Back to the 2015 Recap Post

I still have two speedpaint posts coming up soon, one for November, and one for December, but today I'm just going for something fairly quick and easy, one of those Review of the Year things that all the cool sites are doing these days, plus some thoughts on my goals for this year.

I don't recall ever doing one of these before (I have done year end speedpaint reviews, but those paying attention will know those usually come around in May, for reasons), so here's the format - I'll give a quick overview of what I've done, and then pick my 4 favourite pieces to show again and cover why I like them, and one piece I hate.  These are ones I personally like (or dislike) - not the most popular, and my preferences for my own work might seem a bit strange.  All good?  OK, let's begin.

This is almost every image I painted (outside of my day job) in 2015, with one major omission which I can't talk about except to say it exists (a shame, it would have made the top 4), and a couple of others I just remembered (but aren't worth redoing the image for).  If you click on it it'll blow up to a size where you can actually see what they are.  They're not in any particular order, and not all of them have had associated posts yet.

There are 72 images on the sheet, but some of them contain what I'd consider multiple pieces in one (and some contain multiple pieces I don't think count as more than one), so it's actually well over 100 things (I make it 142, depending on how I feel like counting at the minute).

Of those, 64 are speedpaints, which is awesome for reasons I'll get to.  The rest are commissions and random side projects.  That's not bad going for something I do in my spare time, and even then not as often as I feel like I should.

So of those, which do I consider the most successful pieces of the year?  Well, I'm surprised at how difficult it is to choose (you know I'm rarely a fan of my own work, but I have to admit, there's some good stuff tucked away in there), but I think, at least today, the following qualify:

White on Black

Photoshop Speedpaint taking 110 minutes, based on an older Skullcandy advertisement.

I liked this one so much I did a companion piece, and also considered doing others along the same theme (this may still happen).  This one was one that came about really quickly - I saw the image it was based on, thought "I should paint that!" and did it almost immediately.  In addition to that I made changes and choices that I wouldn't usually make, and I think the result, especially given the time I spent on it, is a quite striking and polished image.  Everything just sort of works together, from the one bold colour (pink/red) in an otherwise subdued palette, to the more graphic nature of the composition and pose (actually fully intentional for once), to the strong light shape of the headphones in the otherwise dark (but not fully black) surround.  One of the few pieces which turned out almost exactly as I planned, rather than turning out OK due to some happy accidents.

Me

Photoshop Speedpaint taking 120 minutes, based on a snap from my cellphone 2 minutes before.

Well, this one is awkward.  Not only is it a speedpaint I have yet to post in a speedpaint roundup (that'll be the next post), but it's also a self portrait.  I'm not the best subject for portraiture, by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm generally available, and this was for Self Portrait Day (November 1st).
So, if I'm a terrible subject, why is this here?  Because despite the unfortunate subject matter I'm of the opinion that this might be the best portrait I've ever done, speedpaint or not.  Everything about it came together, and speaking as the person probably most familiar with the physog in question, it looks exactly like me.  The colours work, I like the feeling of depth that it has.  Really, the only things wrong with it is that it's of me, and I really can't remember how exactly I did it (I usually keep those step by step images for my memory's benefit as much as yours, and in this case I neglected to capture any).

So that's how my ego managed to make the top 4 of the year :/

Urban Assassin

Artrage Speedpaint taking 115 minutes, based on this photograph from DrunkHobo-Stock

Much like White on Black, this piece was a concentrated effort to do something a little bit different.  I worked looser, and with very different brush settings from those I'm usually comfortable with. This is the case for a handful of speedpaints - sometimes it works out, other times it's a disaster.  In this case it worked out, and I've used a similar technique twice since then, once for the book cover featured in the last post.

