Another Monday night drawing, my first attempt at using my phone for anything like this, I used Sketchbook Mobile to make this, I just did it with my finger and used about 3 layers. Hit the link if your interested in getting it for android there is a free and a paid for version and another "pro" one for tablets. I did this without a capactive pen but I'd suggest getting one, they are alot easier to use (if you have chubby fingers like me).
As for the Sant'ta these were basically time police, that protected the universe from time disturbances, and punished anyone that commits an offence, once they realized that they couldn't charge us they decided to get rid of the planet anyway because the superhero population would change the balance of power. Fun fun, and hat off to the GM. Nice festive killer time cop for the season.
The graphics card in my laptop is shot and replacing it and everything else that's wrong with it is going to cost too much to justify it really, but fingers crossed I can at least get Photoshop running again.
Enjoy your holidays, and try not to get too drunk ;)
A couple of drawings today, laptop is still out of commission but I've hooked the scanner up to the net-book, no cleanup on this tiny screen.
The second image is just for fun It might go along with last week ;)
The first one is relevant to a news article I was reading, Google Voice Search a way to control the android phone with speech recognition, has been around for a while, hell I even had it on my G1 (Cyanogen ROM). Now that Siri for the iPhone has come out all polished and shiny and cool looking, Google are going to have to step up their game a little... I've read a few places that Googles answer to Siri is called Majel and it'll only be incorporated into voice searches at first. Now, the reason its called Majel? Well nothings confirmed but I'd like to think it's a nice homage to Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. The voice of Enterprises Computer in star trek, and I think it's brilliant so you get this nice doodle.
Laptop's still out of commission, it will be 'til after Christmas. Here's an image of a pet project that's rattling around my brain it's a secret for now though ;_;
I had to draw this whilst under attack from the new kitten, she's all teeth and claws. If it moves she kills it, if it doesn't, she kills it.
If I survive the next mauling I'll post some pictures/drawings. I'm hoping the laptop is up and running again soon I could do with getting back to Photoshop.
I have missed a few weeks, and have been struggling with posting things on here. I am sorry for that. I truly am. Technology certainly has not been my friend recently. But there is nothing new with that.
I have been out with my camera over the last few weeks, so I'm going to update a little with a bit of a snapshot of what I have been taking with my camera. Because that has been the only way I have been inspired at all.
The picture above is me attempting to get unusual perspective, by sitting the camera on a wall. It gives the perception that the plants are on a size with the building. It obviously isn't, but I feel that it is something that adds a different dimension to a photograph. This isn't something that interests most people, but it is something I find really exciting. I like being able to change how a scene looks, just by positioning the camera slightly different. It is almost magical, when I think about it.
I have tried to get the same effect in this image. I feel that this one is a bit more successful, in that the flowers look large compared to the building behind it. I also feel like the pink parts of the flower petals really look bright, brought out by the flash in the camera.
I try not to be over complicated with my photographs, as I have had no education on it, and just have the ideas which are in my head. Whilst I do think about what kind of image I want to take, I don't try to think too much. I feel that sometimes pictures I just 'take' on a whim are better than the ones that I actually take a lot of time over. Which is ironic really.
Hey there back again thought I put some thing up that has been done on illustrator again.
The last few weeks I have been helping to build a new student intranet at the college I go to. and this is some thing that was built for an image slideshow.
so this was created following a tutorial and all that was used to do it was creating a line then useing the 3d option in illustrator to extrude it out into the back ground.
So this is the final look for it imported it into Photoshop add the text to it all. well if you can make it out the text is from a rule pack for one of the games workshop tournaments. Hopefully no will notice that :) this was a fun and stress piece of work to create as I wasn't too sure on what to do for the back ground but i thought i keep it simple and have it a see through bg.
