Was trying to do a draw-off with a friend and record the work on the computer, but I hit the wrong button when I  was almost done and it didn’t save a thing. Quite sad. At least the artwork is fine. The ‘ghost’ is not really finished but I’m a bit too bummed to fix it right now.

I did two images for the holidays this year, this one is for the boys on DeviantArt and the other communities I frequent, and for friends. The other picture is more… approachable, and is meant for clients and relatives.

Here’s a spread I did for OWL Kid’s Halloween issue. It accompanies an article that goes ‘How to haunt your house’ with some tips for kids to pull of simple pranks. There was supposed to be another spread about dressing up as a headless ghost, but that was shelved out of respect to the recent events here in Canada.

And… done. Illustration of subprime crisis. What with all the talk lately of the markets going to hell, I thought it would be an interesting thing to illustrate. Illustrator and Photoshop, actual size 8.5×11 300dpi. RGB version shown, CMYK seems to dull a bit due to the intensity of the greens.

Got a new computer and installed CS3 on it. Tested out Illustrator and Photoshop. Spent couple of days getting everything back up and running. Still not too sure about all the new stuff, but I think it’s been configured to do what I need it to do. Wacom pressure sensitivity still drops in Photoshop; relaunching stills fixes it. Not sure why. By the by the girl was supposed to be in a chair, but I didn’t feel like rendering that out. Looks like a teacup to me!

pencil sketch for illustration

So like everything else that gets finished, The Hunted started out as a pencil sketch. Since this was a test, I sketched it straight onto my Stonehenge paper. Which is a bit silly because it’s nice expensive paper that, like all nice expensive papers, is prone to lose some of its niceness due to erasing, which is pretty much inevitable if you’re not doing a prep sketch.

But since I’m a bonehead – oh well. I did the sketch in blue pencil and then went over it with a HB. At first I was trying to make the lines look good, to see how the pencil would react with the paper. Ultimately I knew I was going to ink over it anyway so it really didn’t matter, and you can see that halfway through I decided to just rough out the outline (towards the bottom). Scanned it in before I inked it.

color rough

Here’s the color rough. It was was my own reference so I just did a really messy job with throwing in the colors I wanted to use. The paper texture was also dropped in to see how it would react with the colors. It did a really good job. I saved a small version of the file so I could easily pick the colors for reuse later.

inking the artwork

Here is the inking in progress. I used a brush pen, as well as india ink with several brushes, and a dip pen. I probably could have done it all in brush, but again I was testing how the paper reacted with the various things. It did too good a job (to me) of soaking up the liquid from my brush pen, but it had a nice bite for the india ink, so I’ll probably use a brush next time with this paper. The dip pen didn’t do so great, maybe I need a more fluid ink or something, but it just wasn’t flowing right.

final illustration

After the inks were done it was back to the scanner. Scanned in the inks at 600dpi, reduced the file to 400dpi and added the colors and textures. I did another pinkish version (see previous post) but this is really closer to what I wanted to achieve, so I guess I’ll settle with this as the final version.

Hope it was a fun read!

The Hunted. Pen, india ink, brushes, Photoshop, custom digital brushes, some scanned paper, Stonehenge paper, and a few backaches. Not sure which I prefer. Top is a variant, bottom is the original.

Ink test painting on Stonehenge paper, with Photoshop color tweaks afterwards.

The Dove ‘Pay Beauty Forward‘ site has been launched! I did the illustrations for the backgrounds and small elements like the plants and fish. It was an interesting project that was quite technical despite it’s simple looking finish – a lot of the elements were on separate layers to facilitate the scrolling that was programmed in later. Hope you like the site!

Illustration of a boy and his fawn. He’s very fond of it. Hahahaa.

Sorry. Bad pun.