In this case though, I think the original worked out the best.  I'm slightly amazed by how well this piece works myself, given I know what went into creating it.  Small things, like exactly how little work went into painting the hands and face, but how they still came out looking really effective.  Usually capturing those elements takes quite a bit of work, but here there was very little repainting - what you see is essentially what I painted, stroke for stroke. Now if only I could work out how to do that every time I'd be set.  In the meantime, some of the techniques learned creating this piece led to two other fairly successful pieces, and that is enough to get it a spot on this here list (also, he does look pretty badass).

Not So Innocent

Photoshop work, based on this photograph by AmethystDreams1987

This is going to be a fairly short writeup.  There are actually a few elements in this picture where I think I did similar things better elsewhere (such as her hair), but I'm picking this one for one reason - that jacket.  It took a really long time to paint it, but the end result is probably worth all the time I put in.  That, combined with how much this piece transforms the photograph it's based on is really enough to place it in the top 4 despite its flaws.

Well, making that list was remarkably difficult.  Much more difficult than I was expecting when I started this post.  Looking at the four, I'm interested with how dark each of them is (in terms of lighting, but also in terms of subject in two cases).  Does this mean I just like strong contrast in a piece, or is it just a coincidence?  Blowed if I know.  

I do know the next section is easier though - what was the worst thing I did this year?  Scroll on MacDuff, and discover the horror:

Crap Tarzan

Crap speedpaint taking 25 minutes in Photoshop, and not worth a minute of it.

Really, I'm not even going to try and justify it, it's just pure crap.  There might be a kernel of an idea that could work quite well, but as it's own thing...  Yeah, no.  I can't blame the short time spent on it either - I've done a lot better in a lot less time.

So that covers the year, more or less, with one other thing to cover.  A year ago I said my resolution was to do more speedpaints - one a week.  I pretty quickly changed that to four a month, as that seemed more manageable.  

This grid (or at least 75% of it) was created then to track the speedpaints I was doing, but at the time all the green boxes were black.  Three columns of 16, so 48 cells, one for each image I needed to do - each time I completed one, I would fill in a box with green.  I'd filled those by mid September, back when I painted Bruce Lee, so I had to add another Column.  Since then I've done another 16 paintings, the last of which I'll be covering in the next two speedpaint posts. So I blew past my personal challenge to get a total of 64 speedpaints done (to varying degrees of success). Rather more than 1 a week - Go me.

One thing I realised while doing them though, was I'm still too reliant on direct reference.  Nothing wrong with that (especially when painting at speed).  I could probably work from nothing but straight reference from now until forever and nobody but me would mind.  It's not like I'm ever going to stop working from direct reference completely either - It's can be too relaxing for that.  

Even so, I want to go back to working on some of the fundamentals, and if that's at the expense of the number of speedpaints I'm cranking out then so be it.  This year's resolution is to work on those fundamentals, which will also aid my painting from direct reference in the long run.  Things like proportion, human anatomy, perspective, composition, and colour theory. 

I also realised that the speedpaints were getting to the point where they were less speed and more just paints. so I'm going to change my personal terminology a little.  Anything under 100 minutes can still be a speedpaint (that's still pretty fast for some of the things I've managed to do), anything over becomes just a quick painting.  The intent is to do more speedpaints, and just the occasional painting - even if that means they go 'unfinished' when the time runs out. 

This doesn't effect much as far as you're concerned - they'll still all come under the speedpaint umbrella as far as posts are concerned with the same internal gut feeling on whether they count or not.  There will also be Studies, which will be where I'm tackling something specific.  Those might be as little as a few brushstrokes, as long as I learn from them.  You'll get to see those too, but possibly under a different post.

Oh, and my other resolution is to get the rest of the sketch posts up to date ASAP - if some of this study is going to be traditional (and I intend for it to be) then it might be beneficial to get it up where I can easily find it - and by extension you can see it to.

So this year things are shaking up a bit while I go back to basics.  Back to the drawing board if you will.  Hopefully the only difference you'll really notice will be in the quality of the results.

Until the next post, Happy New Year! I hope 2015 was a good one for you, and 2016 is even better.