Well I know I haven't been that much on here for the past few weeks and like I said before Uni is taking a lot of time up so I am going to say this. I know we all have our own personal things happening in the outside world and at time those things end up taking over everything. I am not worried if you can not find time to post some thing ever week. This for me is meant to be fun and enjoyable and if you need to take time away from this that fine.
So on a brighter note Here is a some thing I have done in Illustrator.
was going to use this for something but ended up deciding not to use it. but still looks cool
So the harddrive in my laptop decided to give up on living a full and happy life, the netbook doesn't talk to the scanner well and is too wee to run Photoshop but just to top it off the first time I use a brush with inks it breaks on me, I think it was last used in high school, half the bristles fell out after his left hand. This picture sums up today pretty well, with a cold and everything my rage meter is full all the time poor laptop, I may have called it some hurtful names.
New harddrive on the way so should be back to normal soon.
Busy week at work and university I'm afraid, essays due and new projects so have some tank animations, just done in Photoshop with the animation window. I'd love to draw an entire RTS army, or several armies... now that would be fun.
EDIT: It looks like you'll have to click the images to see the animations.
What do you do when you are in a rut?
How do you find inspiration to help you back on your way?
I do what I do in every other situation and turn to YouTube. Seriously, I rely on that site so much, it is becoming ridiculous. But I do love it so much, and one of a good thing to watch is someone else drawing (see below).
Because I am a little bit stuck, I felt I would give advice to people who may also be stuck in a rut. It may sound a bit rich, but trust me, as an artist there is no worse feeling in the world, than not being able to create something.
So I am going to give you 5 tips of getting over that creative rut. 1) Do something to take your mind of the subject of non-working. I know it sounds crazy, but focusing all your energy on something which isn't happening is depressing and does no good. Putting pressure on yourself to do something, can back fire, and can make you hate what you are trying to do. So try and relax, watch a movie, read a book, just de-pressurise yourself.
2) Find what inspires you. Again, sounds a little silly, but it works. Listening to NWA's Straight Out Of Compton, got me through my HNC in Art & Design, it really motivated me. I can't explain how it worked, but it did. It made me excited, and that's what you have to do. Find something that makes you excited, something that makes you take on the world. At the moment, for me, it is The Lion King. I feel so creative when I watch that movie. The good thing is, if your inspiration relaxes you, that's point 1 tackled too.
3) Write a list of what needs done. Something you were probably told to do at school, along with making a study timetable. It is recommended because it works. Write a list of EVERYTHING you need to do, and prioritise. If you have a lot of heavy duty stuff to do, you may want to put something light hearted in between them, just to give yourself a break. And just work through the list. The idea behind this, is that it helps you visualise what you need to do. Most of the time, you write a to-do list, and realise that most of the stuff isn't as important as you first thought.
4)Free yourself from distraction. I am the boss of finding a distraction, so I know how much this can set you back. If you are struggling, your mind will automatically start to wonder. And if it wonders onto a site like Facebook, bang goes hours of your precious time in a heartbeat. So switch of the distractions, log off of twitter, switch your mobile phone off, just put the temptation away. If it is too hard for you to stay away from temptation, do it in bits. Schedule yourself 45 minutes away from the Internet, and have a 5 minute check-up.
5)Don't give up. I am aware that this point contradicts some of my previous points, but it is true. Whilst I am saying try to relax and not pressure yourself, it is important that you don't give up. If you can't get something done, give it a break and try again later. The hard part of anything is perseverance. Giving up never achieves anything, so keep on trying. If one thing isn't working, go on to something else. You can always come back to things later.
These are all points I have used throughout my life since School, really. Everyone has a point where they want to give up, and that they feel they are no good, but keep your head up. You can do this. If you couldn't, then you wouldn't have been given the opportunity to try.
I tried to think about what I wanted to draw last night, and I was pretty keen on trying to draw a cheesy scream, but no matter how I tried I couldn't get the feel I wanted. You'll notice if you watch the video below that I erase, and redraw A LOT I really just wasn't feeling it at all...
