Portrait

In an effort to make more art - no matter what, just something - I did this little colored picture and spent the afternoon reading Brandon Graham's livejournal insteadof doing my homework. Well, i did a little bit.

Trent and Draco. Not telling which is which.

Editorial Illustration

digital illustration about food poisoning and Guillan-Barré disease caused by raw milk consumption

Sufjan Stevens

Digital extrapolation of a tester piece I did for a new in-class technique.

More Fun Than Homework

I continued to productively procrastinate this afternoon by working on Retinue. It is coming along well and I have a spin-off piece using one of the figures.

Also doing some watercolor work in Illustration Techniques that I will post soon, maybe. Well, next week probably.

Retinue


Gaurd


detail

These things are starting to suggest other, bigger things to me.

Something From SCAD

I've been experimenting with the Scintique screens here at SCAD (you draw directly onto the screen using a stylus instead of using a mouse; it's just like using a pencil on paper (!!!!!)) and am digitally coloring this sketch/collage from my sketchbook.


Having some silly fun with lasers. :)



progress so far:

I need to redo the drawing on the pope/saint figure and figure out what drawing to do in the foreground.
(the main figure(s) are model Sean O'Pry, fyi)

This Is How I Do It

So yesterday I was talking to my fantastic friend STEPHEN who reads this blog, and he said that I should put in more details and descriptions of how I do things. I think sometimes these processes seem obvious to me, or I do them more intuitively than analytically, so I’d never really thought about doing something more step-by-step like that before. So, without further ado, a More Detailed Look at how I created this digital illustration in Photoshop.

This is an illustration based on a reinterpretation of the hymn, “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending” by Jonathan Green. We met up yesterday and had a stimulating talk about electronica (Björk and The Knife!) and the intersection of visual and audio art – among other things. Anyway, he left me an album he’d made, and after listening to it for a while I got to thinking about how I might visually represent this rather gritty track, which stuck out to me.

First I decided to work digitally rather than with ‘real’ materials, since the song is so synthesized and contains a ton of artificially-generated textures and sounds. I also decided on two colors that really stood out to me from a few listens: a sort of grey-green-greasy army-fatigues color, and a harsh, El Grecesque acid yellow.


Then I thought about imagery. I have a print that I made my sophomore year of an angelic figure and decided to use it as the basis of piece. It uses a lot of radiating lines and is somewhat of a favorite of mine, but it isn’t framed or anything and doesn’t get out much.


Then I started thinking about the nature of sound(!) music programming, and how I could bring in a feel of these digitally-created textures and sound patterns. I thought of bringing in little digibit-shapes like the MIDI sequencer in Garage Band


but ultimately decided to go with something more like sound waves or sine-waves. I build them by creating some random shapes with the Lasso tool and then warping them repeatedly using the various Distort filters until I had an nice curvy wave shape [not pictured]. Then I duplicated this and distorted it some more to give an idea of the dark, minor feel of the song, and the timbre of the bassline at the opening. (Not that the song is especially dark or destructed by the standards of electronic music, but minor keys are an interesting feature of a lot of hymns that isn’t reproduced much in contemporary worship music, and I liked how this was carried forward in Jon’s re-do. The dark musical elements stood out to me so I wanted to emphasize that in the work.)

ANYWAY I arranged the ‘waves’ in a repeating sequence and then applied a further filter from left to right so that the sequence would show change and progression (ie.
1st wave: not filtered, 2nd: filtered once, 3rd: filtered twice, etc.). You can see the degrading of the wave quality at the bottom of this shot:

At this time I also incorporated a bit of a glow around the figure’s head, using both photoshop brushes set very Soft, and some effected scans of ink splashes on Yupo, a plastic paper (“paper”) which preserves the pigment texture of watercolor really well since th eliquid has to evaporate vertically off the surface rather than being absorbed into the paper body and blurring the pigment grain as it does so, and which I often use for “real paint” effects that I can scan and use as textures in Photoshop.

At this point I had the angel and a lot of yellow squiggles, so the image wasn’t very high contrast; I needed to bring in some darkness and drama. I brought in another watercolor/ink scan

and played around with it a little, duplicating it, inverting parts of the color so that I could get the right balance of black+white in different parts of the picture, and applying various blending effects from my Layers palette, as well as adjusting the color with Hue/Saturation so that the red in the original was a nice yellow that went along with my color theme.

Here’s the yellow effects combined with the ink scans (the angel layer is still turned off so you can see what’s going on elsewhere, although when I’m actually working I leave all the layers turned on, usually, because Blending effects depend largely on what other layers the effected layer is interacting with…if that makes sense).

It still lacked depth so I added a large, transparent layer of red over everything, faded in some areas like around the angel’s head. (Around this time I switched the main color scheme from green+yellow to red+yellow. Originally this layer was green, but it seemed too underwatery and not celestial enough(?).

Alternate green version
I wanted to add some gold as a halo, and looked around to see what scans of gold I had. I found a section of Resurrection Rabbit and thought incorporating the flowers would be interesting too. Using Polygonal Lasso, I chopped out a jagged crop of the flower area that combined the sinuous motion of the plant with the energy of a lightning bolt. Using the same original layer, I chopped out a different variation of the jagged edges and multiplied them over each other (using Difference to make sure they lined up exactly) for a richer effect.

That looked cool, but now the lightning/roses were the focal point and the figure was getting lost. I snipped out some body parts from magazines and scanned them in to create a composite, Michelangeline body.

[Other layers removed for a better view of the body and how roses/lightning turned out]

I submerged most of the body under a few other layers, but left the left hand on top so that it would really pop. I gave it a little benedictive flame. The angel print was still not really holding its own so I duplicated the [already Multiplied] layer and offset it a tiny bit to give it some movement.

Around this time I added some other details which are pretty subtle but help pull it together – for isntance: Even though the feel of the song is pretty minor, and the second coming of Christ will be pretty dramatic, I felt that the piece overall was a little dark and I wanted more light to be shining down from heaven on the figure. So, again using Polygonal Lasso, <3, I created a jagged, lightningish burst of light coming down and illuminating the space a little bit. I duplicated this and assigned Overlay and Saturation to the layers, respectively, to tone them down a little bit – I wanted them to add ambience, not really be seen.


Made final tweaks to color richness and such, and DONE.

Some Watercolors

...augmented digitally. I did some sketching earlier and put in some colors but the paper was v. cheap and wasn't holding up well. So I scanned them and added more color/shaped things up digitally. It's a technique I think I will explore more.




A horse



A youth

Paperdolls

Some art I made recently around the idea of paper dolls and action figures with included accessories.

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Dark Hills illustration, Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Vault

Alissa (Zombie/Clown)

Part of an experiment with painting and drawing onto print-outs. It is a little outré but I like it. I don't think Alissa does so much...

A Little Something

Some drawings I did yesterday. Mechanical pencil and Photoshop.

This One's For You!

Portraits of Dave:

Normal.


Punked Out! lol

More Digistration

Portrait of Sufjan Stevens

More Foxes

A fox meeting a rabbit under a moon and a pine.

All handmade elements assembled in Photoshop.

From The Vault
Summer 2006. Some details from an album cover I did for After The Sirens.

field of thorns


the sky is assembling an army


cities built on bones

Two little creatures, probably from 2004 or something like that. Wow.

beastmonkey


otterstar

Graphic Novels

Just something I threw together last night/this morning to hone my skills for a potential upcoming collaborative project.
Whee!

New Client Work

Three images I just produced for CIVA, as page decorations.
Hand-drawn ornamentation with Rennaisance painting clippings assembled in Photoshop.