Sketching - October to December '14

It's a bit ridiculous that I simplified posting sketches so I could more easily keep up with it, and then haven't posted any for 5 months.  I shall post now, although this still puts me a year behind.  Same rules as last time - Scan page, adjust levels, post image.  Edits allowed for rotating something so you can see it better, or cutting something out you're not supposed to see (for work or whatever. Not because it's bad - you get to see the terrible stuff, or there wouldn't be much to see). So, let's see what I was up to a year ago...

October 2014

Notes:  I quite like TV man, and sweater girl, as well as knife woman on the bottom image.  Jack-o-lantern on the central image wins it though really.  I need to do a painting of that one day (maybe for next Halloween).

November 2014

December 2014

Notes: Chap in the middle of the lower one is based on my Brother (not a good likeness).  It's the only one based on a photo I think.  I quite like a couple here (especially fur collar Aria up there), but nothing is really standing out as amazing.

I think next year I'm going to do with sketching what I did with Speedpainting this year, since I've been sketching less but painting more.  Next year I'll give over that time to more sketching, but it will be study sketching, rather than free form stuff like this.  Hopefully that will get me out of the rut I think I'm stuck in right now (really, this years sketches, few as they are, are no better than these from last year).

Robots Under Lighting

Well, I certainly missed a couple of weeks there.  One of them was the July 4th weekend, so of course nothing happened that weekend except alcohol, grilled meat and small sparkly explosives (a winning combination!).  Last weekend... I have no clue - obviously last weekend occurred, but I could not with any certainty tell you what occurrences happened during it.  Possibly I did some art, I'm really not sure.

So, anyway, hopefully today I'll get some catching up done.  I think this will be done by just saying less stuff - most of what follows is basically stuff you've read before about other pieces anyway, so this one will focus on things that were slightly different.

A picture of a Robot.  Done for the DeviantArt Artrage monthly competition in May, which was themed 'Robots'.   It's one of the Robots I initially sketched for those pieces I do for my son, but it didn't get done for that, so I painted it for this in Artrage instead.

The initial sketch, blown up, just like the previous ones.  Unlike the previous ones I did a cleaned up sketch of it to work from (just sketched over the original scan).  This was done in artrage using the Ink Pen tool.  In the end it didn't prove terribly useful, but I later used the original sketch.

Adding flat color, and then reducing the opacity of the ink layer and starting to fill in some of the lighting information.  I was tempted to do a very polished piece, using airbrush and such, but then decided (by this point) that having it look more like a children's book illustration would work better with the style of the robot itself.  The red tone of the shadow was because I knew the heart would be glowing red, and the light would probably bounce around because this robot is metal.

More lighting basically, including the first pass at the background.  As reference for that I pulled out an old render I'd done of a car sitting on a 'backcloth' in a spotlight.  Gave me a pretty reasonable idea of what angle the light cone would be at, and then I modified it to suit.  I also added some reflection of the ball, and some bounce light from it.  I have no idea if those are accurate - it just looked good.

Incidentally, since metal is a surface made up entirely of reflections, for this to look like this in reality it would require something like a white drop cloth behind the camera, that was itself illuminated, but that would then add more fill light than shown here.  So yes, I know that, and I don't particularly care as I wasn't going for realism.

These are basically the final stages.  I added the lights, and the lighting for the ball, as well as his antenna.  I wanted the smile to look like an old LCD display (like you'd get on a digital watch).  To do that I drew the mouth as pixels, added the grid to look like pixel cells, and then painted a very slight shadow under the mouth pixels.  After that I just lit the screen to hide most of the grid.  It worked quite well I think.  At this point I also pulled the original sketch back in and blurred it slightly.  This worked quite well to simulate a little ambient occlusion and give the little guy some solidity.

To reach the final result I made the background a bit choppier and added some noise overall, as well as the border.  The majority of the piece was done using the Oil Paint tool. Some of the stages, such as the glow around the lights, were done using a very drippy Airbrush, or sketched over with the Pastel brush.  the background was softened with the Palette Knife, and the overall noise once again added with a low intensity drippy Airbrush.

