Everything that's old is new again

Things have been a bit quiet on the illustration front for me, being kept busy with work and family life... One creative outlet I've found is colorizing old black and white photos that people have been posting on Reddit. It's been an interesting way to practice photo retouching, as well as explore color theory and lighting.

Here are a couple before-and-afters of pics I've worked on:

New stuff

After what seems like forever and a day, I've got some new stuff to post. I've been super-busy at work, and haven't been able to do much art for myself beyond the random quick doodle. But recently, we were offered the opportunity to submit illustrations to display in an upcoming gallery-style showing at work, and I decided to take some older sketches and develop them further...

Frostfoot, watercolor and marker

The original drawing of Frostfoot sprung from a weekly sketch challenge I participated in for the topic Ways Penguins Fly, and I've always wanted to return to it. From the outset I envisioned the Frostfoot sketch as a watercolor painting, like something out of a children's storybook, and this is pretty close to what I had in mind. I think the colors I used are still a little too "standard" but I feel like my sense of value is getting better.

Drizzle version 2.0, Photoshop

Another one where I was going for a storybook feel, per the original DS painting. It's still rough around the edges and I consider it a work-in-progress, but the intent is there; I'm mostly happy with the way it's turned out so far. I may tweak it a little further before final submission.

So hey, new art! Woot!

Raygun enhancing

I've taken the raygun illo into Photoshop and am noodling around with things like adding texture, boosting saturation, and playing with lighting:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Trying not to get ahead of myself

 

This is a work-in-progress I've been doodling on and off during my morning and evening commute. I've been keeping it pretty loose and painterly, conditioning myself to work with larger textured brushes. I started to jump the gun a bit in terms of detail with the cockpit window, I'm going to leave it alone for now and try and get everything else in the scene up to snuff.

Pew-pew continued

Here's where the raygun rendering stands currently:

I added the little targeting sight thingy, and refined some of the detail in the grip. Next step is to take it into Photoshop and add some texture.

Here's what the underlying mesh looks like:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Raygun work-in-progress

Here's a new gradient mesh illustration I'm working on:

Pew-pew!

Still rough around the edges, but I'm liking the way meshes work with metallics...

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Bus sketches

It's sometimes difficult with the winter cold to sketch during a commute, but people in this season can be fun to draw, with their big poofy coats and draping scarves...

Space Miner

A new goal I've set for myself is to do more character design, so here's a grizzled old asteroid miner from the outer frontiers of space...

A lot sketchier than I've drawn in a while, but I'm having fun with it.

Ship sketches

Another pair of ship sketches, done up with ballpoint pen and a bit of gray marker...

Last night I ran across a new ballpoint pen that impressed me with its responsiveness; so much so that I went searching around the interwebz for some place to order a batch.

The Lexi 5

As it turns out, these Lexi pens originate from India; my wife Leah must have picked one up during her recent travels there. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a place where I can procure them stateside; I've emailed the manufacturer to see if they can recommend a distributor, or if I can order from them directly.

Ballpoint

Doodling with ballpoint pen again. Feels good, man.

Oldies but goodies

I ran across some old sketchbooks from a couple years back, and it was interesting to see how much my illustration style has changed over time; I can definitely see a progression. Here are a couple pieces that I only vaguely remember drawing, but which I think are pretty nifty:

Some sort of cybernetic warrior dude, 2005

An adventurer named Annabelle whose backstory I don't quite recall, 2006

Paranoid guy, 2007

I may have to go back to drawing with a ballpoint pen, especially now that I've been working with value more and more; I remember being able to do decent gradated work with them.

Thanatos

I started out this painting as a Colors! 3D doodle, after being inspired by reading a blog post  about the work of Ivica Stevanović on Muddy Colors . I had initially intended to make it more illustrative, but it just organically grew more painterly as it progressed, and I just went with the flow...

I didn't realize until about the halfway mark that I had defaulted to painting with local color; I have to remember to take into account the color of the light. I ended up trying to go back in with some transparent washes, but it's not ideal. I just have to keep working on it.

Also, I turned down the brightness of the screen on the 3DS XL, and that seems to have helped with picking more correct values. The image isn't as washed out as it's been previously; that being said, there's still room to push the values even more...

Once more into the breach!

I was up again far too late working on this painting, one of those instances where I got lost in the flow:

Hardsuit 85
(A bit of trivia: the 85 is a nod to Robotech, which had 85 episodes and first aired in 1985.)

Tried to concentrate on a couple things in this exercise, with varying degrees of success:

• Contrast/1-2-3 read of form
• More detail in the light, less detail in shadow
• Unified color palette
• Working with more opaque paint, rather than building up transparent washes

Painted with the app Colors! 3D on my Nintendo 3DS XL. Here's a playback for your viewing pleasure: