All the speed, none of the finesse

Well, it's been a heck of a month, and somewhat exhausting.  I'll spare you all the little details, but they are much the same as ever, with the addition of three bereavements.  Again, I'll not go into details, this being more a reminder to my future self as to what I was doing when they left us than any seeking of sympathy.

In other areas things have been going better.  I did a portrait that I can't show you for some time (for reasons murky and unfathomable - I don't really understand them myself), and managed, with a bit of modification, to keep up with my New Years resolution.

This modification was simply to change the goal from one speedpaint a week to the equivalent of four speedpaints a month.  This has the advantage of requiring fewer speedpaints (3 less, since I'd already excluded the first week of the year), and also meaning that if any were missed I could catch up on them at another time, something I have had to do, somehow managing to miss one in January I made up for in March.

All of which is to say, there's a bumper fun packed* collection Speedpaints to follow.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: This image, original photographer unknown.

For this following bunch of speedpaints there's a reasonable amount of experimentation with the types of brushes and settings I'm using in the software.  In this instance I was experimenting with wet on wet oils - something I've done on occasion, but never, to my recollection, on a more graphical scene.  The original photograph is of Torino Italy, and was found, as many of my subjects are, on Pinterest.  Sadly I've not been able to track down the original photographer to credit them properly, so if you know, mention it in the comments below.

As you can see, the majority of it was just building up details over time.  The majority of the composition was worked out in the second image here, with much of the colour being introduced in the third.  All that remained was adding the details and nailing down the minor red and green hues dotted around.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based On: The first image of Armstrong under the Visual References of this page.

I found this image on Valentine's Day, and was struck by how much the composition looked like the heart associated with the day, and decided to paint it.  I didn't actually get around to it until 5 days later, which rather reduced that significance.

Again, I'm playing with brushes a little here.  The  main brush used is the one I like that's based on the Oil Brush from ArtRage, but there are others intended to give it a rougher distressed photograph feel, adding noise and such. It doesn't look like there's a lot of change from the main shapes of the second step here to the end,(there's obviously a large difference from the first), but actually the shapes and border of the helmet were refined right up until the final black and white stage.  I find the face interesting as this is not usually how I refine them, but the technique clearly worked even despite the slightly nightmarish visage in the second stage.  The final sepia colouring was just a colour overlay roughly applied when the rest was complete.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Artrage 4
Based on: This

Yes, another image with no original source credit.  I'm feeling less and less guilt over it as time goes by, given that I'm not claiming they're based on my original ideas, I'm not making any profit on them (It's primarily just practice), and I do make at least an initial effort to find where the image comes from, and link you too it, if possible, when I can't.  In this case the first 3 pages of google results are almost all Pinterest, which has issues with letting non members see pins, so this link is the best I can do.  I'm a bit miffed actually - the image on that page is about twice the size of the one I worked from.

Not much to say about the process on this one really.  I did use a cropped image and a crosshair 2x2 grid to get the centre point and composition, although the image was so small that didn't help nearly as much as I would have liked.  Also of note is that her expression changes marginally three times in the three stages shown at the bottom.  The one in the middle is the one I posted to facebook, and has her left eyebrow slightly raised from the one on the left, with the one on the right having an additional minute of work done to it to fix something I didn't like about her mouth and cheek.  If you're really eagle eyed you might be able to spot the difference.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: A Photograph of Bill Murray by Leif-Erik Nygårds

Can we just forgo reasons for this one? All this typing is making my hands tired, and really 'Bill Murray' is all the reason required.

I do find it amusing that he looks increasingly less like Bill Murray the further along I get.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: Personal photograph of a local cinema

The second of my Designated Area series.  I think I took the picture when I was going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy.  More an experiment in working with perspective than anything.

Y'know, I think I accidentally rescaled these using the wrong scaling method?  If you squint at the first few stages here (after clicking to enlarge) you can see the perspective guidelines, but they're really pixelated, and they shouldn't be.  That's unfortunate, but I'm not going back to do them again.  Not much else to say about this - it was as straight forward as it looks.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: This Stock by ChamberStock on DeviantArt

I'd been meaning to do something based on this photograph for ages, and I'm sort of sorry I ended up doing it as this experimental piece.  Basically I was mucking about creating a triangular brush on photoshop, and painted this to try it out.  It's an interesting look, and probably useful in places but not very refined (plus, I think the proportions are way off).

The whole painting was done using the same brush.  It has a sort of pixilated look if you use it correctly, which is also an interesting effect.  Other than the funky brush there's not much else of note to say about this piece.

