Marble mesh

Thought I'd try my hand at using gradient mesh for something made out of glass. I like the way the swathes of color turned out, kind of painterly.

Finished apple mesh

Here's the finished apple created with gradient mesh, with some texture added, all done in Illustrator. It's not a picture-perfect copy of the reference photo, but it gets the idea across. The original pic is actually pretty grainy/pixellated, so it's a decent trade-off.

Vector apple WIP

More gradient mesh practice, fruit seems to lend itself to these kinds of exercises.

Apple mesh work-in-progress

Without texture it's looking a little tomato-ish...

Adventures with Gradient Mesh

Gave the gradient mesh tool a go in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and I think it turned out pretty decent:

(Original photo taken by benjamint444 and used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)

Not a total copy of the original photo (all the little details would have been incredibly tedious to re-create, but I've certainly seen others go to those lengths) but I think it gets the point across fairly well. Eventually I'd like to make a face with gradient meshes, but hey, baby steps... There are also a couple things I'd like to try to create some original illustrations with it. Let's see where the road takes us.

Anne Bonny, Pirate

I attended the September session of Aaron Miller's Figurative Illustration Workshop last night, and the model this month was dressed as Anne Bonny, the Pirate Queen. She wore a great costume with a ton of accessories, like sashes and pistols and swords. It was an overwhelming amount of detail; seriously, I could have spent days upon days trying to capture it all. As it was, I constantly had to fight with the tendency to linger on every little area, and instead concentrate on capturing the gesture and form. Hopefully there'll be good photorefs made available so I can go back in and give the paintings some more polish.

It's been a while since I've been to one of these workshops, and it was pretty evident to me how out-of-practice I was. I definitely felt very rusty, and slow. Still, it was a nice opportunity to use Colors!3D on the 3DS XL, and for the most part it worked out fairly well... I have to adjust to the XL's larger footprint; my hand cramped a couple times while holding it. But it sure was nice being able to paint on a (relatively) bigger touchscreen.

Overall, it was a great figure drawing/painting session, as per usual.

Tachikoma Tales: Almost There...

Here's the latest iteration of the Tachikoma illustration, with a bunch of changes... First of all, I looked up some more references and found out that the claw hand types needed to be swapped left-to-right, so I fixed that. Then I added outlines to help tighten the presentation some. There are a few more things I'd like to work on, but it's pretty close to done, I think.

New sketch batch

One of the things mentioned time and again in "Drawn to Life", one that's really made an impression on me, is the idea that gesture drawings are not about drawing "nouns" but about drawing "verbs". You're not just drawing a person, you're drawing an action... a person doing something, even if that something is just standing there, slouching about lazily.

As I've mentioned in my previous post, a good number of my commute sketches amount to the action "sitting down staring intently at a smartphone". I try to mix it up whenever the opportunity arises, though.

Smartphone poses

More commute sketches, this time with a theme:

It seems that people on smartphones make decent sketch models, since they tend to stay in a fixed position for a long time.

Tachikoma... Stiiiiill working on it.

This project is feeling like I'm rebuilding a muscle car in my garage... I work on it bit by bit, whenever the kid manages to take a nap, or my wife takes her out while running errands. It's coming along, perhaps at a snail's pace, but there's progress.

Here's my "to-do" list:

Out n' about

A smattering of sketches, mostly from my commute to work and back:

I recently picked up Walt Stanchfield's two-volume work "Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes" after reading about it on the Muddy Colors blog. Chock full of knowledge and great art, it's 800 pages worth of lectures on gesture drawing, storytelling, and changing the way you see. I've already read the first book cover-to-cover and just started the second, and it's genuinely been eye-opening. They can be hard to read sometimes– not because the books are poorly written, but because I find that every few pages I feel the urge to pull out my sketchbook and draw someone. Really good stuff.

Puppet Time

(For added humor, imagine the puppet speaking with a deep, gravelly morning voice...)

Tachikoma polish etc. etc. etc.

More work on Tachi, still not done:

Tachikoma polish continued

After some constructive feedback, here's another iteration of the Tachikoma rendering:

More tweaks to come...

