Early Atlantis sketch

atlantis

My Atlantis series of paintings was (is?) based on a single dream I had during the summer of 2011. In the dream I was walking through a forest when it opened into a clearing filled with abandoned and broken but incredibly ornate and beautiful mosaic statues.

Above is the first sketch I made while thinking about how to convey the dream in a painting or series. After struggling for an entire year with the problem of conveying the simultaneous sense of wonder and unease I felt in the dream, I finally decided to depict a series of smaller pieces of the scene rather than try to encompass the entire thing in just one image.

What Is Happening: Line Drawings, So Many Line Drawings

I was in Maine and Connecticut for various reasons last week, so I’ve saved up a fair number of drawings and things that I haven’t posted on here yet. Also, I’m launching a new regular comic tomorrow BUT because it is launching tomorrow and I have all this unposted stuff, blah blah blah I’m going to go ahead and wait till tomorrow to talk about that.

So here’s what I’ve been up to.

1. Final Fantasy Legend III PaletteSwap: An artist who does really awesome things, Rusty Shackles, invited me to submit to his PaletteSwap blog, on which artists reinterpret videogame cover art. I did three, all of which are going to be posted this week! It is exciting. Here’s the first one:
final-fantasy-legend-3
And you should go check out the whole blog, because it is full of excellent videogame-related art. Oh! And you can buy an art print of the one above, if you’re interested!

2. Content-aware studies: I’ve been planning on doing a series of non-comic-related paintings based on the weird deformations that sometimes happen in Photoshop when you use the “content-aware” fill tool.

content-aware-1

Basically, the content-aware fill is for if you have like… Okay say you have a picture of the sky with a bunch of clouds, and there’s a smudge or a bird or something in the middle of one of them, and you don’t want it there. You can select that area and use content-aware fill on it, and that should “smart” fill it, so it will look seamless and like the bird/smudge was never there and it was always just a sky full of clouds.

That may have been a needlessly complicated explanation. Anyway the point is that sometimes the content-aware tool glitches, and if it does so near an image of a person, sometimes it can get really weird and creepy and gruesome.

content-aware-2

So I have a bunch of these content-aware deformations saved, and eventually I plan on painting them. The two sketches above are just studies! And they are the first I’ve done.

3. Final Fantasy IX’s Lindblum: Final Fantasy IX is my favorite game of all time. (I wrote about it a whole bunch in Manic Pixel Dream Girl 2, if you missed it!) I’ve done a lot of drawings of things from FF9, but my favorite thing to draw is the game’s largest city, Lindblum.

Here’s a study I sketched last week, for another one of the alternate cover arts I did:
lindblum

And, for comparison I guess, here’s a little painting I did of Lindblum like two years ago:

lindblum-small_o

That was from way before I’d become comfortable with my current painting process. I think I actually used gouache, which is WAY too expensive to use regularly. Now I use acrylic, very very watered down. Also I’m a lot less afraid of putting in lots of details now, just because I’m more practiced. For example, the line drawing above I drew in one go with a pen, over the course of an hour or two. The painting I did in like a hundred steps… Pencil, pen, paint, like 3 more layers of paint, then pen again. And as you can see, even after all those steps, it’s still less detailed and the architecture is a bit off.

I like the colors though. One of the first paintings I ever did that I was REALLY happy with, so even though it’s easy to criticize in retrospect, I still kinda like it.

4. Trees on Lake Pemaquid: No, you’re not going to escape my post-Maine blogpost without some drawings of Maine. I drew some trees over a lake. In context, and then just some random trees there at the bottom.

trees

Okay, that’s it for now! Big announcement about a new comic, coming tomorrow! :)

What Is Happening: Clip Art & Crustaceans Edition

That’s right: It’s time for another installment of What Is Happening! Here’s some of what I’ve been up to in the last week or so.