The picture won the competition by the way, so I'm glad I did it even if it's very different from my usual fair.

Oh, and I thought I'd posted this before, but I guess not.  I did another Robot picture for my Son's birthday, which is now framed and hung on his wall.  We'd noticed during the year that one of the pencils I'd used to do one of the previous ones fluoresces under blacklight (my son thinks UV lights are amazing, so we'd had one in his bedroom briefly to see how different surfaces reacted).  With that in mind this particular Robot was done specifically with pencils that had the same effect, so the whole thing is also a blacklight picture.  Might come in handy when he's a teen and has the obligatory Blacklight around all the time.  Might mean he'll keep his old man's cute robot pictures around a little longer than he otherwise would.

This is a scan of the actual picture, and a simulated blacklight version (the colors pulled off a photograph of the actual picture under blacklight, which was otherwise too blurry to show).  The process for creating this was basically the same as the previous set, other than ensuring the pencils would all fluoresce.

All New Year Old Sketching: July to September '14

Despite having quite a lot to post about, I do seem to have fallen behind on the actual posting bit.  This means that for the first time in a while I have quite a few pieces that need posting about, rather than just a handful of speedpaints.  I'm not going to be doing much catching up today though, instead I'll be doing some catch up a little on the other posts I've fallen behind on - the monthly sketch update.

From here on things will be done a little differently.  Usually I scan the sketchbook pages, and then cut out things of note for the month and compose them into a new image.  This has two disadvantages though.  Firstly, it takes bloody ages, and I don't think there's really enough feedback to warrant all the work I put into it (this time sink aspect is the main reason I've fallen behind so badly).  Secondly, it means that consciously or not I end up cutting out a lot of the stuff that's crap.  This gives a false impression of my current progress (actually, my progress about 11 months ago because I'm so far behind).

To combat these issues I'm going to take to just posting the sketchbook pages mostly as they are when scanned.  There will still be some minor edits, and the colour and contrast adjusted for legibility, but instead of a couple of hours per sheet, it's more like a couple of hours per post, which is  a lot more manageable.

Edits will happen for the following reasons:

• I drew something that's directly or indirectly linked with my day job, and might get me into trouble for posting (even if you don't know that it's associated and there are no clues that it might be), or is something I'm working on outside of that job and I want to save the sketch for the final review post.
• Something I like is upside down or at some other odd angle, and I want to show it off better (this will not apply to things that are crap).
• I am so unspeakably ashamed of something I've drawn that I just can't bare to share it (this will be far rarer than editing by omission as mentioned above).
• A piece I like got cropped off during the scan (the sketchbook is larger than the scan bed by an irritatingly small amount), and I want to include it in the main image.

Other than that, you'll get the lot - including the ones where the cat sat on my arm while I was sketching, or my son injured himself headbutting the coffee table and I had to stop, or I was half awake at the time, and so on.  I won't be giving explanations (unless it's an amusing tale, which I doubt), so if it's crap, just accept that it's crap and move on - there are occasionally good things.

JULY 2014

 

 

 

Notes:  None really. This was a fair time ago, so I don't recall a lot of what I was thinking when drawing these.  There's a head profile in the middle of one of them that may be the worst profile I've drawn in recent memory though.  Yuck.  The spaceman planting a flag right at the bottom is sort of adorable though.

AUGUST 2014

 

 

 

Notes: That page with the Minotaurs might be the best single sketch page I've ever done.  No references either, which amazes me when I look at the head on the right side and the decaying fellow next to them.  Other than that, nothing terribly exciting, but quite a lot of it.

SEPTEMBER 2014

 

Notes: A very disappointing month.  I drew more than this (finishing off that half page for one), but it was mostly things for work, so you don't get to see it.  Quite like some things on the full page, such as the chubby businessman the girl in the dress and so on, but it's not exactly exceptional stuff. 