Tachikoma polished

Here's the Tachikoma rendered out in Photoshop:

Working on this piece has been something of a learning experience for me (well, moreso than usual). Back when I used to do freelance illustration in my spare time, it'd take me about an hour or two to get revved up and find my flow, and then I could be at it for 5 or 6 hours and just knock it out. But now, everything is all fits-and-starts. I'd be working for an hour or so, and just when I start getting into it-- the kid wakes up from her nap, or I have to change her diaper, or she wants to crawl up into my lap and "Paint like Daddy!" Bye bye flow. Still, there are ways to find time to work on stuff, it just takes some sacrifices.

Works-in-progress

Gah, I've been so busy lately... Haven't had a lot of opportunities to work on my own stuff, but I didn't want too much time to go by without posting something here.

I've been working on this piece during my daily commute, re-working an older illustration into something a little more painterly, using Colors! 3D. Unfortunately, the file seems to have gotten corrupted, so I'm not able to output it at high resolution. I might take it into Photoshop and build it up more from there:

 

I'm also doing a paintover of another previous illo, a more dimensional version of the anime-style Tachikoma. I'm working out all the shading in Colors! 3D, and then I'll take it into Photoshop for a more finished polish:

New digipaint sketches

On the original Colors! for DS:

Alien Interface 2.0

On Colors! 3D:

Mr. Rhino

Raid on the HMS Arcturus

I've had a hankerin' to do a Star Wars-style space battle scene with the 3DS... This is just a quick down-and-dirty doodle painting, more a brain dump than anything else. It looks pretty cool in 3D, IMO:

Gallery playback:

Supergirl - Figurative Illustration Workshop, April session

As a nod to next week's comic book convention C2E2 (Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo), this month's Figurative Illustration Workshop was held a little early, with the model dressed as the DC Comics heroine Supergirl.

The model alternated between two poses, at five-minute intervals with breaks from time to time. This was done to give the model an action pose and a rest pose. Because of the switching back and forth, I found it a little hard to pin down the likeness; still, I think the resting pose one turned out decent:

Another fun life drawing workshop under my belt!

Colors! 3D released today! Also, a painting of a turtle

Colors! 3D is now available for purchase through the Nintendo eShop. For only $6.99, it's a versatile digital painting program with a well-thought-out interface, and I think everyone who owns a Nintendo 3DS needs to add it to their app library. And I'll admit to being biased, but what can I say? I painted a turtle!

Mr. Turtle

The painting got a little glitchy towards the end so I'm not able to share a 3D .MPO file, but if you have Colors! 3D you can view it all dimensional-like in the online gallery.

Colors! 3D painting playbacks

The Colors! 3D gallery repainter has been tweaked, so I can now share playbacks of the paintings (it's still a little glitchy, but they're working on it). You can get some idea of how the 3D works by clicking and holding the image during playback, and dragging your mouse pointer around.






Colors! 3D will be official released to the Nintendo eShop in the Americas tomorrow, April 5th. I'm really looking forward to seeing the creative things other users come up with.

L5 Astronaut - Figurative Illustration Workshop, March session

Last night I attended the Figurative Illustration Workshop, where this month's model was "Astronaut Rodney Lewis" from the crowd-funded sci fi miniseries "L5". The model, who is also L5's production designer and "action wrangler" Chad Burns, had on some really nice gear; as I understand it he built the spacesuit himself from things he picked up at places like Home Depot and American Science & Surplus. So awesome.

L5's director Stanley Von Medvey and production designer Chad Burns

The life drawing session was a great opportunity to test out Colors! 3D "in the wild" and it worked out really well. Having the compact form factor of the 3DS allowed me to paint from what would normally be a problematic angle. Also, the built-in camera allowed me to take reference pics on the fly, which I could then import into Colors! 3D without pause. And being able to paint using layers offered a lot of flexibility in terms of workflow. I built the painting up primarily as a 2D image; doing it in 3D would have required a bit more forethought, and I wanted to concentrate more on just painting.

Astronaut Rodney Lewis of L5

Just for kicks I tried converting it into a 3D image afterwards. It actually adapted to 3D pretty well, and didn't involve much if any blending. Check out the .MPO file if you have a 3DS (or some other compatible way to view 3D) and let me know what you think.

