On the Hill of Roses

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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)

Sketches March & April

After what I now realised to be a rather long hiatus, prepare to be swamped with recent work! For now, just some sketches. I have fallen behind with both sketching and scanning (lately I am so tired in the mornings or after work that taking out pen and paper in the metro seems too daunting).

The overwhelming majority of these are from the time I spent at a hospital looking after a family member. Long hours with nothing much to do - good for drawing. When sleep deprivation kicked in, less so - but still. :)

Then I realised I had also scanned another batch from March - I just never got round to posting it.

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.

Prophecy

A semi-quick piece: some 20' for the first rough sketch (see below), then a couple hours this evening.

Acrylic tinies

To my surprise, my old tubes of acrylic paint (bought in 2003!) are still alive. They are big plastic ones and could surely last for a few more paintings. I had a couple smaller metallic tubes, too, but those are bone-dry.

I tried them yesterday evening on these itty bitty (9x6cm) pieces of canvas. Fun times! I'm a lot more comfortable with acrylics' drying times as opposed to oils'. I still attacked the first two with a hair dryer, though.

I'm also realising that my scanner is not handling reds very well. I always have to colour-correct my scans, and it's always the reds that are most skewed.

Edit: here they are, sitting snugly on my desk shelf! :)

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.

Nelleke's forest

A tiny (10.5x10.3cm) watercolour study, from this lovely photo by Nelleke.

(A very early stage can be seen in the previous post.) :)

Workspace issues

I haz them. D:

2012 meagre beginnings

I suppose something is better than nothing!

Two VERY quick pieces I did this morning. Aisling, from The Secret of Kells (a fantastic animated film, I highly recommend it. It's a visual treat), and the Arishok from Dragon Age 2. I've been running a fever, and it was hard to focus (coughing and blowing one's nose while at it doesn't help, either). So I painted semi-blindly, and on the whole both these came out very spontaneously in subject as well as execution. 

I came across this while rummaging in my 'Quick' folder. A few touches and I suppose that's it. Wild red-haired girl holding something that tries to look like a Kalashnikov - I can't draw weapons to save my life. :p

Finally, some figure practice from earlier this week. Reference from M. J. Ranum's stock account. The skinny girl was interesting (read: difficult) to draw. The one with the wide hips (which I made even wider) - simply delightful! ;)

Hammeln

More watercolours tonight. My mother has come home for the holidays and set up her own workspace in the living room, which made me realise the light there is infinitely better than the one in my room. So I joined her and painted this:

Reference is from National Geographic.

Calton Hill

A small watercolour piece I made in mid-November as a birthday present for a friend. She likes green and greenery, which is something I learned to appreciate very much while painting this: green is so restful to work with! It's almost like eye-food, or something. :)

It was referenced from a photo I took in Edinburgh in 2009, at a very lovely spot on the north side of Calton Hill. The bright sunshine was a bit of a rarity...

I wish I could have made a contrast as stark as the one in the photo! But I was fearful of botching the picture. I should have been more bold; but then again I know I don't control the medium very well, and I would have botched it. :}

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:

Apologies - watercolour

"What timeless hours must it take,   writing my apologies,   on these burning rocks,   grazed by the dust and the wind and   shaked by the storms and   in ambiguous dismay or delight at a clear bright sky,   my eyes hurt."

Quick illustration of a story-in-the-works. This one is not mine, but it also belongs to the Sunraze world.

Sunraze (watercolour)

Another take on the original Sunraze scene, this time in watercolours.

The result could be better (I suppose it will be a while before I get the hang of watercolours, barring any 'happy accidents'). The paper was not made to take as much water as I loaded it with, glazing after glazing. I will need to to improve my blending, too.

The tree figure was done a bit haphazardly: started with sepia first, then the reds, then I inked it a bit, and again sepia/red. I'm too used to adding the highlights on top, so I got confused. :}

Well, on to the next piece!

