Cania

I had started this painting in December 2010, tortured it until mid March 2011, dropped it, tried a scant few things again in 2012, and finally picked it up again and finished it last month.

It took me such a long time for a number of reasons. One, I had in mind a specific way her face had to look, and it was difficult to get her expression and features right. I like keeping all my characters' expressions somewhat ambiguous, but this is easier achieved in looser works, where forms are not very clear to begin with.

Two, I had no idea what pretty much the rest of the image was going to be like, except for the snowy backdrop, her white fur cloak, and the gem-like bloodied object in her hand. In earlier versions she kept it close to her heart, but I didn't like how it made her look vulnerable. I wasn't sure what she should wear, either. I tried out a variety of outfits, from a white robe to plate armour(?), then a couple more armours of indefinite materials. I grew more and more frustrated as each attempt to add definition veered the image into stock fantasy territory - which is perfectly fine by itself, but not where I felt she belonged. In the end I sort of made up my mind and went for this oddly textured garment.

But what kept me back most of all was that I was getting more and more invested in the character herself. With a commission I can easily say "that's done", even if there are a number of things that bug me about it. I felt I had to do justice to this unnamed woman (Cania is the name of the place, not hers), and didn't mind wait until my skills were a bit more up to the task.

A few of a total of 32 different saves for this image:

 And details of her face and hand:

 

Commissioned RPG characters

These were commissioned for an urban fantasy setting, about which I admittedly know very little, except for the very detailed (and helpful) descriptions of the characters:

 

 

Marcus 'Littlepike' Coates (top), Victoria 'Threeleaf' Glyn, and Psellos Tarsitos. My favourite of the three is Coates; his description mentioned 'chill' mannerisms that I think more or less came through. By saying he's my favourite, though, I actually mean that I find the other two rather awkward. :p

Painting these characters has been an important learning experience, in that I actually tried to learn from my mistakes instead of just fret about them. I generally don't paint very consciously and tend to over-rely on what Bob Ross would call 'happy accidents', which have sometimes turned out impressive enough, but the rest of the time I find that I have great difficulty in fully directing my paintings or being accurate in depicting a vision I or someone else may have.

Mentioning these things here feels a bit like rediscovering the wheel, but someone else might benefit from reading them like I did from noting them down as I faced each hurdle (or success!).

• Thumbnails. I'm always stingy with thumbnails and tend to jump into painting after I get a single sketch to look more or less right. I've come across professionals suggesting 2-digit numbers for thumbnails, and they have a point.
• Find or make the right reference. Probably not necessary in concept or looser work, or if I were really confident about my anatomy skills or about how different objects and materials may look under different angles. I'm not at all confident. Reference saves my butt. I might pull things off without, but I might mess things up entirely and have to backtrack (see also point 4).
• Set up values and colour schemes. Decide on a light source and don't ignore or forget about it during rendering. Maybe even make a silly little arrow on a separate layer and keep it there as a reminder.
• Clean up drawing and double check for errors (flip the canvas, walk away from it for a while, show it to someone else). There are things that can and probably will have to be corrected or changed during rendering, but a solid drawing saves time - and frustration.
• Render... but don't over-render. That last one depends on personal style, but one thing looser works have going for them is that whatever detail is not in the painting is usually mentally filled in by the viewer in the most favourable way. 

 

I don't see these steps as some sort of holy grail, and I feel it shouldn't all become a mechanical process; I like a bit of mess in my paintings, just not when it spills over everything I'm trying to do with a painting.

2013 bits and pieces

2013 has not been a very good year art-wise. I moved house in late December 2012; my new place was a dilapidated mess, previously uninhabited for some 10+ years. Between full-time work and trying to tackle said mess so that it resembles a habitable space, my art productivity dropped entirely.

The sum of what I managed to paint or sketch this year is this:

 

 

 

 

 

The last piece is a WIP and is going relatively well, so I suppose the next update won't be in another year from now, but much sooner. :}

The Other Half of the Sky

I've been really looking forward to sharing the cover I made for The Other Half of the Sky, to be published by Candlemark & Gleam in April 2013.

The Other Half of the Sky is an anthology of science fiction stories with women protagonists, a theme that could hardly be closer to my heart. In science fiction female characters are often on the sidelines, passive and flat; I suppose because of a widespread belief that women are uninterested in the whole space idea. This collection of stories turns this stereotype down a notch, so I was understandably very happy to make the cover for it.

