Io non sono qui'

Assassin

2009-10-11T23:12:00.004+02:00

A quick sketch, done in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and tweaked a bit in Photoshop.

The ugly, the pretty, and the dinosaur - part 2

2009-09-21T21:36:00.002+02:00

The redrawn image from the last blog entry, finished in long last.

I declare it finished otherwise I'll continue dicking around with it for another week.

The ugly, the pretty, the dinosaur, part 1

2009-09-17T23:13:00.002+02:00

Decided to redraw a picture from, oh, more than a year ago.

It's not finished yet, but it's late now so I'll continue tomorrow.

Damn how time flies.

Last year's version can be seen in this blog post

Any improvements?

Ink, brush, create

2009-09-16T22:42:00.003+02:00

I've decided to try out inking using india ink and a brush.

But first, of course, one needs practise.

Result! A test for something bigger, hopefully, for Schlock magazine.

I like the effect of ink on plain old board.

I have no scanner at the moment, so photos will have to suffice.

Later got around to having some fun with the SLR and Poladroid.

Sketch for the day

2009-09-08T22:43:00.002+02:00

A favourite subject of mine.

Unimaginative? You bet your ass. But I will insert some lame excuse here, and, uhh,
let me give myself a break.

Venusian Rescue! an Ultranauts adventure

2009-08-22T21:39:00.003+02:00

A step by step of my latest illustration. Nothing too fancy, really.

Aaand there it's done! Hoorah!

Nazis and the Schlock cover: Part 2

2009-02-24T13:14:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-24T12:45:00.007+01:00

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

2009-01-22T23:40:00.004+01:00

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?

2008-09-19T23:26:00.003+02:00

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'

2008-09-01T23:13:00.005+02:00

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

2008-06-05T00:39:00.003+02:00

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.

2008-06-02T23:33:00.004+02:00

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

2008-05-16T00:28:00.002+02:00

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

2008-04-29T17:22:00.002+02:00

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

2008-03-18T00:05:00.005+01:00

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.

Sketch Update

2008-03-12T15:17:00.004+01:00

I haven't been able to really post updates for the past month, if only because I didn't actually draw much. Shame on me, I know.

Anyway here's I'll throw a couple of sketchbook pages.
This one is actually from some time ago. I like the little Batman there, he's so happy.

This here is from today, a water demon chap or something. He has a totally disregard for humans and their pants.

Art Rage!

2008-03-02T01:53:00.003+01:00

Not the actual raging about art (although that should be an actual subject for a blog post) but the program Art Rage, a simple but rather neat piece of painting software. One of its cool features is to have an image pinned on your working space as a reference, something not even Painter or Photoshop do, as well as allowing you to quickly set that reference as a tracing image, if you're ever so inclined to do that.

I decided to test the feature out.

A random photo of a girl was found in one of my many image folders and was hastily sketched over as an excercise of sorts.

Pixel Po-po-portraits

2008-03-01T00:44:00.002+01:00

Some time ago I got around to making a couple of pixel portraits for my friends Daniel and Lara, who together form the dynamic duo behind the movie blog A Medium of Images. They're quite quick and fun to make.

That reminds me of an excuse to show something off from history.

I did these last year, all using the nifty little pixel art program Graphics Gale.

Ink'd up Quickie.

2008-02-26T16:30:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I like just to quickly draw little sketches and then ink them up. This one here didn't come out too badly, I think.

I then added a quick texture over it in Photoshop just to make it a bit more interesting.

Barbarian Day(s)

2008-02-24T00:45:00.003+01:00

I got to sketch and watercolour a couple of drawings involving barbarians (of the Conan variety).

Here's one dude riding on a dinosaur!

This one was loosely inpred by the Frazzetta style images in the February issue of Imagine FX. She's a falconer, since today I actually got to see a real life falcon at a demostration. Beautiful bird.

Here's a photo of the aforementioned bird, which was kind of used for reference. Forgot what's actual species of falcon it is, but it's related to the Peregine and the like.

Painting nights

2008-02-19T23:59:00.004+01:00

So it was decided that I'll be getting my hands dirty with real media at least a couple of times or so a week. Which is pretty cool if you ask me. Here's what was done today.

Here's a Professor kind of character and his plucky kid assistant who are probably soon off for exciting adventures! And a couple of crows. Crows are pretty awesome birds if you ask me.

This was my first time trying out inking with a brush. It's real difficult if you ask me. I wonder what brushes are best for inking?

Say Hi to the guys

2008-02-19T01:11:00.002+01:00

Today I felt compelled to drawing Krang from Ninja Turtles.

Dude, that is hell of rude of you sheesh.

Guess he misses his robot suit.

Painting is for Everyone

2008-02-18T00:03:00.005+01:00

This evening I ended up messing around with watercolours; actually it was the girlfriend who spurred me with her experimenting with acrylics and modelling pastes. I have to try that out too, actually, the whole process looks like a blast. And since the ex-flatmate left a whole ton of art materials in the flat, it's a crime not to take advantage.

I was trying to imitate Quentin Blake, one artist whose work I absolutely relish - few weeks back I was leafing through a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and was blown away by the beauty of deceptively simple artwork.

And here is what happens when someone tries to 'ink' with actual watercolour paint instead of, err, ink. Inking with an actual brush is next in my list of things that I want to try.

Wherein a dude gets to take some photos.

2008-02-16T20:21:00.002+01:00

I'm first to admit that I'm no photographer - I lack the patience for the art, as well as generally prefer to leave it to those who have an eye for such things. But I also admit that I have fun taking the occassional photo, even if with something as simple as a mobile phone camera.

However today I ended up going around Cottonera and decided to snap away.

It's fun what one can see and enjoy just few minutes from one's doorstep (or, err, about 30 minutes' worth of bus drive).

On the different things...

2008-02-15T00:24:00.002+01:00

So I saw this rather nifty sketch of Yoko by teh_ryu on good old livejournal and couldn't resist throwing some colours over it, even if only as an excuse to try out this Paint Tool Sai art program, if anything. It's an impressive piece of coding, and works well on my machine to boot.

And here is some dumb fun done in Photoshop. I love drawing silly little monsters like this over green chap over here. I call him Monsigniore Biongiorno Biscotti.

Finally, umm, my own version of Pan's Labyrinth's Pale Man, as drawn with Tegaki E's basic as hell java drawing applet. Surprisingly enteraining stuff, I have to do this sort of thing more often.

Let's do this thing

2008-02-12T20:19:00.000+01:00

Finally settled on a template that I like.
Oh and a banner... I have to admit it's fun to mess around with that sort of thing.

Here's for a sketchpage, folks. Fresh from yesterday.

Colors!

2008-02-12T13:53:00.000+01:00

Few months back I discovered this neat little homebrew for the DS, Colors (hnngh the missing 'u' pains me to no end), and thought it might be a good, fun idea to open this blog with the stuff I drew with it over the months. I should restart drawing on it!

Working on a medium that's possibly restrictive (Colors only has one layer and no undo) helps one train their creative/artistic muscle a bit, I think.