Hands.... hands are a pretty big nemesis of mine, at one point I stopped the recording because I had tried it so many times I wasn't going to waste all the time showing it. I'm not so good at showing emotions on faces either and you'll see that I had to mess around with it for ages, looking back I can see exactly what worked and what didn't but at the time I really just couldn't figure it out. That's what it's about though, learning as you go.
I'm impressed so far that this blog has worked, at least as far as my goals have gone, each week I draw something and that's a lot more than I was managing before this so that's a thumbs up.
I guess one of my favourite things to create digitally are abstract pieces. And most things come around with practicing with some techniques.
^^This image reminds me of a flower. There is something about, with its appearance of layers that I really like. I like the pink outline as well. I think it is simple, but it also has a depth due to the overlapping parts.
^^This image, is different, but still was made through experimentation on Photoshop. Mostly with swirling the cloud effect. I like the smoothness to it.
Our Monday role playing group swapped to Mutants and Masterminds for a few weeks and I got a bit carried away with my character story. So much so in fact that I wasn't even able to describe it to the group... so they picked some bizarre creation that I didn't really like all that much. So my homework for the week is to go and create my original concept.
Lab assistant, that was used as a guinea pig unknowingly by his now former company, while working with an extra dimensional rift experiment, he was attacked by elemental spectres and now has to share his body with 2 of them(not sure what elements yet). The longer they inhabit his body the more of his mind they destroy. Another worker in the company knows about his deliberate involvement and anonymously tells our hero of the conspiracy, he then aims to find the lab co-coordinator that was in charge that day to find more about what happened. Fights with the idea of revenge vs cure.
Spectres can only communicate through his subconscious or when he is asleep? No direct conversations?
One was destroyed by the other, the remaining one fights to control his body? To keep the element under control he has to use an opposite force for example spectre is a fire spectre, he has to sit in a freezer when at home.
A lot of question marks, regardless I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted. His company gave hims some lame excuse about his arms (which turn into fire and ice later on) and bandaged them up with some ointments, these actually contain chemicals that subdue the change (like the freezer example in the quote).
Just me having fun at lunch and coming up with ideas but I wanted to draw the character. There's a video below of me drawing this, I actually forgot to press record for the first half, my bad...
Tuesday 1 November 2011
I'd like to be like the guys and say how I make a lot of things, but I need to be honest here. Most of the things I make, especially digitally, happen by mistake. And I don't even want to think about how a tutorial for making mistakes would work? Actually I can, it wouldn't work.
As you can probably see, this is a swirly thing. I went through a phase not too long ago, where I used the swirl effect on anything on photoshop. And, by playing with things such as 'glow spread' and how solid the lines appear, something quite cool happened. I am not a good teacher, I am more about doing what you feel and trial and error. Which is why I am kind of reluctant of telling people how to do things.
I guess you can say I am in an art rut right now. Nothing is coming to mind, to create something. Though I am taking part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where I have to write a novel of 50,000 words throughout the 30 days in November. This is something I have been preparing for, and I have been putting a lot of energy thinking up the storylines. There is a chance that I may be inspired to do something artistic alongside my writing, but right now I have a one track mind. But I am really excited. I take on projects, because I look at them inspiring me in other areas of my life. So if I am trying to picture a character in my story, I may draw them. I did before, and it does give me overall inspiration.
Ok first off I missed last weeks post. So let me explain Uni work is taking a lot of my time along with trying to find a paying job so there might be a interruption in my posting over the next few weeks.
So this is the second post on how I go about creating stuff.
So when I start drawing I normally let my mind wonder and do doodles on the paper on the paper most of these would be basic stick men in different poses.
from after doing that for a while creating quite a few of these drawings I then move onto making one as a toon in the drawing adding more and more detail to them. Till I'm happy enough to try and create a full image. The top image is a good example of this strange process that I do as all the lines are still visible on it. So that is it for this week hoping to get some more stuff done and upload it on here, till then have a nice weekend.
