A Psychochronography in Blue

Really, I had to use that title, how can you ever pass up the chance to use a word like "Psychochronography"? Why I have the chance to use such an insane title is the entire point of this post, so hang tight and I'll explain.

You may recall that I'm fond of a show called Doctor Who? Well, I'm not the only one, it's a rather popular show. One of the other fans out there is a guy called Philip Sandifer, and he likes it so much that he's decided to watch every (existing) episode and write a blog about them. Then, he compiles the blog, cleans it up, updates it and publishes it as a book. It's a very in-depth blog, I rather like it.

Anyway, when it came to the book he needed a cover and asked for people who would be interested in doing it. I contacted him and he said "Hey, that's cool, but you couldn't do anything that could get me into legal trouble, like a portrait of William Hartnell" (the subject of the first book). So I decided I'd do a spec cover to show I can do more than just portraits - but I was in the UK at the time, so I did it when I got back to the States.

Which I thought was pretty spiff, as did Philip when he saw it. Unfortunately while I'd been away someone else had done a cover for him, so mine didn't get used. He requested I not show my version publicly until after he'd published the book though. I had no issue with that, so since the book is now available (with the other artists cover) I can show you this and talk about it.

My first thought when told I couldn't use a likeness was to go very graphic with it. My second thought was to do something in the style of a book published at the time Hartnell played the Doctor (1963-66). Since I couldn't use his face I thought I could perhaps use the costume (which is perhaps even more distinctive on a per doctor basis). But since I didn't want the new book to look old I though I would do the cover as a picture of an old book on the white background of new cover (oh the post-modernism!). After that it was just a case of doing it.

There, that really didn't take long. I didn't polish it all that much since it was just a spec (which is also the reason the finished piece isn't print resolution - if he'd wanted it I would have to do it a second time, but better). After getting my graphic looking cover it was time to age it and wear it, which is not something I'm a stranger to.

I think the wear was around 15 layers of grime, creasing, chipping and so on. Probably half were created using photographs, the other half were done by hand. This resulted in the final "aged" cover that I would then add into the white background of the actual cover. The shadow of the book was a combination of Photoshop's layer effects and hand painting. I think it turned out rather well - although I prefer the aged version (not on the white) to the final spec cover.

As a consolation Philip said he'd let me know when his next book was in production if I wanted to do the cover to that. It won't be about Doctor Who apparently, but I think the subject matter might be even more fun to work with...

TARDIS Eruditorum is available in digital and print from Amazon.

The Best (Not Worst) Sketching of November

Merry Christmas! Yeah, so it's a day late - well, I'm not going to actually post on Christmas day am I? So it's a day late, whatever, Boxing Day still counts*. Some of you probably don't even celebrate Christmas, and that's fine too I hope you have (or had) a wonderful whatever you observe this holiday season. I do observe it though, so as an added bonus for what would otherwise be a very short post I'll throw in a speed paint I finished at 11:50PM on Christmas Eve.

There we go. If you bothered to enlarge you'll see that it's not a terribly good paint at full size, but when it's small it looks OK. It took 50 minutes using ArtRage, and as I said I finished it 10 minutes before Christmas itself. Badly done or not I still think it's a cute image.

On to the sketching!

I said it was going to be a real short post, and yes, that's it. November went in a hurry as I've mentioned before, and I didn't get a whole lot of sketching done (not at all from photographs if memory serves). You'll note I started working on the anatomy of the arm again - I'll work it all out one day, but there are a shocking number of muscles in there that are usually forgotten about, not to mention I can never remember which bone in the forearm connects to where in the wrist and elbow. I'm rubbish really.

I'm quite proud of the perspective sketch of the chap reclining and the girl on the far right - just feels pleasantly dynamic. I'm not terribly pleased with any of the free sketching, but the guy to the left of center is OK, as is the woman to his right (if a little tired looking).

Another added bonus for you. Back in October I finished my second 50 page sketchbook, so I've now compiled all the scans I made into one big image (click to enlarge obviously). This is direct from the sketchbook, not laid out and tidied up as I usually present things, so you can see what a waster of space I am when it comes to filling up pages. A couple of pages are blank - one was lost when my son tore it out of the book, the other I guess I just didn't scan, and I wasn't about to work through all 100 pages to work out which one it was. Yes, that big black hand print is my son's - I have no recollection as to why it was needed ;).  It was right after this that I decided I was done with showing things on the pink background for a bit - I still mostly sketch in a newsprint book, but when I clean it up I throw it on white - which I also now sketch on, having two books going concurrently.

OK, that's it - I'm hoping to squeeze in one more post before January, but we're going out of town for a couple of days so don't hold your breath too hard. If I don't catch you until after the event (again) have a happy New year and I'll catch you on the flip side.