Sketching - October to December '13

Yes, I've managed to go almost another month between posts, and in all honesty I didn't get as much done in that time as I would have liked in order to share with you over the next one.  It's not that I've been doing nothing, just that not much of it is the sort of stuff this blog covers.  One thing that is related though is that I've been doing some general 'housekeeping', and I'll get into that further down.  Part of the housekeeping has been to actually start compiling the 8 months of sketches I'm behind on sharing, and that's the focus of today's post.  There are also some speedpaints for me to share, but that will probably be next week's entry.

I'm ditching the usual format of these sketching posts until I get caught up.  Usually I compile all the sketches for the time I've been lax and they're organized into different images by what they're of.  This time there's one image per month, with everything lumped in together.  It's marginally more manageable this way, so I'm more likely to do it.

October
It's been a while, obviously, but I don't believe I used reference for any of these, which means that I'm quite pleased with a couple of them (for a change).  Not all of them, and most of them have issues that I will now address.  One thing you'll see wrong with a few of the sketches here, and in the next two months below, is that I do a poor job at getting the angle on the far side of the head right.  You can see it here most obviously with the chaps head on the centre left there, and the girls next to him.  It's like the far side of their head is half as wide again as the side closest.  It's something I've been working on correcting, but it still happens an embarrassing amount of the time.  The  backside on the figure near the top right is also severely malformed, as is quite a lot of the unfortunate woman bottom left.  These things I know.  Things I'm happy with are the portrait in the top right (She's odd looking, but fairly believable), the girl in the bottom right (I'm really happy with some of the cloth creasing there, even though her nose is a bit strange), and the robot, because who doesn't like robots? Yes, this was long before the robot mania of March this year.  The rest all falls somewhere in between.  Oh, and the reaper?  Well, it was October.

November
I didn't sketch all that much in November, so this is actually a good percentage of what I did.  Not much to say, except the arm and shoulder area on the guy top right is appalling, but I really rather dig the hair on victorian dude at the bottom there.  The rest is just somewhere in between.  I guess I was getting better at the torso stuff here, but I've back slid since then, which is a shame.

December
Used some reference for some of these.  That's probably obvious given Luke Skywalker hanging out on the right there.  Two above him is a girl I found on Pinterest.  Sadly I have no idea who she is or who took the picture.  Reverse image search just returns "Dyed Hair," and sure enough she's on the top row of that image search.  It's not a great copy, but I quite like it anyway.  A couple of the other small sketchy portraits were done on the plane when we were going to my Mother's for Christmas.  Pretty par for the course, and this time I did barely any sketching while away because Christmas meant having surprisingly little time to do so.   To the best of my recollection the rest were with no, or minimal reference.

Housekeeping
You probably didn't notice, but there have been a number of small changes to the blog; specifically in the sidebar.  Mostly this was just some reorganisation, but under Pages you'll find two new links.

One is to my other "blog" The Art of James A. Taylor.  It's using Blogger and it's fancy new interface, but it's basically just a gallery of some of my work.  Some of what I consider to be the more successful pieces.  Each post has one image, and where relevant there is a link back to the corresponding post on here.  Not everything I do will go up on there, but what does go up might be up there before it's up here, but I suspect I'll partly be using it as an easy access index to the posts back on this blog.  I've had the blog and URL for ages, but only got around to adding anything to it a couple of weeks ago.

Secondly is the My Useful Links link.  This is more for me than you (in case I need to reach my list of links on a computer I'm not logged into), but it is public, so feel free to take a gander.  It was actually a surprising amount of work to organise it and make it presentable, but I figured if it was going to be public I should at least make it pretty.  If you have any links you think I should add, or that I might be interested in, let me know in the comments, where the tumbleweeds usually hang out.

Other than that I also started going through my Anatomy board on Pinterest and labeling things so they actually turn up when I search them.  I haven't made it very far through that yet, but it's a big board, so it will take a while.

