April/May roundup

I've been sort of beating myself for not painting/drawing all that much in the last few weeks, but gathering all the sketches and such from mid-April onwards, the sum doesn't look too meagre after all. :)

First, two illustrations for Zeitgeist:

Fanart for Angeliki Salamaliki's Monsieur Charlatan webcomic:

I spend a couple days re-organised my brushes in Photoshop, with these two cropping up from the process:

Some portraits: my femshep from Mass Effect, referenced from screenshots, two more photo studies, plus one quick master study, The Valkyrie's Vigil, by Edward Robert Hughes.

And a few figure studies; the first batch are referenced, the second (probably obviously) not.

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.

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:

Shade

A painting for the cover of the autumn issue of The Colored Lens (available on Amazon now).

The image's progress, for anyone who's interested:

I started by trying to make an interesting-looking background. The ghostly figure emerged soon afterwards, and from then onwards it was just a matter of refining. Step #7 was in Painter, which I use for its interesting textures, all the rest in Photoshop.

And here it is with the lettering on the actual cover:

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. :)

On the Hill of Roses

Click for larger image

Dust jacket cover I made for On the Hill of Roses, a short story collection by Stefan Grabinski (translated from Polish by Miroslaw Lipinski), to be published by Hieroglyphic Press this summer.

I had a helpful and poetic description from the publisher: '[...] a landscape at dusk, a rose garden with the bloody reds of the bushes merging with the dying sunset shades. The ground might be a dark, almost black green with hint of the sinister in the deepening shadows.' They specifically wanted something in the style and mood of Eventide, loose and impressionistic. So I set out to put my new watercolour skills into preliminary sketches.

Well, 'watercolour skills' might be a bit overrated. But these colour blobs were just what I needed, so I scanned them in and threw more values in PS.

Then I took the two and merged them into a larger, wider piece. I threw in more golden tones because I felt the pinks and lilacs were too subdued, and because the title story is a psychological horror piece taking place in midsummer, so I wanted a small taste of it to seep into this image.

Not forgetting that the right side of the image would be the front cover, I flipped it soon after, so that the focus would be on the right and that it would still work as a whole.

I also added some guidelines to keep my composition together and flowing, and was switching them on and off right until the end.

From then on it was just a matter of rendering. This is frequently the part I have most difficulty with. I tend to overwork my images and they lose the freshness and dynamic their earlier versions have. A lot of the time, I'm just going back and forth between different saves of an image. I was more careful with what details I added and where with this one, so maybe that's why it proved to be a more straightforward process than usual.

It also turned out to be a true digital/watercolour hybrid: in order to preserve the watercolour textures, I kept laying down shapes in watercolour, then scanning them and adding them to my main image:

(All this from my 'upgraded' workspace, no less)

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.

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.

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.