Athena Andreadis, the editor of the anthology, was particularly helpful throughout the process of making this image. She had a clear vision of what she wanted the cover to look like, and was precise in communicating it.

The character is not chosen specifically from one story of the lot; I made her generic enough so that she could fit any of the protagonists. It was important to set the tone through her expression and stance rather than any particulars of her appearance.

On a technical level, this was mostly straightforward. I set up a model in Poser to help me with the odd lighting and angle (not pretty, but it did its job). I tried out a couple different colour schemes, and even one lighter version, with a planet instead of nebula in the background. The eventual nebula background has a composite of various nebulae images (thanks, NASA!) as a basis, further rendered with watercolour-like brushes alongside with the plain old round brush.

I got the idea of the twisting spires from the Dynamic Tower concept, though I tried to make them look a little more organic (likely at the expense of structural integrity!).

For the character's outfit, I had initially thought of something more armour-like, but that would put too much military emphasis. In looking for inspiration and reference, I kept stumbling upon the extremely bulky EVA space suits currently in use, but then I came across the Bio-Suit concept, and took it from there. Its decorative elements were inspired by a lovely gif circulating tumblr.

Once I had put everything together in satisfactory detail, I extended the image so that it could make a full wraparound cover. (Already a large file, the full wraparound was over 12000 pixels wide, some 1,5GB in size, and working with it turned much, m u c h  s l o w e r.)

The text treatment had its challenge, too. Diehl Deco was chosen as a typeface for all capitals, and Pyke's Peak Zero for lowercase. The two were a good match, but Pyke's Peak is really a display font, so I took it to an editor and changed a few glyphs to increase legibility. The version on the cover has slight changes in the letters s, v, w and q compared to the original. This was a new one for me, but I had much fun with it.

Lastly, the cover without the text:

Sisters

An illustration for Jude-Marie Green’s short story Sisters, published in the summer issue of The Colored Lens (also available on Amazon).

Keep an eye out for The Colored Lens’ autumn issue: I’ve made art for the cover. :)

Original sketch: on wysp.ws

Zeitgeist: Cauldron-Born

 Two more illustrations for Zeitgeist #5, Cauldron Born.

 

A toast to peace 

'King Aodhan and "Minister of Outsiders" Lya Jierre -- warily raise wine glasses to each other.'

These were existing characters - the king's appearance is loosely based on the actor Clark Peters, and Lya is based on Carrie Fisher. 

Colossus Under Construction

A 300-ft. tall metal construct is being built in an underground shaft. The idea was to make it look more human/statue-like than robot, and to show its scale. If you can see some inspiration from Prometheus' poster - it's because it's definitely there. :)

Zeitgeist: Always On Time

Further interior illustrations I made for the Zeitgeist adventure path (see previous batch here). These are for the fourth chapter, Always On Time.

 Screaming Malice: Imagine a black oily swamp reared up
and towered over you like a giant with tendrils that end in screaming,
fanged mouths. When a group of bandits try to ambush and rob the train, they
provoke this monster to attack as a distraction.

Ashima-Shimtu: One of the train's stops is near a
cursed island, with a prison for a millennia-old demon. 

Haunted island: At night the fogs or
rain roll in, and if anyone living is still on the island, all the dead who
drowned or crashed on the rocks around its shore shamble onto the island to
kill them. 

To be honest, I'm not quite as pleased with these three as I was with the ones for the previous adventure. I was under a lot of stress lately (work and family matters) and I think the work suffered from it. Some changes were needed, too. Ashima-Shimtu was initially a scene that included the demon, but it had to be cropped so that the focus would be on the character:

Likewise, the malice image was a problematic (though I'm partially fond of its rough look). The train in particular was a mess; for the revised version, I finally got round to learn how to use Google SketchUp. It saved my ass, and I'll be definitely coming back to it for future works.

Lethe

I had aimed to make this a very quick sketch, to force myself to put in only what was necessary and keep my forms simple - that took some 20', with relative success.

A little while later I gave in to temptation and spent another 20' adding a bit of texture, though. :)

Reference from Elandria.

Zeitgeist illustrations

I got the green light to post the illustrations I was commissioned to do for Zeitgeist: The Gears of Revolution, a series of D&D adventures published by EN World. The adventure these are in will be out sometime in early January.