Time Taken: 35 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: N/A

So here I am mucking about with brushes, still.  Still not completely happy with them, but they are getting better I think, and closer to what I'm after.  Both this one and the next came about when I was scribbling with the various brushes as I tested them, and then saw a picture beginning to emerge and pursued it, so it's all a bit chaotic, and not remotely polished.

Time Taken: 30 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: N/A

And here's the second one arrived at from the same basic technique of no technique at all.  More speed sketches than Speedpaints really.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes (+5 Minutes)
Software: ArtRage 4 + Photoshop
Based on: Various

This looks very different small, surprisingly so.  It also looks a bit different to the version I had 5 minutes prior:

Which was because in a rare turn of events I took the original ArtRage version and pulled it into Photoshop for some post action (oh man, does that ever sound filthy).

It's not based on anything specific, I just went into Pinterest and decided to pull out the first few things that seemed interesting to me, and base a painting on them.  They were, in no particular order:  A guy in a coat with a large collar, a woman in a shiny skin-tight top, and two asian women.  I'm not linking to most of them because, well, I thought I'd already pinned them all in the past, but in fact I'd only pinned the guy in the coat (or maybe I did pin them, but not where I thought I did - whatever, I can't find them now).

The woman with the skin tight top was the rough inspiration for the pose and the sleeves, the inspiration for the jacket comes from the guy's collar and the face is evidently from the asian ladies.  In a fairly rare move I actually roughed it out before starting (I do rough out speedpaints on occasion, but usually when I'm directly basing them on something).  The final version, pulled into Photoshop, was first cropped (because I made a real mess of her hand - really, it's deformed, ill proportioned and generally wretched, and didn't want to do any more painting - 2 hour time limit was up, but I gave it the extra 5 all the same) and then some color tweaks and blurring the background.  Nothing terribly surprising here.

One thing of note though - her head looks slightly twisted at an odd angle.  that's not intentional, I just messed up the perspective.  Also, her neck is not well done, at all. I couldn't crop that out like the hand though.

And there we have it - nine speedpaints.  I'm not sure it's a record, but it's more than I usually post at a time.  Maybe I shouldn't wait two months before posting the next lot.

* I lied about it being fun packed.

For Psychochronography, Turn to Page 5

Well, I'm writing this at the last minute because of things and stuff.  Not going into details, though I will say I'm writing it with cold hands because our furnace is out for the second time this year.  Fantastic! It's been that sort of week (as in the last 7 days, not as in the week beginning on Monday, because it is Monday, so I would say it's been that sort of day instead).

So, since it's so cold, and I'd like to go and do warmer things than type a blog entry I'll try and keep it short (Ha, like that ever happens!  Well, it did last post, so there).

Oh, this is a Phil Sandifer cover post, if you hadn't already guessed from the title.

That's the latest cover.  You can click on it to make it larger as usual, as you can with many images on this post.  The format of the cover might be reminiscent of a series of books from your childhood. Or, if you're British, the competitor to the far cooler series of books from your childhood (in my opinion).  If you're as old as I am anyway.

The origins of this go way back to the Tom Baker Doctor Who essays Phil wrote.  No, not the ones from the last two books, but the original blog entries those books are based on.  Phil likes to have fun with posts occasionally, such as in his more recent ones where he offset the episodes he was covering depending on whether the character River Song was in them or not. Thus his 'final' post was several months ago, while his actual final post a couple of weeks ago covered her first appearance in the show with Silence in the Library. Actually, it didn't, instead it covered the entire series, and therefore the entire blog, in a 99,000 word extravaganza.  Like I said, he likes to have fun with it.

So back in the Tom Baker days of old he covered the serial Logopolis as though it was a non-linear gamebook, not dissimilar to a Choose Your Own Adventure.

Time passed and there was that Kickstarter for the Second Edition of Volume 1 (if you're hopelessly confused at this point scroll down to the labels and click Philip Sandifer, that will give you all the relevant posts - start at the beginning, it might take a while - look, I just linked his name there too, to make it easier).  One of the extra goals of that Kickstarter was to do the Logopolis entry as its own book.  Phil being Phil, he planned on expanding it,  but ended up rewriting it almost entirely, though it still had the temporary title of Logopolis.

Phil sent me the final text a while back, and I worked through it, and then tried to come up with an image for it.  The nod to the book series was a given (Phil requested it), but the image to go on it was less obvious.  You see the text was so dense in imagery, and so wide ranging in scope, that there really wasn't a central key thing to latch on to, so I flailed around a bit.  Hated all of them, and Phil wasn't terribly impressed either.  I think it amusing that the worse drawn of these (the one in the top left, which my son could do better than) ended up as the source of the little sketch on the back cover.  Phil did make life a bit easier after seeing these though - he suggested something based around the Tree of Life, and said I didn't have to be too slavish to the actual style of the old cover illustrations.  Great.