Thanks again go to Aaron Miller for running the whole shindig, it's always a good time.

08th Div. Tactical Cyborg Ops

More exploration of Colors! 3D:

3D .MPO file

I took a pic with a 3DS camera of a sketch I had doodled in a notebook. Then I set it as a background and blocked out the silhouette and some tonal values. I mostly worked everything out on one layer, and then copied it over a couple times to add depth. I erased away from each layer whatever I didn't want to pop forward; in some cases, I tried using the eraser tool at low opacity to blend pieces into the background, with mixed results.

While the 3D is admittedly pretty gimmicky, it does have me thinking about spatial relationships, how to make stuff come forward or recede into the background, and that's cool.

Ghost in the Shell Tachikoma, painted on the Nintendo 3DS

One of the unexpected drawbacks to painting with Colors! 3D is that it's almost too much fun. I was working on this illustration last night and really got into it, and when I'd finished I looked at the clock and it was 1:30 in the morning...

I was feeling kind of nostalgic about my old anime fanart days, and I happened to have a little Tachikoma toy sitting on my desk, so I decided to mess around with the photo background feature in Colors! 3D. I snapped a pic from within the program using one of the three (fairly low-res) cameras on the 3DS, and was able to use it to trace over.

And then, using the five layers the app provides, I was able to build a cel-style illustration. I'd have lineart, base color and shading on separate layers, and then merge them. I found that some of ctrlpaint.com's (originally Photoshop-based) layer techniques applied very well, like roughly dropping in color and then erasing what I didn't need before merging.

3D .MPO file

I don't work in cel-style all that much anymore, but I know there are a bunch of users on the Colors! Gallery that do, and I think they're going to love being able to use layers to create their art.

Colors! 3D for the Nintendo 3DS

I've had the distinct opportunity to play with the Nintendo 3DS app "Colors! 3D" (available in the U.S. starting April 5th, via the Nintendo eShop), and it's quite cool. If you like to draw or paint and happen to own a Nintendo 3DS, purchasing this program is a no-brainer in my opinion.

If you have a Nintendo 3DS, you can download the .MPO file here and view it in the camera app's gallery

I'll have more to say about the program in upcoming posts as I put Colors! 3D through its paces, but all in all my experience with it has been great. I think it definitely has the potential to be considered a killer app.

Check out the.MPO file here and view the picture in living 3D! (Well, sort of 3D... More akin to a "View-Master" cartoon image, but still pretty cool!)

Developer Jens Andersson and his crew at Collectingsmiles have created something really great, and I have no doubt that their hard work will be widely appreciated.

Chrome Dome

I'd forgotten how fun it is doing these freeform paintings...

Mira at 2

Decided to do a practice portrait on a whim. Here's a DS painting of my daughter Mira, the ultimate "work-in progress":

 

Some notes... As has been the case lately, I genuinely struggled to keep the painting loose, and had to backtrack a couple times. I'd find myself getting lost in trying to capture too much detail, which had the effect of flattening out the tones too much and making the image pretty bland. It's incredibly tempting to keep pushing for further detail, especially when working from a photoref; I had to let go of the urge to just straight up replicate, and worked on getting the values and overall feeling right.

It never fails to astound me how much she's grown in such a short span of time...

Sci-fi helm

I've got the digital painting urge again...

Toy Huntress

After far too long, I attended Aaron Miller's Figurative Illustration Workshop last night. This month's model was dressed up as a "Toy Huntress", adorned with the furs of plush toy animals. A neat costume, it made for an interesting and challenging figure drawing subject. We started with some quick 5-15 minute poses, which I sketched out with Sharpie pen and gray markers:

... and then moved on to longer poses, which I painted using Colors! for DS:

As always, a pleasant time. It felt good to be drawing again, I've been soooo out of practice lately.

Colors! news

The Colors! gallery now allows paintings to be embedded, here's a test:



(Note: Clicking on the three triangles allows you to adjust the speed of the painting.) In other news, Colors! 3D for the Nintendo 3DS is nearing release via the eShop, I'm really looking forward to trying it out.