And that's all I have for you today.  Back soon with those speedpaints, and maybe some other things I've been working on.

A Four-Colour Psychochronography

I 'complain' that I'm busy a lot.  This is mostly because I am often busy.  I'm not always busy with art, or with my day job (although of course these two things combined account for the vast majority of my time breathing), but other things as well, like relaxing in front of the TV, trawling Pinterest for references, keeping on top of my messages (in various places), video games, reading, eating, and sleeping.  You know, life? It tends to add up. Fairly low on that list of priorities, but still a priority, is writing blog posts.

Phil Sandifer on the other hand, has blog posts as one of his main priorities.  Blogging, and subsequently making books from those posts (with many additions and edits of course), is his day job, so he blogs a lot.

Previously I've done book covers for his collections based on his still ongoing TARDIS Eruditorum series of blog posts, and also on the book he wrote about Wonder Woman (A Golden Thread), which didn't appear on his blog.  A series of books and a blog covering every episode and a huge amount of tangential material of the 50 year history of Doctor Who (with some of those episodes being covered in 12,000+ word essays) is not enough for Dr. Sandifer though.

Yes, he actually is a Doctor, in English, and possibly in awesome.  A doctorate of awesome would be a useful thing to have, come to think of it, I wonder where you'd get one.

With his blog rapidly approaching the present time of the show he's cast around for something else to cover when he catches up, and found it in the form of the passive feud between writers (and self proclaimed magicians) Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  Now I can't pick sides there as I'm an enormous fan of both their works (though not enormous enough to have read everything by them), and Phil doesn't pick sides either.  His work is presented as the history of a war distant enough that there are no stakes in the winners.  Not dry and dispassionately though, but with a wink and some dry wit and humour.  The 'war' is really just a framing device for a vast and sprawling canvas; the actual chapters covering topics as diverse as the influence of J.G. Ballard, Robert R Crumb, and Edward Blake, to the narrative structures of aristotelian literature (and so on), as well as the works, and influence upon them by 'the war', of other writers, such as Neil Gaiman.

It sounds insane.  It is insane.  The good Doctor is a self proclaimed Mad Man With a Blog after all.

Writing blogs doesn't make money though - as a Day Job it's pretty low income stuff, unless you have a huge and sprawling readership and lots of ads.  Phil's blog has minimal ads, and a moderate following among a certain type of intellectual nerd (as well as less intellectual nerds like me, who just like his writing style), so he's running a Kickstarter to fund it.  And since (to paraphrase C3PO) he's worked with me before, he asked me to knock him up a nice banner for the jam-jar shaking.

Still here?  Oh good.  That may be the longest Cold Open I've ever written, so I hope it was worth the wait.  If it wasn't keep going, there's a mid-episode twist a little way down.  You can expand the images by clicking on them by the way - I'd recommend it for the one above.  And now back to our scheduled programming.

So, I could have just doodled some stuff, slapped a logo on it and called it a day, or thrown together a simple photo montage. There's no challenge in that though, so I immediately thought of doing charcoal portraits.  Because I'm such an expert in Charcoal! Right? Ha, hahaha.  This was decision was actually before I'd done the Robots for my son, so it's not like I really had any reason to be confident I could do it.  Anyway, he asked in The Time of Ultimate Busyness, so I had to tell him it would be a few weeks, but I'd do something in charcoal.  It was a week after that I started on the robots.

Anyway, eventually I sat down and did a preliminary sketch of what was in my head.  I had a photo of Alan Moore available, but I wasn't being terribly careful about the accuracy of the sketch.  I just wanted to firm up in my head what I wanted.   Obviously it's terrible, but it did it's job.

After that I wanted to see if it might be better served as a comic style rendering, so I did it again in a style vaguely reminiscent of Kevin O'Neil (who illustrated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).  I liked it, but it wasn't going to work for what I wanted, so it was back to the charcoal idea that I was now less sure of, having done the robot pics.

