Gun Slinging

Didn't have much to do the other day so I rendered out a new Myxomatosis picture. I really should do some 3D that doesn't involve these rabbits.

Chinese Class Doodles

This is about the extent of my Chinese speaking ability.

Instead of a man on the moon, the chinese have a rabbit on the moon.

Illustration Method (in 10 steps)

Some people in class asked me how I did my illustrations. My method isn't exactly rocket surgery, and is actually pretty methodical. To whom it may concern, this is pretty much the method I used for every page (although time spent on some pages was more than others).



Step 1: First off was just drawing the bulk of the picture with good ol' paper and pencil. I tend to draw pictures like this with a pacer, which every art teacher I've ever had hates. Hmmm... I just like having a sharp lead for hatching, and forever sharpening a regular pencil wears them down too fast.
Normally if I had time I'd use ink at this point, but there wasn't really time for this project. This alone took anywhere from 4-6 hours
Step 2: Once the picture is scanned into the 'puter, it's just adjustment of white and black levels, and deleting anything that's not the drawing (in photoshop).

Step 3: next, I just duplicate the layer and Gaussian blur it to get some smoother shadow tone.

Step 4: Multiply the blurred layer over the top of the pencil lines.

Step 5: Draw in the pure black that was used in varying ways throughout the book. In this case it was the ground, and a couple of spirally background "trees".

Step 6: digitally paint in the characters' colour. I'm not much of a matte painter, and kind of average with colour as I've said before, so with these pictures I'm relying kind of heavily on my pencil lines. I did some mild dodging and burning on the colour, mainly to just enhance the pencil shading.

Step 7: Most of the colour were just multiply layers on top of the pencil image. The girl's skin was a color layer, as it gave it more of a glow. At this point I burn some of the outer pencil lines to mimic a poor man's "inking".

Step 8: Paint in the backgrounds. This part was what I found looked the most "photoshoppy" in some images. Makes some of the pictures look like desktop backgrounds.

Step 9: Paint in background details, such as clouds. This was about the extent of my matte painting technique.

Step 10: Add some overlapping foreground clouds and some dark green under the character. These are the "grounding" details, which makes the foreground, midground and background all look part of the same image - rather than a bunch of layers on top of each other. This was definitely done better in some images than others.

And then, 8-12 hours later you have your illustration ready for your Indesign layout - not including the 30 - infinite or so hours you will spend nit picking over tiny imperfections.

My Picture Book Pages (with a bit o' complaining)

Heads up - I've been staring at these images for a long time, so I'm at that stage where I see nothing but problems. Hence, there may be some whinging in this post (plus I'm writing this at about 2 in the morning).

I meant to do more "work in progress" posts, but instead I just went ahead and churned out the entire book as fast as I could. These are the pages as they currently stand (in reverse order of creation). Some images I'm more happy with than others, but... deadline, time limit, 4 weeks, blah blah blah... - they ended up this quality. I'll try to live with it.
Not sure what to put on the back cover so this could definitely be subject to change.

I'm really not happy at how "photoshoppy" some of these pictures look. It's due to the fast noobish digital painting I did. Slightly above MS paint.

Personally I like my drawings to be "cleaner" than this. Normally I'd use ink for outlines and such, but instead I just had to do the quick poor man's version of burning the outer pencil lines in photoshop. Some people may find the scratchy pencil lines "charming", but I think it looks more like a drawing mistake than an intentional style choice.

smoke is a bit dodge...

At this earlier stage I was spending a bit more time on the backgrounds.

This picture of the girl is the one I like the most. I think it's because I did it before I felt like I had to rush each image.

I imagine the cuckoo as some sort of cross between road-runner and Spawn.

These pictures do make nice thumbnails, though.