Draw Me

I love work in progress shots.

Sketchy Kate

Sketched in sketchbook pro and then cunningly added to a paper texture to make it look like it was sketched in a physical book used for sketching, possibly know as a sketchbook, I have sketched this sketch of a woman with a sketchy future.
It's a sketch.
Last week I had to explain to the head of the visual art department of the polytech closest to me that I used a wacom tablet and various digital painting software to create these little gems. You would have thought I was actually speaking Braille if you had seen the look on her face.
"So you, you actually draw these? By hand?"
"Yes, I sketch them in sketchbook pro and then paint them in painter."
"Oh so you do draw them in a sketchbook first?"
"No I draw them in sketchbook pro which is a piece of software."
This is the HOD of a place that teaches digital illustration and I'm explaining what a wacom tablet is. It's not a wonder that people on trademe get confused when I try and sell prints. "It's a print, of a sketch, that was sketched in the computer... Just like a regular sketch, only done in the computer, not  on paper. "
Anyhow this is Kate. Quite possible the stupidest woman on planet earth. And when you take into account all those American socialite bimbos who don't seem to know how to wear underpants despite the fact that the paparazzi  are actively walking around with mirrors on their shoes, that's going up against some pretty stiff competition.
I'm curious what her family thinks about her impending inclusion in the royal family. What I'm really curious about is why no one has sat her down, slapped her really hard and asked "Are you out of your fucking mind?" I mean seriously, look at the consequences of marrying into that family. Sure it starts out nice enough, a few streets get blocked off to accommodate the royal wedding and it's televised so there little to no chance of everyone you ever knew getting to see how nicely your wedding dress looks and someone else is footing the bill which always helps and marrying royalty takes wedding presents into a whole new realm of thinking. I know that New Zealand's prime minister is even now trying to figure a way to give them his first born as a wedding present. (John Key and Prince William have the same hairstyle, interesting fact there. Write it down, memorize it. Impress your friends at parties.)
But after that it goes downhill pretty damn quickly and ends with either shilling for a diet centre or  blocking off that same set of streets to accommodate your funeral.
Really I'm just jealous.
I could have made Prince William happy.
And my wedding dress would have looked stunning.
Ha! That's be a post stamp for the ages.

Big Bad Gavin Pope

Been drawing a lot of birds lately. I don't know why. I might be spending a little too much time looking at Florian Stazingers blog.

The moon man

A quick sketch of the moonman. I have been busy today but I have about four pieces that are nearing completion and I'm pushing myself into new and unusual territories with all of them. In a nutshell this means that it's getting difficult and not going as well as it would if it were easy. I put colour on one piece this morning and when I went back to it about twenty minutes ago it was not looking so good. I have a character and a secondary character and an idea for a situation only the "throw it to the wall and hope it sticks" technique I have used in the past is not cutting the mustard any longer and I need a more considered approach.
Basically, this is the point where I would like to leave this work and do something less difficult but that's not an option so I must struggle on and with any luck the results will be worth the effort.
Also I don't like this sketch. I will be having another go.

Batman!!!!

A while back someone told me that painting batman was an experience not to be missed and everyone should do it at least once. So I decided to go back to the batman of my impressionable youth, the Michael Keaton incarnation. I wanted to do some research so I hired out Batman Returns. I only vaguely remember it so I figured it would be a bit of cinematic entertainment while I eat my dinner as well. It wasn't. That film was dreadful. The characters were dreadful. The story was dreadful. It had Christopher Walken in it. There was only one redeeming feature about the whole experience and it's right at the beginning when they first shine the bat signal into the sky which, through a series of carefully placed mirrors which swivel of their own accord, shines the bat signal into the library of Bruce Wayne, interrupting his own dinner.
At that point he leaps bodily from his chair and looks, with purpose, in the direction of... Somewhere and it's magnificent. The camera is below him, pointing right up his nostrils and emblazoned on the wall behind him is the silhouette of the bat signal.
It just sets up the near constant barrage of bullshit cheese that makes up the whole fucking movie. And its scored by Danny Elfman so on top of everything else, it sounds like an evening at the circus. Actually it sounds like an evening at the circus when the elephant has had a guts full and decided to make a break for it straight through the audience, stopping briefly to scrape its latest trainer off of the sole of its foot and then continue on through rush hour traffic.
But I digress.

This is an attempt to illustrate that glorious moment when Michael Keaton's hairdo takes centre stage. It is a completely failed attempt and looks like a freshly scraped elephant trainer I know but it's an interesting angle of his head and I have every intention of keeping at it until I get it right.
He looks fairly distinctive in his batman costume, I might have a go at that later as well.

Too much?

See, I don't know. I think I could go bigger. The renderings shit, sorry Neville, all your instruction goes out the door when my eyes start to defocus of their own accord.
I will say this for the record, for all the clean up involved, it's probably easier to just skip the liquefy tool and paint the buggers in.
I don't think I have this where I want it yet either. You know those really ugly babies that cry for hours and hours non stop, I kind of want the eyes to bulge out like that. I'm sort of going for the human chameleon hybrid condensed into a puppy thing. It'll get there.

Pinhead and puppy

So Pinhead's pretty much finished. At least his head is. I actually had this at a further stage. In this image the nails have only been gone over with the highlight once and there are no shadows from the nails at all. Earlier this afternoon I did another pass over the nails and then added in the shadows. To be honest it didn't add a lot to the image but it if you look for those sorts of things then you'd notice. Sadly, for some reason, I closed the file and it didn't save or I didn't save it. Which is unusual because if you make any changes at all such as turning on or off a layer it offers you a prompt asking if you want to save the changes. Whatever happened, I didn't save and lost the changes and I'm going to go stick my head in the freezer for a little for being such a fuckup.
Fortunately I have only lost a smidgen of work but I'm too tired to go through and redo it all now. Perhaps later.
Also this is a nicer rendering of the puppy idea and a small close up of the puppy. I sketched the puppy and then started to block in the values when I decided to make the eyes comically large. I did this using the liquefy tool which I often don't use as I feel its a good way to get lazy. But again, I'm pretty tired and I know that I can draw in the eye but I really wanted to see what it would look like with huge eyes and I wanted to see it quickly.


Ta daa! Although, now that I'm looking at it, they could still be bigger. Like huge saucer sized eyes
that take up most of his head.

 For anyone who doesn't know, this is Gary Vay ner chuck. He does a regular online wine tasting on http://dailygrape.com/ it used to be wine library tv but he evolved the format I think because he enjoyed it so much. Anyhow, he also wrote a couple of books. I haven't read the new one but the first one was called Crush It and was all about doing what you love and building it into something that you can do all the time. I really enjoyed it and his wine tastings are pretty funny as well, even if you don't drink wine. I'm quite happy with how this one's coming out. I want to start pushing my stuff so that its got a bigger focus on cartoony and funny rather than hyper realistic. All this endless fucking detail gets boring as hell. Seriously, if I'm going to render things out to that huge a degree then I may as well just start photo manipulation.
Maybe not, too many people going that way already.