Watercolours

I have been struggling with an art block lately. I have little motivation to sit in front of the PC and paint. I do try to force myself into doing so, but that kind of defeats the object. Pencil drawing holds little appeal, too (I used to do most of it during transit, but now I tend to read instead).

Last Friday, however, I got hold of a decent set of watercolours, and I've been genuinely itching to try my hand at using them. I think that might deal with the block!

I am still very clumsy, and I need better brushes, but I'm liking them very much.

The fluffheap tree is from a rougher pencil drawing I made this summer. I used tracing paper to transfer it on my watercolour pad (by tracing it on both sides of the paper and using one side like carbon paper). The necessary cleaning up was done on the fly. Inking was done with very diluted India ink (and a pen with an annoyingly scratchy nib).

 The landscape is a variation of a somewhat failed oil painting I started and abandoned about a month ago. Since then I got some insight on what went wrong with it, though, so maybe I should pick it up again, or redo it from scratch. Problem with oils: long drying times and the fact that turpentine, which would speed them up, disagrees very badly with me. I also feel that using a hair dryer is not exactly the next best approach. I should probably get some Liquin.

Lastly, this is the unfinished digital study (referenced from this photo) I apparently don't want to paint. I tell myself it's useful, learning to paint forests, but I don't seem to believe me. Why, self?!

Summer sketches

I'm back! And not quite empty-handed, even though there wasn't much time for drawing. The two weeks I was away were largely spent on the road, and in impromptu family gatherings. But I managed to get some stuff done.

I now think that I had a breakthrough of sorts, and it was right after seeing Katerina Chadoulou's work earlier this month. Katerina draws faces very deliberately, with attention to planes, building forms with bold cross hatching. I tried to work in a similar manner in last post's photo studies, and in the ones I did subsequently:

as well as in a couple studies of other artists:

(The figure on the left is from a painting by Jacec Malczewski; the others are from Dave McKean's Black Orchid).

And I think I'm slowly, very slowly, getting somewhere with all this. The more 3d-like approach is helping me a lot. I can see or visualise volume where I previously saw mostly flat light and shadow.

I still need a lot more work. It's funny how, the more I practice, my skill increases at a more or less steady rate, but at the same time my standards rise exponentially. So I'm never really very pleased with my work. (I'm pleased when I draw and when I finish stuff, but then soon afterwards I want to do better). So I hope I keep doing better, I guess!

The rest is much less focused, but here it is anyway.

Life drawing from the port of Kavala:

And all the rest is from imagination.

By the way, all the pencil sketches I post are digital assemblages: the drawings usually span a lot more pages (and even sketchbooks), but I cram them in together for convenience, chronologically or, as in this case, thematically.

Summer break (of sorts)

I've been slacking it since the second half of July. I kinda blame it on the heat, but the truth is I just haven't been motivated enough to draw much lately. I kept doing a few sketches on the metro up to a point, but I was dissatisfied with them; hardly worth the hassle of scanning them. Then I picked up some unread books that were gathering dust on the shelf (Oryx anf Crake by M.Atwood filled my transit time until the start of my summer leave last Monday), and I got hold of Civilization V (that one created a huge time sink), and well, you get the idea. :p

These are from early July:

The yard (second image) is from life, the rest is from imagination. The wrapped critter is supposed to be a tarsier. The fluffheap tree is intended for either a mural or a huge print for a friend's wall.

And these are from just this evening. Photo reference from a video by Paris Kain (upper row) and Suresh Natarayan (second row). I realised that all this time I've been drawing with a B pencil, which is great when I'm making sketches during transit as it doesn't smudge, but on the other hand it makes them a bit dull as I can't get much contrast out of it. I used a 2B for the faces, and it was almost a revelation! (I did spend a lot of time cleaning them up, though.)

I also tried a different technique for these, thinking about planes first, then use crosshatching to build up volume, instead of my usual pussyfooting around shadows.