This is what we ended up with.  Originally I was going to go for something more complex, looking down the platform with the map in perspective, but I went with this instead because it's more easily readable, it's more graphic, and it's simpler to do.  On seeing it Phil immediately emailed me back:

So, amusing fact - Alan Moore’s Promethea... introduces the Tree of Life with a copy of this map: http://www.johncoulthart.com/pantechnicon/kabbalah.html

I have absolutely no problem with this. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a lovely and entirely apropos homage, and the synchronicity of you coming up with a map in the same style as Promethea is fantastic. I love the design.

Which of course is exactly the sort of thing the good Doctor knows off the top of his head.  So we went ahead with it, though in deference to Mr. Coulthart, and his having the idea first, I named a station after him, and gave him due credit on the map - alas this may not actually be visible on the cover, so here's the map I then created so you can actually read it (if you enlarge it at least).

Lots of Doctor Who references in there if you know what to look for.  The crisscrossing branching theme also ties in quite nicely with the book thematically.

Of course with that done I still needed the rest of the cover.  Much of it was fairly simple - the thumbnail layout was all done with vectors, so it just needed scaling up and it all remained crisp and sharp.  The illustration was a little more complicated though, and had to be recreated from scratch.

So the image on the left was created in Photoshop using gradients and shapes and the like.  Next over we have the version with the shadows being cast.  For those I originally did them in Photoshop but I wasn't happy with the result, so I modeled a rough form in a 3D package and then rendered it with a couple of lights casting the shadow onto a white wall.  A little bit of distorting here and there in Photoshop and it all looked of a piece when overlaid on the initial image. I wasn't happy with the top of it though (it looked too 'rendered' to me), so I recreated it in Photoshop; now I had something as a guide that was fairly simple, and can be seen next to the rendered version - it's also had the levels fiddled with. On the right is the final image used on the cover with extra colours and graphics, and the map added.

Next I needed to add the spine and the rear cover along with some wear and tear.  None of this was terribly taxing, though the cover was a different size from the previous books (it's a classic paperback size rather than the usual larger format, to stay in keeping with the type of book it's referencing).  Nothing very exciting to know here that I've not covered in previous entries, except for the illustration and the big logo.  That logo is taken from Volume Two of the Eruditorum book series, it was replaced by the Eruditorum Press logo on all of Phil's subsequent books, so I thought it may as well get one more airing before being retired forever.  Plus I needed something to fill the space that wasn't text (The submission process automatically rejects any text obscured by the barcode 'sticker')

As for the upper illustration; given the quality of the usual illustrations on the back of such books (not terrible, but simple and charming), I didn't want to spend too long on it. I did a fairly quick pen illustration of the man (that hand is terrible, I fought the urge to redo it), and then to save time I created the spiral in Photoshop - something that's actually very simple to do if you know the trick (you draw slightly angled lines across the image, then run the Polar Coordinates filter, and then warp it around a little).  Painting out the bits where the guy was supposed to go took longer than the rest of the background, as of course you could see the background right through his line art.  Finally, the shading on the figure, and gradient to black in the background were done by painting them in grey, and then using the Photoshop Graphic Pen filter.  It's not perfect, but at this size it's hard to tell it was partially faked.

At this point Phil had given me the page count and the new title of the book, along with the blurb for the rear cover.  You may note something about the title if you're paying attention.  It's wrong!  In my opinion the spine also looks better with the large logo, but I'll come back to that in a moment.  So Phil gave me the correct title, but in his blurb he has mistyped it (not my fault for once!), so when I added the blurb I thought I must have misread the title he'd sent me, and used his mistyped version.  He picked up on it of course, and it was easily fixed.

The change in the spine though was a little more irritating.  I'd done it that way so it would look like a graphic choice if the spine wrapped slightly around to the front or back cover; Some nice dashes in the darker blue line, and an interesting look to the spine itself.  I kept this format when I corrected the spelling, but unfortunately the auto-check in the submissions process kicked it.  It doesn't give an option to override such things for those who want to deliberately buck the trend.

I made the  changes, and fixed up a few other minor details to arrive at the final cover.  And if you look at the final title on the spine you may note it looks a little blurred.  It's actually because the title is recursively occluding itself, and fading away with each repetition to the side, but I like that it also looks blurred.  For some reason the Auto-Submit didn't decide to have an issue with that.

Phil's launch post on Recursive Occlusion can be found here, and the book itself is available from this page now.