This Week I'd like to go over scanning in an image and preparing it for colouring in Photoshop. I'll be explaining how I do it, not the only way to do it, and probably not even the best way. But as far as I know, it produces the best results for me.
First thing is first, Scanning the image in:
I always find it best to scan an image in using a high DPI (around 300) that way we can make edits and shrink the image down, which normally makes it look a lot smoother. If you are drawing in ink, or really dark pencil and want a black line drawing by the end of it, Then scan in black and white. if you have a pencil sketch I find it's normally best to scan it in grey-scale.
Then were going to load the file into Photoshop, the image is going to appear big and grainy at first, thats ok, just means were doing it correct up till now.
Were going to clean the page up a little bit by using the threshold option.
By moving the slider back and forth we can decide how black a line has to be, to be kept. It lets you get rid of stray pencil lines and smudges, but don't go too far or it'll start to eat up your lines. You'll just have to play around with it to get the result you'd like.
Here is one of the images getting cleaned up, I forgot to change my brightness to eliminate pencil lines.
The next step is to do any editing you'd like to do, either erasing lines, or adding them. If your going to add lines I'd recommend using the pencil tool at this point and pick a size that won't look out of place. (It will still be grainy but don't worry. At least it will match)
I'm sorry about the music, it cracked me up so I had to use it.
Once you've edited the image and cleaned it up we can colour it. You don't have to do this now, you can do it after we have shrunk the image. We're going to create a new layer and place it below our original one, you might need to double click the background layer to unlock it, then were going to change the background layers style to darken. This will let us put colours on layers underneath and have them still show through the white, but not the black.
I'd recommend saving our big image as image_clean.psd and then using the save-as option to save again as image_shrunk.psd (that way we can't make any mistakes and accidentally save over it). The last step is going to be changing the resolution to 125 dpi (it's really your own preference), go to "Image" - "Image Size..." and enter the dpi you'd like.
And there we have it... you should have a good looking image, scanned in and looking smooooth.
It's time for an overly edited photography. Mostly because I love taking pictures. Also, I was going to post some sketch book pictures, but I have to pretend that it is organised before I post it. There is a lot of empty pages right now, because I haven't got round to sticking things in yet. *cough* So lazy, very lazy.
This picture is a look over the Quarry in Inverkeithing, where I live, out towards Rosyth and Dunfermline. Okay, this obviously isn't an actual quarry, it is the overgrown wilderness before the quarry. It has lots of paths where I used to walk my dog. build gang huts and the like.
The main reason this photo is so heavily distorted, is because I thought it was a great picture. Because I have a really great view, from the top of my hill. But, the wonderful overcast weather kind of ruined the picture. So I went on Photoshop and creatively vomited until it was all yellow. Apparently. Seriously, it is just messing with colour and light balance a little (a lot).
I am evidently in a rambly, bloggy mood today, so come find me. I'm hiding here on my personal blog.
So here is a couple of ideas I had about an undead roleplaying game, it involved you playing a group of decrepid soldiers, all mushed up into one army and you fought against the living. As far as your character was concerned he was the winning team. There could be no greater cause (your undead, the necromancer is always right...)
These were as always drawn in Photoshop with the regular brush, but the opacity was fairly low. I think perhaps the second image was a little too dark, and kind of like the style I was heading for in the first one.
I come ready with an excuse. I have been ill today, and have spent a large portion of the day in bed, only leaving it to go to work. So appologies, as this is late. But, I decided to go with variety again. :)
This is an image of a lovely lady, taken from a figure drawing class. She is chalk and charcoal on sugar paper. I never got the chance to study figure drawing at school, mostly because the school wouldn't have someone stand naked for students to draw. So I had my first experience at college. At first, it was something very awkward, as it is very strange looking at someone and trying to draw them. Even worse, when they looked at your drawing.