*Note to those who have no idea what Boxing Day is - it's the day after Christmas in the UK (and a handful of other places, but in the UK it's a legal holiday). In Ireland it's St. Stephen's day and in some other places it's "Second Christmas Day" in whatever the local language is.
Why's it called Boxing Day in the UK? No bugger really remembers exactly why - there are a whole host of things to do with boxes traditionally done on the day after Christmas (giving the servants and the poor gifts, opening the alms boxes in churches, handing Christmas boxes to tradesmen etc), it's probably a combination of them all that led to the name. No actual boxing is involved. See, Pretty pictures and education on foreign places - good value for money this blog.

Bearing Gifts

So I clearly lied about getting the November sketching up ASAP. In fact this post isn't about the November sketching either; I still have to scan it in in fact (It's only 6 pages or so - I'm hoping to get it scanned tonight). In the mean time you get to see the only other thing I did in November, but first a little background.
I finally joined Deviant Art, which I had always assumed was, well, y'know, for deviants? Well, turns out that's not it at all (though some of the stuff on there is a little twisted), and it's full of artists of all types sharing their work. One thing that happens a lot is that people share "stock", which is stuff you can use for free as reference or whatever. So this is based on Stock, and you can see that original, by AimeeStock, here.

So it's not as good as I was hoping when I saw the original stock image, but there are bits of it I'm really pleased with, and other bits that I think are fairly terrible. Her face doesn't look right, and I think it's far more lopsided than Aimee's actual face. Despite this it took an age to paint. Pretty much the whole of November was spent on it, and in terms of hours I wasn't keeping track, but I saved a new file every hour on average and I have 27 files saved so make of that what you will.

Since it took so long I'll be presenting more step by step images than perhaps I normally would, and I'll also include the traditional step by step animated gif later on. The image above is expandable if you click on it by the way, the rest of the images are not (even the expanded version is only 50% of the size I painted it, but it's more than big enough for most purposes).

Step 1: Pencils

I spent a lot longer working on this stage than I usually do. I'd already decided that I wasn't going to rush the piece and that I should spend a fair amount of time on this step so as not to fall into the trap I have on so many images before, where I have to fix things as I go along. That didn't really work out, and as I've mentioned I'm not really happy with the finished piece. This isn't a real pencil sketch by the way, but one done digitally in Art Rage. Other than being a bit cleaner than a real pencil sketch it's surprisingly convincing I think.

Step 2: The First Mistake

This isn't actually the mistake, this is what I came up with in frustration at actually making the mistake. I had started with far to light a colour, and it was making the contrast difficult to manage, so I abandoned it and took a (simulated) palette knife to it. I quite liked the effect of that actually, but it wasn't what I was aiming for with this piece. In retrospect I think the lighter paint might have worked out better in the long run. Live and learn, as usual.  I told another porky pie by the way, you can expand this image ever so slightly - though why you'd want to is anyones guess.

Step 3: Roughing out the Flesh

I think that heading sounds vaguely dirty personally, but it's exactly what this step entailed.  You can see I've started adding detail to her eye already, and this is something I continue into the next step, getting the first pass at her face done.  In this step she looks like a bulldog chewing a thistle, but it is extremely rough as I hope you can appreciate.

Step 4: The Face

First pass at her face as I said.  While I should have been trying to rough out the rest of the image at this time I felt that I should at least see if I could get her face to a presentable place before continuing (especially after the first failure).  This was close enough, and infact I don't think it really ever got much better than this throughout the process, just different.

Step 5: Starting the Cloth

Here I've added the basic outline of the cloth, and you can also see the ears and base of her hair have been done.  The lines are visible again.  The lines were always there, but I turned them off when I was actually painting quite often, only using them as a guide on occasion outside of painting her face.

My initial plan was to paint everything on one layer, but it was at this stage I discovered that Artgage's latest version had a bug (which I still need to report), making it extremely difficult to paint complimentary colours on the same layer if they're thin.  I painted the cloth on a new player as a result.

Step 6:  Continuing Work

Not much to to say here.  I've made a first pass on her arms and started on the cloth.  Her hands are one of the things I'm most pleased about with the finished image, and you can see one of them is almost complete at this point.

Step 7: Roughing the Background

Here I've come much further on the cloth and repainted quite a bit of her face (it will be much more apparent in the animated gif I suspect).  I decided I needed to make a start on the background.  Originally I was going to copy the draped cloth from the photograph, but here I decided half way through painting it that a mountain might work better visually.  I decided to keep the composition though as I felt it worked well.

Step 8: The Home Stretch

Almost finished at this point.  It's really just a logical continuation from the last image.  After this I add jewelry (and I'm not happy by how her headband came out, but I'm fairly pleased with the necklace and earrings), complete the cloth and hair and take one final pass at her face before calling it quits, signing it and cropping it.