This was my initial pencil sketch of Moore.  I used a grid to get the basic proportions and angles of his head right, with the rest of it just being measured with a pencil and a pair of dividers.  I'm hopeless at judging angles (as you may have noticed over the years), which was why I resorted to the grid.  Cheating?  No - but we'll get to that in an A-Musing post soon enough.  Other than his head I used about six different photographs as reference to get the rest of it down.  I left the medals blank, intending to put some references on them (such as one of them being a smiley face), but then I forgot completely, and they stayed blank until the end.

I then traced the sketch (with tracing paper - the first time I've used it in, well, since the Robots, but before that long enough that I don't remember using it before), and transferred it to the toned sketch  pad that I'd previously drawn robots on.  I wish there was some clever technique I could harp on about after that, but really it just boiled down to "Shading it in charcoal,"  which is fairly boring and not terribly informative.  I did try blending the charcoal here and there, and discovered the charcoal I was using was a little firm for it - I've bought softer charcoal since then, so I might try doing it some other time.  Also I did relight the picture of Moore I was working in, so all the shadows are a little deeper and he's lit more from the left (our right).

Phil was happy with this, so when I had the chance I did the same thing for Grant Morrison.  Here's the pencil sketch.  This was done in exactly the same way, with the only real difference being that I only used two references for his body (one of them being from a publicity still of a popular UK drama, so less said about that the better - I did change it a bit though).  I also drew his eye a little large - this is after I scaled it down slightly, but really, unless you were looking for it you wouldn't notice the difference it was that slight.

The actual shading didn't go as well though.  I tried to relight him the same way I had for Moore, but overdid under his eyes a bit (okay, a lot).    This looked fine on paper, so I fixed it with fixative and then scanned it in, but after doing so the darkness there was just overbearing.  I couldn't just erase the black, since I'd fixed the charcoal, and I didn't want to do it digitally or the whole point of having an actual original for a change would be lost.  My solution was to grab a Prisamcolor white pencil (waxier than a charcoal one, which I thought would be advantageous) and gently run it over the top of the fixed charcoals.  This took a couple of attempts, but as you can see it eventually worked fairly well.

Here's the finished Grant Morrison picture.  I think it's less of a likeness than the Moore one, but still recognisable.  Next time I do something like this I'm going to stick with the lighting in the original picture, I swear.

By the way, you may recall me lamenting a long time ago that my scanner had a tendency to skew things when I scanned them, but that I had no proof that this was the case rather than my just drawing things a little off and not being able to tell on paper.  Well, now I know.  This picture had a border around it so I could accurately judge the scale.  The border was a perfect rectangle, but when I scanned it, well, it wasn't.  Thankfully Photoshop has a distort tool that allowed me to get it back to the correct shape, but that's certainly something I'll have to keep an eye on in future as I won't always have such a defined guideline for straightening it back up.

After that I just needed to do the banner itself.  This meant placing the two scanned pictures next to each other, adding a logo and making it all look a little aged.  The aging and compositing was done in Photoshop of course, with the paper's aging done with a combination of textured overlays and custom brushes (I'll have to share those at some point, a great set for wear and tear).  Above is the first pass, and, if you scroll up and down between this and the final one at the top there, you'll see that the logo changed a bit between here and there, as well as the banner proportions being changed.  Most of the extra stuff on the logo is just done with a combination of traced paths and victorian style clipart.  I could have done the flourishes, but time was short.  Other than that the 'in' was changed because neither of us liked it in this version.  The border in the final was also done partially with clip art, which saved some time, even though it wouldn't have been terribly difficult to have done that without.

And that's it - the ridiculous and slightly roundabout route to a relatively simple Kickstarter banner.

Oh.... But there's more.

Going back a bit to when Phil first asked for the banner, and my first communication with him on it, he'd also mentioned doing an E-Book cover for the individual chapters he releases as he goes along.  One that might do double duty of the first printed volume too.  You can see the end result above, but here's a brief explanation at how it was arrived at.

