Nazis and the Schlock cover: Part 2

A quick recap, if one was ever needed - I got to do a cover for online pulp anthology Schlock. In the first post in this series of sorts, I chronicled how the linework was brought about, a post you can read here

So first off, what I call the quick and dirty colours. This was all done with default Photoshop brushes on a layer over the lines set on 'Multiply'. By playing around with the different brush and opacity settings one can create an interesting texture over which to do some main colours.

After a bit of refinement, I threw a texture over the colours, basically a layer set on 'Overlay'. The texture in this case comes from a rusted metal column the girlfriend very kindly took a photo of. If you're curious, check out the original photo here.


More playing around with Opacity/brightness settings, and two more textures. One is another photo, this time of an old city wall, which you can check out here. The second is a generic paper texture, taken from Mayang's ultra-useful Texture Library.

Discussion with T concluded that we weren't that happy with the colours - yet. So it was time to tweak the colours; first via a bit of desaturation (through the Saturation/Hue/Lightness panel) and then the blues were increased in order to make the background 'colder' and hopefully the figure would pop out a bit more.

Noisese is generated over the picture (through Filters - Noise - Generate Noise) to give a fine textured effect I tend to quite like. And finally, some excitng sounding (hopefully) magazine text is thrown around in wild abandon. Yes, Schlock issue 2 WILL have a story involving John Keats and a Succubus, so in no way I made that one up. So go check out Schlock for your quality reading needs, and let me know what you think!

An in progress: Nazis and the Schlock Issue 2 cover: Part 1

At the moment I am doing some artwork, such as covers, for an internet magazine created by a few friends of mine. It's a pulp anthology rightly named Schlock and now it's on its second issue. I did the cover, together with T who did the inks.

The issue's theme is 'Exploitation' so immediately the idea to do something Nazi related came to mind. Nazisploitation, if you will, as in the Ilsa She Wolf of the SS movie series
.
So here is the very first sketch, done on a random piece of notebook pad. The pose was taken directly from this poster to Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks





After that I went to photoshop for more sketching. The sketch on the right striked me as the better pose, so work went on that one.


So with a pose decided, yet another sketch was done. The original idea was to do the illustration in the form of a poster to a movie about Nazis coming from the moon on flying saucers, thus the text. However since it was going to be a magazine cover we decided to keep it all more general.


The sketch above was sent to T for inking. T's style is very angular and spiky, which I think actually suited the piece quite well.

With the lines settled, it was time to open Photoshop and start doing the colouring. Since that process would make this blog entry too big (and blogger is a bit unwieldy to compose posts with in the first place) I'll do the inprogress for that in a second post. Keep tuned.

STOP PRESS ! Check out part 2!

Long time no post

I have to admit of not being very active here on this blog.

Hopefully this year will change that?

Here's a couple of things anyway.


This one was more of an exercise than anything else.


And some fun with character designs.

WHY SO SERIOUS?

While the Joker is one of my least favourite of Batman's Rouges Gallery, I was somehow inspired to do a drawing of him today.

Mind I wanted to do this for a bit since reading The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale.

Caricature Sketchin'

I've been doing some caricature work of my office workmates today.
Here's a sketch for the first one.

I've been trying out inking with Illustrator actually.
I'll be posting those later. Maybe tomorrow! So stay tuned.

An in progress of sorts

Last night I started working on a piece, which I got around finishing just today.

Here I'll do a quick 'in progress' just to catalogue for myself how it was done!


First off, this is the first sketch, which was actually done on the bottom right corner of a much larger photoshop doodle page.

Here is around half-way done, and the last time I had saved yesteday night. After a couple of hours' work, however, Photoshop crashed and all the progress I did after this stage was lost. So all was redone (hopefully for the better) on the morrow.

And here is the final result. I think I'm relatively satisfied with it. Perfect? No, but then nothing is. So far however I'm pleased, to say the least.

'Tis a Sketch Update I say.

One digital and one traditional, just to keep things balanced.

I enjoy creating weird characters just for the sake of it.
Wonder what their stories are?

It's a pixel self portrait

I don't regularly do pixel art; the style demands a lot of attention and consumes a LOT of time. But it can be very effective and it's surely a lot of fun to do. I decided to do a new pixel art self portrait/avatar, because, hell, I wanted to change the one I was currently using.

A peek through the way-back machine

There was this challenge going on LJ for artists to draw themselves as teenagers; it was too good not to give a spin, at least in totally sketchy form.



Now back to drawing more regularly so this blog can get restarted with the updates!

Colors! the sketchdump

Today I was messing around with the DS homebrew software, Colors, a bit. Here's the results.

I like the last one best, truth be told.