1. Uh… Crustaceans: There is seemingly no end to the weird shit I am going to have to learn to draw for this Secret Project I have mentioned a few times before. In this case, it isn’t necessarily that I’m going to have to draw any particular type of shellfish; rather I’m incorporating crustacean-inspired design elements into some stuff, so I’m practicing drawing them to internalize their parts and the ways their anatomy hangs together:

crustaceans

I drew the above things (two terrifying crab-like creatures and I guess a tail?) based on a couple pictures in one of the amazing clip art books—yes BOOKS—that I discovered this week. Which leads me to the next thing that’s been taking up my time…

2. Clip art books are the best thing that has ever happened to me: They are seriously awesome. First of all they only cost like barely anything because all the pictures contained within are in the public domain. Second of all, they are better than the internet because you can have them all in one place and let’s be honest—for visual references, Google image search is ALMOST ALWAYS totally useless. Unless you’re looking for something incredibly specific.

clipart

Clip art books are definitely better because I can have pictures of unicorns and men coming out of other men’s heads and overly ornate suits of armor and terrifying crabs without going to the trouble of knowing what I’m looking for before I find it.

For practicing drawing random things, and for fast visual inspiration in well-defined categories, I cannot recommend these more.

And also here is this picture of a woman dancing with a bear, which is going to be very useful in my artistic career:

bear-lady

3. Victoria: I did another character design for Secret Project. This is Victoria:

victoria

I haven’t figured out what her costume is going to be quite yet, but I have done a design of one of her swords that I’m pretty satisfied with:sword-1

She’s going to carry two of those, which may be very slightly different from one another. They are going to be proportionally ridiculous, in the style of Cloud Strife’s Buster Sword. But TWO TIMES that. Because there will be two swords.

4. 25-minute nude sketch: Here’s another one from my Art Students League life-drawing class. Like last time, I made this with pen and compressed charcoal:

nude-1

That’s all for the moment—I’m pretty deep into the next piece of Lost In Hong Kong and the first draft of text for part 3 of Manic Pixel Dream Girl, but I’ll blog again soon, promise!

What Is Happening: Gears & Gals Edition

Now that I’m doing art full-time, I am (not-surprisingly) drawing A LOT. So I think I’m going to do a regular feature on this blog just kind of taking you through some snippets of what I’ve been doing, maybe every other day or so. May I present to you the first of hopefully many such posts. Enjoy!

1. Elements of Steampunk: For this thing I’m working on, there are a few parts that rely heavily on the steampunk aesthetic, so I’ve been doodling steampunk visual elements to get a hang of them. I am definitely not like “into” steampunk at all, and I often actually dislike it, but daaaamn is it fun to draw:
steampunk-elements
2. Julia: I also am finally happy with one of the primary character designs (not steampunk!!) for that same secret project. Below, meet Julia:

julia-sketches
She’s wearing chunky heels on the right, but she’ll usually be wearing flat lace-up “booties.” God I hate that word. What I mean is, you know, ankle-high boots. Can I just say that instead?

3. 20-minute Nude Sketch: Moving on… Today I started taking a life-drawing class at the Art Students League, which I’ll be doing two mornings a week to keep those particular muscles warm. Here’s my favorite thing I did in today’s class:

20-minute nude
I drew the outlines freehand with pen, and did the shading with compressed charcoal. It was a 20-minute pose.

More soon!

Concept for a small piece of a large (secret) project

rsideorder

I’m working on kind of an extensive project (spoiler: it’s a comic.. thing) with a friend of mine. Here is a concept for a seal or crest from aforementioned Secret Project.

Eventually, I’d like to make the edges a little more ornate & distinctive, but what was important to get done at this stage was the basic composition of the circle. Decorative stuff will come later… Also I have no idea yet what the colors are going to be for this. I haven’t yet decided if they should be somewhat naturalistic or very logo-ish like maybe just two colors total (the hands and border white, for example, and the negative space black). Maybe next time I post this or another crest I’ll have figured that out….

(I’ll definitely be posting lots more cryptic stuff from Secret Project in the next few months… It has begun to consume a nice-sized chunk of my life.)