Before I got to working on the Alan Moore charcoal image, I took some time in between drawing Robots to do some mockups.  My initial inclination was to just use the Kickstarter images (which didn't exist at this point), or painted versions of the same (either digital or actual paint - I hadn't really thought enough about it to decide either way).  To that end I included some actual portraits from the Boer War and First World War as placeholders (I think it's Field Marshal Sir Frederick Roberts and Major General Sir Andrew Russell as the stand ins there, though names of peers can get a little strange, so I might be a bit off).

They were all looking like fairly reasonable "History of the War" type designs; the sort of thing you see in the reduced price sections of Barnes and Noble, and also boring as shit.  I decided to mix it up a little with what I was thinking for the Kickstarter banner, and what I know of Phil's general preferences, and added a little Victoriana and whimsy to the affair.  Newspaper, Periodical, Propaganda, that sort of thing.

When I did the boxing one I had an inkling that it would be the one he'd pick, but I did a couple extra just to be on the safe side. Reshuffled the results a little to fit a better format frame (originally they were in two rows) and sent them off to the Doctor.  He did of course pick the boxing poster.

From there it should have been a simple case of rescaling the thumbnail, adding new images of the boxers and redoing the grime, as all the text and the Union Jack* were fonts or vectors.  In other words, I could make the text and flag as big as I wanted with no loss in quality, but the rest had to be done manually.  Didn't work out that way though.  I don't have a copy of the version I just scaled up, but at the larger size the text just wasn't working, and the whole thing was a little bland.

To fix this I went through each bit of text, and sought out a better typeface for each.  Sometimes I'd find a perfect typeface, but I'd need to embellish it a bit to fit with the sensational nature of the poster.  I'd also add a little "bleed" to the red and blue, as if the inks hadn't come quite so perfectly off the presses.  It's subtle, and hard to see at all on the e-book,but it might read well enough if it ever sees print.

In actuality posters like this didn't really start appearing until the early 20th century as far as I can tell (shortly after World War 1), and of course the styles of text and such had changed drastically by then, so I combined the layouts and styles of Victorian playbills with the spectacle and portraits of the later boxing posters.  I think it looks fairly authentic, even if it's an enormous anachronism.

As before with the kickstarter banner, the weathering came from scans, images found online and custom brushes.  The stain is mostly modern paper stained with tea. The fading of the colours and black ink is done partly with photoshop filters, and partly with some photographs of stained concrete I took a while back.  More clipart here too, in the shape of the filigree under "presents" and the leaf-like swirls around "This Event" and "Albion".  The original hands pointing to "presents" here were clipart, but I swapped them out for some I drew in the final version.

All that was left to do after all that was to add the fighters.  This was simple enough; just find two pictures of victorian boxers, and draw them with vague likenesses of the combatants for their heads.  No measuring or anything for these, I just sketched them in my sketchbook and then inked them with a thin pen.  I was careful to keep the shading to horizontal lines only, for a slightly more Victorian feel (I usually use a lot of crosshatching when I ink).  I filled in my Alan Moore illustration before scanning, but for Grant Morrison I was lazy (because there is more shadow) and added the solid blacks in Photoshop after scanning.  The image above is the original line art as I scanned it.

And that really is all.  Eventually I'll need to do a back cover to go with it, and I might tweak the front some more while I'm about it.  Unlike the TARDIS books these will all have the same simple design for the back covers and spines, giving me more time and energy to go a little crazy on the front ones of the series.  What will the next one entail?  Only time will tell, and it might be a while before I have to think about it terribly hard.

You can back the Last War in Albion Kickstarter here, With more information about the currently available chapters over on Philip Sandifer's blog.

*Or Union Flag, if you want to be pedantic.  It's not a flag though, it's a symbol of a flag on a screen, and since it's neither flying on a building or on a ship I can call it what I bloody well like.