Digital Abstract 1

Inspired by Jon Burgerman, I started this visual excursion as a linear composition in Illustrator, added some color, some texture, then brought it into Photoshop where the mayhem really began. I stacked about 30 layers of various opacities and blending modes, painted with some handmade and standard brushes (occasionally with layer effects) and generally stumbled around until I had something I liked.

Working organically is time consuming but fun. It’s also a good way to develop an eye for creating focus since one decision or set of decisions can send the composition careening in a direction that lacks punch and emphasis. Rather than doing too much subtracting of layers that were counter-productive, I opted instead to adjust the opacity or blend mode, or just add another layer to compensate and correct.

Menace From the Deep

Here are some process shots for the second gouache robot/guardian-inspired painting. This time I started with a blue ground. Unlike the first one, I skipped a step. Rather than brush ink the figure after transferring him to the prepared page (a la graphite transfer), I decided to jump right into painting after darkening the lines with a ballpoint. I ended up doing ink touchups last time anyway and  figured I’d save some time and work. Stay tuned for the finished painting.

Step 1: Free hand drawing with my ink-filled waterbrush.

Step 2: Redraw with pencil, rub 6B pencil lead on the back side of the drawing and trace with ball-point pen to transfer image onto the prepared sketchbook page.

Step 3: Begin filling in flat sections of color.

Gouache Guardian

This gouache sketch started out as me using up some extra paint by painting an entire page yellow. Once that was done, I sketched a running figure in a funky futuristic armor. I redrew the sketch larger and worked out some details.

After carbonizing the back of the enlarged sketch with a 4B pencil, I traced the drawing with a pen, transferring a light pencil image onto the yellow background.

I inked the drawing with my rapidograph ink-filled Niji brushpen. I then began painting, filling up the inked areas with various colors. They were really bright and obnoxious so I went over them with a muddy red to mute them. I added the highlights with slightly dirty white paint and the shadows with blue. I left the goggles yellow.

In the background I doodled a futuristic city, adding some shadows and  few ink lines. I painting in the ground plane and added orange to the top corners to add focus to the main figure.

I still have paint left over so I began drawing 2…

Jungle Red Line

Sometimes the hardest thing is just to overcome an artistic block or to tackle a project out of the gnawing unease that it won’t turn out as planned. I wanted to draw a sequential page (or more) but the stories that I had in my mental queue weren’t inspiring me to act. I needed something to get the artistic ball rolling so I decided to take a more free-form tack. I drew the first thing that came to mind ( a tropical river ravine ) and asked myself “What next?”. It turns out there’s  a guy in there ready to run and cannonball into the river below. Where did he come from? Why is he there? What happens next? These are all questions to explore. Instant story starter!

The Sarge

Tooling around with a story idea, I sketched a few versions of Sarge. I like this one soI thought I’d walk through some digital inking, coloring, and texturing. For those of you with military knowledge, the uniform is a total fantasy based on poorly remembered war movies and cartoons (mind you own beeswax.) Real research to follow.

Natural Inks

Yesterday a friend invited us over to pick blackberries. I ended up sketching some flowers and plants in her backyard. I was promptly loaded up with clippings from a variety of plants to take home with me. One flower (whose name I don’t know) had petals with a vibrant, nearly flourescent blue-purple. I boiled some of them to make a thin ink. I also made some 2 strengths of Blackberry ink and used some of my morning coffee to round out my pallete.

Sketching a quick composition of some leaves from a Bleeding Heart plant, I just began layering the drawing from light to dark with my natural pigments. I did add a little baking soda to the various mixtures since I don’t know what the pH values were and I didn’t want any acids eating into my sketchbook paper too soon (I have no idea if my logic is sound from an archival perspective, but I know that coffee is acidic so a base should neutralize it , right?).

I mixed linseed oil with the darker blackberry ink so it would stick to my chop.

I also scanned some negative washed paintings of the actual Bleeding Heart leaves that were my model as well as scanning the leaves themselves. I took those and messed around in Photoshop using various blending modes to get the final composition.

Below is the final composition followed by the 4 painting stages:

1. Coffee
2. Petals
3. Blacberry thin
4. Blackberry dark

Celtic Knot

I went sketching at nearly graveyard. Some headstones have great architectural moulding. One grave had metal cross with a bit of celtic knotwork which I sketched and recreated in Illustrator as an exercise.

I set up a grid and found the repeated unit in the design. I then drew that unit as a single stroke, applied several strokes to the appearance. When I copied and rotated the repeating element, I had to clip the lines at specific places to create the “over-under” characteristic of celtic knots.

Leaving the artwork as single, editable stroke with applied appearances makes editing and correcting the design incredibly easy. By creating graphic styles, I was able to try several “looks” to the design in a matter of seconds.

Nod to Leslie Cabarga’s Logo, Font & Lettering Bible

Gramps

I felt like tooling around in Illustrator. I sketched with the pencil tool with the stroke color well set to a light blue (since apparently CS3 and CS4 regressed from being able to apply transparency effects on the go to the pencil and pen tools). I then used the a calligraphy brush to “ink” the pencils.

I double-clicked the brush icon to adjust the tool preferences and left the “edit selected strokes” option checked. This can be greatly irirating to use since when starting a new stroke near a selected stroke, the selected stroke may disappear. The keyboard shortcut command+shift=+A deselects all artwork in the document so when drawing with the “edit selected strokes” pref checked, keep your non-drawing hand on the keyboard.

After the basic inking, I created a custom artbrush (football shaped) and applied it to the strokes, adjusting the weight of some.

I imported the whole shebang into Photoshop and added some color and texture.

Crash Landing

I got inspired to do a rapid “cover-image-like” drawing with my Niji. I did 3 quick 1-inch thumbnails to work out the scene, inking the favorite.

I redrew a more detailed image and inked it.

I thought it would be fun to color the scene with rudimentary flats, but instead of coloring in Photoshop, I overlayed a sheet of layout paper on the inked final and colored with pencils.

I assemble the two pieces of artwork in Photoshop, setting the inked artwork above the colored layer, blending mode set to multiply.

Finally, I messed around black and white layers set to multiply and screen and added a few color fixes.

The whole process took around 90 minutes.

Portfolio Cover

I put together a little PDF portfolio last night. In a misconceived first attempt, my layout of work samples was on a charcoal background. Pretty boring. A friend kick started my creative process and I began brainstorming and sketching some possible concepts for the piece. I ended up going for a “traveling medicine show” look. I really like ephemera and woodtype.

I created 9 pages completely in Illustrator reusing and repositioning elements. Since I might eventually print this as a promotional, I wanted flexibility so I could alter the dimensions if necessary.

I also was able to experiment with the appearances palette.With the exception of the 2 rivets and the type, the metal nameplate is a single, styled object. With the settings stored as a graphic style I can instantly give a similar appearance to any shape I create.

If you’re an Illustrator fan but haven’t utilized the Appearance panel, give it a shot. It’s invaluable as a timesaver if you need different objects to have a similar appearance, and when applied to text the styles are dynamic, meaning that you can edit your text and retain the style. It also makes keeping track of objects easier. Instead of having a shape for the object, one of the drop shadow, one for the metal highlights, etc, you can have one object that can be changed in the appearance panel.

Above is a sample of one of the interior pages. I changed the parchment orientation, position, and size on each page, and had a different bottle and label as well. Sample work was added in InDesign.

There are a total of I started at around 6pm and finished at 2am. Good Times.