Here's the animated gif as promised.  Each image is about an hour further along than the previous one as stated above (each image representing a fresh save file).  It's quite large, so hopefully it will load in a reasonable timeframe ;)

The Best (Not Worst) Sketching of October

I think by this point we've all acknowledged that I can be pretty tardy when it comes to updating the blog, especially when there are other shiny things I could be looking at/reading/playing/watching etc.  This was definitely the case last month as you'll note the new record low of 1 solitary post.  Bah.  If October felt like an eternity then November offset it by going in a flash.
"Oh look, it's Guy Fawks Nigh*VOOF*t...  I mean Thanksgiving."
Partly this was down to the excitement of having shipped another game, and it being reviewed very well, and also being really really fun to play.  Yes, I've played rather a lot of Saints Row: The Third recently.  I only spent six months of so working on it, but it's hard to miss what I did.
Pretty much every ship in the game is something I built, as are a couple of vehicles. They all got touched by other people after I was done (and quite a few people when I was still making them, for technical aid and so on), but they're still enough of mine that I can point and say "I made that ship!".  Anyway, enough excuses and prattling, I'm a month behind, we stuff to catch up on...

Free Sketching

Click to enlarge of course...

So you should immediately notice something different this time. get used to it for it is the way of the future. Basically, another reason I'd put off writing this post was that I couldn't face another month of organizing all the worst work of the month into an image for people to cringe at, so the showing the bad stuff is gone. Prepping these sketch images for online takes a while at the best of times, and since I'd drawn a ludicrous amount in October, and the usual percentage of it was bad I just couldn't face the workload, so I put it off. Eventually I decided I was never going to get around to doing any of it unless I just got rid of the fat, so it's gone and I'm making this post, so that worked. Showing the bad may come back in the future, but right now I'd rather post something than nothing.

With the bad gone I'm dividing the work up into whatever categories work best for a given month, so these are "free sketching" Which is really just a fancy way of saying "Doodles". No reference, very little planning, just sketching. This is what 90% of my sketching consisted of anyway.

I'm quite pleased with a lot of these, although you'll note the lack of full figures. I'll address that last further down, but there are a handful of them there, and they look reasonable. Of the portraits I'm happiest with the girl who's also the thumbnail for this post. In the main I'm pleased with the expressions I'm starting to improve at, with a range of emotion on display here rather than just flat and dull "waiting for the bus" faces. The princess in the top right has a bit of that, but she's a princess, they're supposed to suppress their emotions for the public. ;) I haven't decided if cat face girl is in Halloween makeup or if she's a hybrid. One is pretty hot, the other pretty scary. I'll let you make up your own minds.

Reference Sketching

Here we have the referenced work - drawn from life or photographs (mostly photographs). Actually I can't recall if I drew Iron-Man from a reference or not - I have no recollection either way. It's too good for me to have made up though so I must have.
The girl on the right was not in fact wearing that cloth, but I liked how it looked when I placed the images, so I left it.
I can't remember what I base some of these things on - they're usually very quick sketches while I wait for the kettle to boil and then I forget about them until it's time to scan them in. Not terribly professional, but am I charging? No I am not. :) The unhappy chap at the bottom is me though, for my facebook profile picture - I may have posted it before. Time I did another I think.

Figure Perspectives

And finally this is what I'm calling Figure Perspectives.  They're not really figure studies since I'm not actually studying anything and the anatomy is weak at best.  What happened was that I finished my old sketchbook and realised looking back through it that the vast majority of my good stuff was heads.  I would quite often draw a half decent head and then decide to continue it only to muff up the perspective and ruin it all.  On top of that my anatomy was middling to poor, so I needed to do something about it.  Back, as the title says, to the drawing board.
So now I'm doing lots of these things.  They're a bit like gesture drawings (that I've posted a few times int he past) but they take longer - the idea is to work on perspective and pose and then work on my anatomy more as I go along, but now with a reasonable grounding in three dimensional space.  After that I can work more on lighting, which I've always been dreadful at.   Anyway, expect to see a few of these from now on.  I'll still be doing portrait sketches, but I need to move my focus if I'm to become more well rounded as an illustrator.

I didn't really do anything else in October, and I did less sketching in November (October was 15 pages of sketching, November only 5 or 6), so I'll get the sketching for November up ASAP.  I did something else in November too, I don't like it as much as I had hoped, but others have said it's petty good, so I'll share that with you soon too.  I've got more game assets to post as well - I'll get around to that eventually.  Fingers crossed that the next couple of months go better than the last couple in terms of updates.  My fingers that is, what you do with yours is your own affair.