1. Dr. Xandria Meredith, Archeologist and Adventurer:

She is meant to be a redhead, cute but smart and with an explorer's physique.The background was to be 'bright and academic', so I happily slapped the National Library of Athens in it, slightly changed to fit the composition - though residents of Athens recognise it at once! :)

2. Path to Ruins:

The description called for a rainy grey swamp, with a ziggurat barely visible in the distance, and a path towards it outlined by scraps of golden-orange cloth tied to tree barks.

3. Marsh Mummy:

A mummified corpse, to be exact, hanging from a spear trap from the wall. I don't really understand how a corpse can possibly mummify in a damp environment (unless it's inside a peat bog), but oh, well. :) The glittering necklace was a key point.

Also, here are the early stages of the above. I normally work very haphazardly (as seen in the early swamp image), but I tried a more structured approach for the mummy, and I completely went out of my way with a detailed line art drawing (which is something I never do) for Xandria.

Medea

(right click and open link in new tab/window for full view - blogger scales down the image)

I won a copy of Painter 12 from Digital Artist's contest a few days ago, and finally got round to playing with it. :) I started this one in Photoshop, where I also laid in the final touches - but most of the work was done in Painter.

Reference used for the hand: kindly shared by batchix.

It may be worth mentioning I was specifically inspired by Pasolini's Medea. I found it a flawed, but otherwise very interesting film, both visually and conceptually. I also felt it offered a good insight into the character of Medea, as a person who had lost their way of understanding the world as they had known it.

I also liked Maria Callas' performance in it. Some say it was somewhat stilted, but in my view not so much, certainly not for an 1969 film as stylised as Pasolini's.

If you are curious, here are some links:

Medea (Wikipedia)
Medea (play by Euripides, 431 BC)
Pasolini's Medea on Youtube, in 10 parts

Also, the initial sketch:

Mass Effect fan art

Bioware is having a Fan Art showcase at San Diego Comic Con, and I submitted two pieces I had made last September, after a few touch-ups:

 detail:

Earlier versions can be seen here (turian) and here (Spaceborn).

Lightning in a bottle

Photo study: original photo by Daniel Jung, found via this twistedlamb post.

Progress steps:

Week 20-25 sketches

I think the reason why I haven't been scanning my sketches lately (and I'm halfway through my newest sketchbook already!) is that I had a pile of books and, as of more recently, clothes, sitting on my scanner.

So I moved the pile of books and clothes to my bed. This was a strategic move: since I couldn't go to bed before putting them back onto the scanner, I stayed up scanning some twenty+ pages from my sketchbook. :p
 
These are all from mid-May until today. I put them in two bundles. One, sketches from the metro/bus/tram. Some are finished from memory/imagination, as people have the tendency to move away or get off at stations at inconvenient (to me) times. :)

The rest are all from imagination.

And a bonus: fluffheaps!

Blue Paduflies!

 

I think he likes to torture CS undergrads, too.

From this tiny sketch I did in 2010:

The mantle

From last Friday, about an hour, no reference.

Malaak's Dream

I made this as a guest art page for the fourth volume of Malaak: Angel of Peace, a comic by Joumana Medlej.

Malaak is a young woman of mysterious origin, who is fighting to save Lebanon from a seemingly endless war.

This scene is somewhat independent of the main storyline, but if you read the comic (which I highly recommend), it should make sense. My painting will appear on the printed volume only, coming out early this June.

Inspired by the beautiful nature of Lebanon and the mystical aspects of Malaak's story, both of which made it so appealing to me.

Photoshop, Painter, a few days on and off.

Concept art for Caul: Mother and Priest

Concept art I made for Caul, an upcoming short film by Azhur Saleem. For a synopsis, more info and a chance to support the making of this film visit its Indiegogo campaign.

Photoshop, several days on and off. No reference used (which nearly drove me up the walls at some point), but I applied a wood plank texture from a photo in the background.

The ambassador

A character sketch from a setting- and story-in-the-works. He's probably my favourite one. :)

 About half an hour, photoshop, used some reference for the crossed arms only.

Week 17 sketches: Lagoon

More painting than sketching this week. All I have is this: it's one of the fantastic Lagoon dolls made by batchix. Make sure you check her work here and also on deviantART.