Café Sketch 08: Watercolour Texture
These guys ended up with glummer expressions than they really had.
I added a watercolour texture as an experiment in combining digital lines with traditional elements.
The texture comes from inkandtexture.com, a site I run that supplies free inks and textures for digital artists.
Café Sketch 07: Computer Room
In the spring I started this digital tablet sketch in an internet café. The other day I had the inspiration to work it up into a kind of illustration.
Saalty Deer
The internet is such a funny place.
This evening, someone posted this request for a piece of work:
I just bought the domain saalty.com and am looking for an image to display until I decide what to do with it. If anyone wants to make one I will put it up and link to your site.
Is anyone willing to draw an image of something pretty or cute, like a deer licking a salt cube?
The only thing on the website will be your image and a link to your own site if you have one, with a small message at the bottom mentioning that I don’t know what to do with the domain yet.
I don’t want rights to the image or anything like that. I just want something cute to put up for now so I thought I’d ask around on reddit.
I didn’t give much thought to the image he described, but posted some links to my Thirty Days Project 2011 and 2012, thinking he might find something “cute” in among the robots, monsters and Kyoto market pieces.
He did, and sent me a very nice note asking about the crabs I did on Day 30.
But while he was off looking at my work, I was suddenly struck by the idea of a cute little deer licking a salt-block ice-cream cone on a summer’s day:
I put this together very quickly and sent it off. He responded immediately and, maybe half an hour after I saw the first message, my piece is the holding image on saalty.com.
Café Sketch 06: Combining Prior Experiences
The digital tools are very seductive, allowing me to zoom in quickly and add accurate details as I go.
Too often, however, I lose track of the whole image and the end result is an overly-tight, technical drawing without life.
Taking cues from two other café sketches, the most recent White Objects and my first sketch on the new tablet, I tried to loosen up the lines and cross-hatching with a big marker-like tool and develop the forms selectively.
White Objects
First sketch on the new tablet.
Photoshop Tutorials: Layer Blending Combinations
I got some free Premium Tutorials from the excellent PSD Tuts website.
Here’s my result from following this tutorial to make a “hero unit” (a key image for a blog post, website header or advertisement).
I used some of my own photos from my Baja portfolio to create the background image. (The text is completely arbitrary, unless you can find something in it.)
Here are some interesting things covered in this tutorial:
-Layer>Layer Style>Global Light… will set a universal lighting angle for all layer blending modes
-CS6 offers Smart Filters that apply (non-destructively) to Smart Objects (my CS2 doesn’t have that)
-subtle combinations of blending modes like having both Colour Overlay and Gradient Overlay applied at low opacities
-blocking some applied layer effects with a layer mask
-using vector masks for non-destructive shape-making
-using Layer Mask Hides Effects
-using a black-white Gradient Overlay set to Linear Burn on a colour-filled layer instead of a coloured gradient (the base colour can be changed any time while maintaining the gradient effect)
-a Stroke with Opacity set to 0% will knock out the other added Layer Effects, including Shape colour
Café Sketch 05: White Shapes
A lighter look for finger-painting on the tablet.
Interesting how shading in some areas carefully gives the flat white areas their own illusion of volume and weight.
If there were no colour at all the scene would be very flat, but with a little shading and rounding of some key areas the space instead seems be filled with white objects.
Café Sketch 04: Patterned Shirts
The corner seat that was available today was a little cramped, but it offered the best view of the café. These two were deep in conversation and obligingly sat very still. Their patterned shirts just begged to be drawn in.
Digital Sketches: People
I haven’t done this kind of digital painting in a very long time. The sketches were quick and fun, but there is still a long way to go to learn the ins and outs of painting with this software. I’m getting used to my finger as a brush, but I would still prefer to use a stylus.
Click through for two more plus one bonus illustration-style colour sketch.
Café in Colour
Another finger-sketch on the tablet, sitting in the Boulevard Café at UBC.
