Last week Lilian brought my attention to Illustration Friday. It’s a website that posts an idea for an artwork every week, and links the artwork you made in that particular week. Sounds like a great exercise for me and the Wacom. According to the Welcome page: Illustration Friday is meant to challenge participants creatively. We believe that every person has a little creative bone in their body. Illustration Friday just gives a no-pressure, fun excuse to use it. No clients looking for a particular thing. No one judging the outcome of the work. It’s a chance to experiment and explore and play with visual art. Curious about collage? Try it here. Never even picked up a colored pencil? Why not now? Just have time for a doodle? That’s okay, we’d love to see it. You don’t have to be an illustrator or an artist to participate. Just pick up a […]
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Cover art
I drew a lot and after drawing, I would upload them on to this blog. Specifically I would upload them onto this blog. All of the ones tagged Artwork can be found here.
A Banyan Tree
More scratchings with Painter Classic using the tablet, with some highlighting using Photoshop. This barely resembles a real banyan, since I drew this without any references. Note to self: use more references if you don’t actually remember what things look like.
Continue readingStephan Martiniere Concept Art Gallery
In addition to Ryan Church in my post before this, I’ve also noticed that Stephan Martiniere, the illustrator that was employed on a freelance basis by Lucasfilm for Revenge of the Sith, has also started to display his production paintings from the movie. Apart from that, you can also see samples from other movies he worked on, such as I, Robot, The Astronaut’s Wife and Red Planet. [[image:mart1.gif:Mygeeto:left:0]][[image:mart2.gif:Mygeeto:left:0]]
Continue readingRyan Church’s ROTS Concept Art Gallery
Looks like Ryan Church’s official site has updated with new Revenge of the Sith concept artwork in his pro gallery. As with his Attack of the Clones pieces lower down in the same page, his stuff here are spectacular displays of digital painting. I miss Ralph McQuarrie‘s and Joe Johnston‘s (among others) concept art from the original trilogy as much as the next fan, but I think Ryan’s work make up for the former masters’ absence in the prequel trilogy. Click on his pro gallery link above to see some of his work on the movie. [[image:rc1.gif:Utapau:left:0]][[image:rc2.gif:Mygeeto:left:0]]
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A Spider-Man Portrait
I saw Spider-Man 2 again today. The movie version of the Spidey costume is quite rich and detailed in texture, yet true to its comic-book origins… As before I wondered how a student / freelance photographer, making barely enough as it is, is able to afford to come up with the costume. Did he sew it himself, or did he make a custom order from someone. In which case, how did he hide his identity from the costumer. Anyways, it caught my attention again enough for me to try to recreate some of its texture in a piece using Painter.
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Valley Orchid
It’s not much to look at, but there’s something that barely looks like an orchid in the picture below. No, I don’t know which species it is, only that it’s yellow. And yes, there’s a water-filled valley beneath it. This is my second piece using Painter Classic, scratched out with dry media mostly. Using the program is more difficult than I thought. Oh, by the way, check out this amazing colour-based optical illusion. It’s quite amazing, especially the third one.
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Arise, New Graphics Tablet!
The other cool stuff I bought the same day I bought the table is this Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet. In fact, I’ve been wanting it for many years now that when I finally have it in my hands, I didn’t have the heart to remove it from its box and plug it in for FOUR DAYS. This morning I finally did it. After getting the tablet up and running with my computer, I proceeded to install the bundled Painter Classic software. When I finally ran the program, my blood went cold. All the colours were screwed up! It took me about 30 minutes before I decided to increase my monitor’s setting from 16-bit to 32-bit colour. Only then did I let out a sigh of relief. I grabbed the stylus, played around with the controls a bit; then tried playing with different brushes and tool on different layers; finally […]
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Tales of the Prototype and the Table
Last week, we printed out some of the prototype pages for the first ever Hishgraphics e-book. To be honest, prior to this I do have a fair amount of doubts about the project. In my mind, I estimated that perhaps this would have a 20-30% success when it’s eventually released into the wild. But after holding these coloured printouts in my hands, looking at the storytelling from the viewpoint of sequential art, I feel like this has at least 60% chance of succeeding. The story is somewhat half-baked, in retrospect it looks to me like its influenced by a bunch of different sources such as the C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Pixar’s Monsters Inc. Substantially more text has now been added to the short paragraphs with large typeface size that you see on the image above, so the current version […]
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The Cliff In My Mind’s Eye
So after drawing a dozen or so robots and a couple of cyborgs for a freelance client, I thought I’d take a break and draw a quick pencil sketch of this seaside landscape which real estate value would no doubt be way over my head should the location exist. I figure this would be a fantastic place to cook fried noodles. Anyway, enjoy. The art, I mean, not the fried noodles.
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ArtRage, A Terrific Painting Program
I was randomly browsing when I suddenly found this fantastic piece of digital art on the net. It led me to a digital painting program from Ambient Design Ltd. called ArtRage. It can simulate realistic brush stokes on canvas or paper, as if you were really working with oil or acrylics. And it even gives you tiny congealed globs of paint if you move the brush in a certain angle. The colours will mix realistically when different paints overlap. Today, I tried my hand at it, using my trusty mouse in lieu of a graphics tablet, and here are the first two attempts at freehand painting, with no visual references. I’m really having fun with this and will have to practise more to refine my technique which currently sucks… the best I can with a mouse.
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Old Blue Harvest Fanzine Art
When I was studying overseas back in the early 90s… very early 90s… I became acquainted by snail-mail to one Mary Jo Fox who was, with her friend James Addams, the publishers of the Star Wars fanzine Blue Harvest which ran for 21 “episodes”, another fine way of saying “issues”. They had a plethora of articles that you can read from, such as an interview with Michael Stackpole and A New Hope Special Edition review from way back when the EU was cooling down from its initial Big Bang. Although it ran for years, I only provided art for the fanzine in its early days, mostly for its back cover right below the “Next Episode On Blue Harvest” blurb they usually have there. Here are two of the black and white artwork that were featured in the magazines: 1993… man, that was a long time ago. These pieces were scanned […]
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Homemade Computer Generated Landscapes, You Ask?
You’ve seen it in the movies and television. Camera swooping down on artificially-made terrain. The terrain resides in the mind of the computer, and so does the camera. If you ask, can I do this on my home computer? Can I generate an artificial landscape and have it look near-photorealistic? Can I make green fields and snowcapped mountains and beaches and islands and desolate rocky coastline? The answer to that is yes, with Terragen. And it’s freeware! Just download, install and you can start to build landscapes like this nifty sunset snowscape I made: It’ll take some getting use to. But when you can figure it out, the results are spectacular. Try it out.
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Simon Taylor – A Terrific Artist
Simon Taylor is a friend of mine from Manchester, UK. We share (and mix together) the common interests of art, role-playing games and Star Wars. His skills as an artist is head over heels better than mine. Here are three samples of his coloured artwork. The first is a Dungeons and Dragons character. The other two are Star Wars. Fantastic stuff.
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