full well that I have the potential to produce brilliant work of my own.
I've decided to get back to work on my own work. I'm setting challenges for myself and trying to improve. This week, between minor intrusions from some graphic design work, I thought I'd start a painting.
Inspiration:
Just last week my lads drug out our DVD of "Hellboy" and I discovered that the scene that was filmed in my neighborhood wasn't cut out of the final film as I'd been telling people. It wasn't quite the scene I had been imagining-- I'd thought it was a scene depicting Hellboy's childhood but it turned out to be a scene depicting the character Liz being bullied as a child. I talked with my lads about the day I wandered over to check out the filming with #1 Son perched on my shoulders, saw Guillermo Del Toro but didn't pester him, and chatted amiably with the Assistant Director for awhile before giving him my business card. So I watched "Hellboy" and was again struck by the appeal of its elements of steampunk. I've been digesting ideas for a steampunk flavored comic for a couple of years now.
A friend of mine recently went to a book fair and brought back for me a pamphlet from a publisher that specializes in SF/Fantasy books. I thought that among the dusty stacks of my old fantasy oil paintings I'd have nothing to offer them that I can stand to look at anymore.
Those thoughts, and the super heroes, flamboyant costumes, and armor suited monstrosities in magnificent detail painted by my talented friends gave me the urge to attempt to do something similar.
The Media:
I've made several simple sketchy digital paintings before and occasionally I've used Photoshop to produce digital paintings for storyboards but I've never really tried to work on something refined to the point I might be able to sell it to a book publisher or to a magazine for cover art. I'd been drawing a lot lately with brush and ink, and occasionally I've been scanning the pictures and adding color. I decided to do something different and just go completely digital. My stack of primed canvases and Masonite would wait. I wanted to explore what the brushes in Photoshop could do.
The Painting:
I started with a blank, darkish grey background then created a new layer, picked a "brush" and very loosely sketched in a figure with a lighter tone:
This is old Marvel comics style, "sticks and sausages" drawing. At this point all I was thinking about was typical, beefy bratwurst, male superhero-ish proportions-- a bit of action, so many character paintings are just static. Maybe a lower angle for additional dramatic effect? A bit of the ol' up the nose shot? How about some funky Captain America boots?
I started a third layer, that's the lovely thing about digital painting: you can separate the stages of your work on layers, like drawing on clear plastic sheets that you lay over each other. Your mistakes then don't have to ruin your previous work on earlier layers. It's easy to discard a layer and start a new one. So now, on this third layer I've started using a grey that's darker than the background. I'm getting a sense of where the shadows will be on the figure and I'm defining everything a bit better-- yeah, it looks like I'm going with those wide topped Cap'n America boots and hey, perhaps this could turn out to actually be a picture of his nemesis Red Skull?
Another layer, another tone; this time I'm going lighter, exploring the highlights. Where does the light hit the figure? Is that really going to be a skull?
Another layer, a few different tones of light and dark covering up the figure with an indication of a costume, clothing, a cape? If that's going to be Red Skull I've got to give him a pistol, World War Two-ish? That kinda fits in with the "Hellboy" look. Does this look like, sort of a -- Mauser? I had a cap pistol Mauser as a kid, I remember a drawing of Red Skull with a Mauser or a Luger-- what do they look like again?
Another layer, picking up speed-- heavy on the outlines, no skulls dagnabbit! I'm always making skulls. Enough! time for something more like that creepy assassin from the movie-- or is it starting to look too much like a Star Wars character? Is it a Stormtrooper or a Tusken Raider? Scribble, scribble ... I'll have to work on that. And talk about static figures, that stiff left arm had got to go. Bend the arm, spread the fingers in a gesture-- better. Cape becomes more of a trenchcoat. Yeah, much better.
Now a serious layer, getting into the detail work. Really beginning to refine the costume, shape that odd helmet. Yes, definitely a helmet-- focusing on detail work on the goggle/gas mask/ helmet apparatus. That gun thing looks awful though doesn't it? I take a break and scrounge around the internets for pictures of Lugers and Mausers.
I found a Mauser picture at a perspective angle that fits pretty well with my painting and saved it to my desktop. I open up the pistol pic in a separate picture viewing app and start another layer on my painting and basically just redo that whole area of the painting on that layer. It seems to be a lesson that I never quite learn: knowledge of objects is a grand thing but it's rarely a substitute for good models and photo reference to draw from. I'm lucky to have a fairly large monitor so that I can use one half of the screen for drawing and the other half for displaying a picture to draw from. Tracing would be so easy but I'm trying to evolve as an artist, not devolve into an artistic photo filter.
Well, it's far from finished but I feel pretty good about the direction it's going. I'd be happier if I knew how to do something like the wet paint effect that I once played with in Corel Painter (which I no longer have). This is more like digital pastel drawing than actual painting. There are a lot of applications out there for digital rendering and I've just begun to explore the possibilities of the ones I do have. I hope you enjoyed seeing a bit behind the scenes of my work-- even if I didn't manage to post some cool, time-lapse video I think you get an idea of the process. With a bit of luck I'll find the time next week to finish off this figure and maybe even some background scenery for him. Thanks for stopping by my studio!
Again, this is an open thread. I'm writing this about 9 hours (perhaps 10) before it'll be posted from the Street Prophets queue. It's a bit like knowing the sun's light is already 8 minutes old by the time it hits me. Time travel on a miniature scale. Time to get some lunch, and perhaps a third cup of coffee. Lunch will probably be pumpkin soup-- which reminds me of my poor plants. I do hope they've survived ... I hope I survive-- at least long enough to see you in the comments.