130121

Snowy snowy.

And as is traditional, a couple crops (click for obnoxious resolution):

Painting Without a Brush

A friend of mine once pointed out to me that I seem to get a real kick out of using the wrong tool for the job, or using a tool in the 'wrong' way, while painting.  I thought about it and decided he was absolutely right.  As a result this thing here happened (presented both with, and without monster).

This was painted almost exclusively using the stamp tool.  Also featured are the marquee, a couple masks, some adjustment layers, and a couple filters.  What I did not use in this painting, aside from refining a mask here or there, was the brush tool.

It started out as a photo collage:

Which I coerced into a (mostly) coherent image.  I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the image, I might work on it more or something later, but the process was a blast and it'll be fun to try to mush it into a more controlled workflow.

More Spacestuff!

Upon entering the space cave our heroes, Spaceman and Spacehorse, find themselves separated from one another during an exciting and dramatic sequence involving a bridge and some bat creatures (not pictured).  Spaceman then wanders the caverns for weeks (weeks!) in search of his dear companion, only to find him in great peril!  

Apparently locked in combat!  Attempting to fend off the mighty Spacetroll!  What will become of our beloved equine adventurer?  Find out next time (note:  that is unlikely) on the adventures of SPACEMAN AND SPACEHORSE:  IN SPACE!

Also, here's a little experiment I painted up today.  Would you care to shake his hand?

Yours truly,
Rob

Oh dear

So!  Man, haven't posted anything in a while now... 

There are many many things in the oven right now, but nothing fully cooked quite yet.

So, well, here's a little piece of a piece.  By little i mean cropped, certainly not image size.  It's actually a rather tremendously large image.  I mean, well, ugh.  Click it, it'll make sense.

And there is this.  Which is also a small piece of a piece.  The other thingy, that thingy I didn't describe well, that pertains to this also.

That's all for now.

Rob

Digital Illustration

Some work from digital illustration. Top one was a digital collage assignment. We were supposed to do a book cover, I did Blindness by Jose Saramago.

Next is a painter still life assignment.

Experiments

So I'm playing around with dimensional illustration again, seeing if I can sharpen that stick into something I can actually use... hoo boy. So this here was something I did to get back into the swing of it for Digital Illustration. The assignment was to read a personal add and try to make a portrait of them based on what you've read.

The add reads as follows:

Cougars Only - 24 - men seeking women
Single white male seeking cougars ONLY. Preferably 28+ but willing to go younger if I "like" you. Must be clean. I am 6'3", 210, dark brown hair, blue eyes and have plenty more pics if interested. Your place, not mine.

Now if that doesn't sound like a classy fellow, then I don't know what does.

Honestly this was a lot of fun, I might do more of these just for kicks.

Digital Illustration - Illustrator

So, digital illustration class is pretty neat. So far we've just been messing with Illustrator. Assignments one and two right here. One was to make themed icons.

I made fancy animals...

Two was to do a vector portrait.

Got a little ridiculous on that one.

More on the way

Something Political

We were given a very vague assignment in illustration class: Draw something political. Here's my piece about the disappearing middle class.

And that's our first assignment for the year.

First post of the second month...

So here's the first assignment I've had to do for illustration this semester, it's not actually due until the 7th... she really gave us more time to work on it than she usually does. French gave us all stories, or excerpts from them, to illustrate. I got A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud by Carson McCullers. The chunk of it I got (yeah, it seems funny to cut parts out of a story that short) really just cut out the beginning, where it describes what people are wearing and the end. It started with "The man laid one hand on the paper boy's shoulders, then grasped..." and ended with "was he drunk?"

In any case I tried something new for this one (sort of... really I just tried something that I've tried before with terrible results again, with much better results) and it worked out pretty good. Rather than starting from scratch when I took it over from photoshop I pretty much just colored it and tweaked the value, leaving the initial drawing almost completely in tact. I kind of like it, but if I do it again it'd be better to have a more resolved drawing to go over...

Graphite drawing on tracing paper.


The value pattern (digital over graphite).


Final

The results were nice, method was quick, and it was all relatively painless... all in all it was a pleasant experience... which is good.

After this one month assignment it seems like things are going to be picking up pretty quick, we already have the next assignment with tight sketches due the same day as this final here... and we're already supposed to be thinking about the assignment after that... we'll see how this goes.