A dark, rainy spring day encouraged me to push in colour where there was none.
Lady Macbeth
Malcolm: …this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen who as ’tis thought by self and violent hands took off her life…
While working on the previous Macbeth poster, I remembered that he is not the only one in that play who descends into madness; his wife, Lady Macbeth, hallucinates that she is unable to clean her guilty hands.
I picture her wandering dark castle halls, her horror growing as the moonlight reveals her just-washed hands are still stained with Duncan’s blood.
Aya suggested edging the arms with lace which changes the point of view, putting us into Lady Macbeth’s place looking at her bloody hands through her terrified eyes.
It would be very interesting to promote a well-known play using an image centered on someone other than the title character.
I did not intend to start a Shakespeare theme, but now that one has begun (if two in a row can be said to be a theme at all) it actually seems like a pretty good idea: a series of illustrations interpreting key moments from his plays.
Hmm.
Macbeth Poster Dilemma
Player: … We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but we can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.
This Macbeth poster is a self-promotional piece, not attached to any specific production (yet!). While working it up from concept sketch, I had one of those satisfying moments when I stopped struggling to push my original idea and instead responded to what the image was showing me.
I had originally designed a lot more detail for the face (see the pencil sketch below), but when I started adding the bloody textures, the two areas competed for attention with neither completing its task.
The moment of inspiration came when I realized that the bloody shapes could be persuaded to take on both jobs and say everything that needed to be said, so I just did away with the facial shapes entirely. This solution also gave more power to the eye, letting it show how Macbeth’s paranoia, fear and madness are taking hold under the envy-green crown.
I ended up with an interesting dilemma, however. In this first version Macbeth’s profile has a hard, dramatic edge.
The second version, below, is what I had originally envisioned, with a softer treatment that rounds out the features and “turns” the structure in three dimensional space.
Click through to see the second version and the original sketch.
4 Digital Sketches: Café
Here are four more sketches done on our tablet in the Boulevard Café. I’m getting to know SketchBook Pro a little more since my first try.
Because my fingertip is much larger than the contact point I often end up trying to try to control the brush too much, and the result is that the drawing ends up too “tight”. I have to learn to let the vagaries of the tool contribute to the life of the work, just as I would with a pencil or any other tool whose vagaries are a little more familiar.
There’s a new pressure-sensitive stylus that is due to be released soon: the maXStylus by Atmel. It looks quite promising and is specifically designed for Android tablets. I’m looking forward to trying one.
Two layers of colour fill contributed to a bit of a water-colour effect that I’d like to explore more.
Click through to see three more sketches.
Two Pieces in Group Show at Kafka’s
Curator Michael Schwartz is hosting a group show called “Spring Break at Kafka’s Coffee And Tea on Main Street in Vancouver. The show features work by nineteen local artists, including two each from Aya and me.
Click through to see both pieces and a photo montage of opening night.
Highway Empire 01
Pen, watercolour.
19 x 24 cm
First Sketch on New Tablet
I had a decent cappucino and tried drawing on our new Asus Transformer Prime tablet at the Boulevard Café on UBC campus.
The drawing application is Sketchbook Pro by Autodesk which is available for Android devices for only about C$5.
It’s quite a challenge to draw with my fingers instead of a stylus or other tool, but Sketchbook Pro makes it pretty easy with lots of ways to quickly zoom and move the canvas around. I tried two markers, one fine and one thick, set to about 80% opacity and another softer brush for the colouring.
Had a bit of a scare when opening the file when we got home and found the layer with the lines was missing! Closing (without saving) and re-opening through the Gallery recovered the file properly, but it was disheartening for a few minutes. The application exports as a PSD with layers, which is an excellent option.
Looking forward to trying out more of the brushes and blending some colours. I would still prefer a stylus, though, with pressure sensitivity.
Patterned Sweater
The man at the next table was reading “100 Years of Solitude” and then writing furiously.
Pen, digital
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