But, it is and always will be the best way to draw a person. I can always draw figures better, from life rather than a photograph. You get to see the dimensions properly. Also, when in a drawing class, the teacher will often get the class to preform tasks, such as 5 minute sketches, where speed is the key, as you try to capture proportions. It is something that learnt me a lot, and helped to me get proportions correct, after years of struggling. It is an experience that I think every artist should enjoy.
So this is a really early edit for me but hey why not. Today (Monday) I had a couple of really good ideas during a lecture for motion graphics (and yea I was paying attention to the lecture) so during it I was trying to scribble these ideas down and add more to them. Now your asking what are those ideas? well one is for the motion graphics final hand so I'm not saying anything just now, but the other one is for my portfolio site. and yea its Awesome!
can't really put it in words so I will show you.
Whats THIS!? Glad you asked.
Well this is the overall look to the new portfolio site. The gray hills with the trees in the back will be moving from one side to the other and repeat it self so its a constant moving image. There will be a sign that appears when you click on a menu item that holds the content of that. The next stage after getting those things working will be moving it into Drupal if that works (fingers crossed).
Last year my friend took a game design module at university, he had to create a small game with a partner and write a massive report. Because of everything he had to do he asked me to do some sprites for his characters, he gave me a rough description and I drew out a few design ideas.
The game started off as a silly idea the main character was in his pajamas, and had a bag that carried all his equipment. It then took a more serious tone, and wanted all the enemies to be in suits with glasses.
I had a lot of fun doing this, I hadn't done any pixel art in a while and have't since I did everything here in Photoshop just picked a one pixel pencil brush and 60x60 per frame canvas. The sprites were test animated before i sent them off you can see a few at the end of the blog entry. The "Shooting" Sprite doesn't repeat so you may have to click the image.
When creating the agent sprites, I used the player sprite as a guide, I've left the sheets overlapping to show what i mean.
So, a few weeks ago I bought a new graphics tablet, because I really need to get into drawing, through my computer. Not for any reason really, just so that I have that option. It has always been something I really wanted to do. Especially when I am starting to get requests for Lion King/ Balto style original characters, which are EVERYWHERE when you join any community based around American animation.
So have Vitani. She is a character from The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride. She is part of a group of lions called the 'Outsiders', who are banished from the Pride Lands by Simba, because they believe Scar (Simba's uncle) is the rightful king. Scar, was killed at the end of the first movie, and was the ' bad guy'. So he has a band of followers, who are against Simba, for murdering Scar.
If the first Lion King move, was like Shakespeare's Hamlet, then Simba's Pride is more Romeo & Juliet. Vitani is my favourite character in the second movie, and I just wish that she had a bigger part in the movie. Hopefully, as I practice more, I will post some more lion's as a comparison. The aim is to get it better by Christmas, cause I have a lot OC based card ideas.
well the 24 hr comic challenge has passed and i will warn you that doing that event does sap my creativiness straight away. It was a fun experanice but still got the images scanned in yet so you won't be seeing them today. Instead here is a little some i drew last week for you.
I have not got roung to adding colour to this one but again it does show the frustration of using drupal at times and how easy it is to go and play video games instead.
This weekend past, was 24 hour comic day, I took part in it a few years ago, but didn't make it last year. While I was doing it I recorded both my screen and what my webcam was seeing, I thought it'd be quite funny, but I'm just going to pop my screen up for the moment (It turned into a rather embarrassing karaoke half way through) and I some how managed to miss half the second and third pages...
I was pleased that this year I managed to write an easily 24 page long story, but frustrated because I got bogged down in detail, and picked the totally wrong style to attempt it in. I decided I'd give this digital painting a go, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the results. There's a list of things I'd go back and sort out though, the people were rushed due to time, and there could have been a better attempt at atmosphere and value balancing.
The pages are below in-case your interested and I'm sure you've seen the video above.
P.S I didn't have any of my comic fonts installed so you'll have to make do with what's there, my bad.
