Orange

I was tempted to write this entry using nothing but the word 'Blog,' as in Blog, blog blog blog blog, blog blog blog? Because ultimately there is very little in this post that you haven't read in previous posts one way or another, and I'm not a huge fan of the resulting picture (though it does have things going for it, and I did learn a lot painting it), so why bother?  Well, as I've said, I did learn some things, and some of it may be of interest, but I'll keep things fairly brief.

So DeviantArt, of which I am a member (Despite the name, the majority of art there is not deviant) has groups, one of which is the official ArtRage group, of which I'm also a member, because ArtRage is awesome, and extremely affordable for what it is (I'm not kidding, it's crazy cheap for the available feature set).  The ArtRage group started having competitions, so I thought I'd enter the first, the theme of which was "portraits."  I entered one, a commision on which I've posted here already, but I wanted another, so I came up with the following.

It didn't win.

Are you suprised? I really wasn't (I wouldn't have minded being in the "honourable mentions", but really I'm not terribly taken aback that it didn't even make that), so I doubt you are.  Still, as I mentioned, I tried some new things, and it does have some interesting things going on, so I'll cover it here anyway.

First up, I trawled through some of the stockart I've got accumulated from DeviantArt (and by some I mean loads), because that seemed somehow appropriate.  I wanted something that was fairly stark, and slightly graphic, but with a fairly realistic face.  I found the following (no particular order) and thought mashing them together might make for an interesting result:

Blonde Redhead by NikxStock

Tangerine set by CathleenTarawhiti

Cyber queen stock 11 by Random-Acts-Stock

Ribbon by jlior

You can probably tell which bits became what for yourself, though you can see in more detail in a moment.  The ribbon was not something I was originally thinking about, nor was the orange hair (though I did want someone with a bob type haircut), but when I saw these I thought 'Yeah, I should use those', and in fact the orange hair eventually drove the predominant colour of the image.

This is some of that stock quickly glommed together in Photoshop to give me a layout and to see if the colours I was thinking might work.  Of course I changed the colour when I got to painting, and in retrospect that may have been a mistake (see the end of the post if you want to decide for yourself).  Nothing fancy going on here - this didn't need to look polished, it just had to prove the concept to me.

Here's the sketch that came next.  I used a grid to transfer the location of big landmarks to get the proportion right (you can see the layout lines for the eyes and bow if you look hard enough), and then just sketched in the rest on top.  The coat was just sketched in roughly with no real guide, though I had no intention of putting all that much detail into the coat, I thought it might prove useful if I decided to add more detail later.

Over into ArtRage 4.  That's significant because for this I was determined to use 4 instead of the Studio Pro version because 4 has many features the earlier one doesn't, even though the way the oil paint works seems odd to me after the previous package.   Up until now I've predominantly used Studio Pro as a result.

You can see that she's not looking terribly good here though - I'm just blocking in the forms really.  You may note that some of those forms, and much of the background, don't really change between this and the finished piece.  For those elements I wanted a rough and ready look, and I think the contrast between the detailed face and more loose surround are one thing that works quite well here.  I've also turned off the lineart at this point, and I barely refer to it for the remainder of the painting, until the very end.

Here's a rare look at what my view in ArtRage is like.  Nothing fancy really - there's the overview of the canvas on the left, and a reference image of the Cyber Queen stock to refer to.  On the right are my layers (one for the lineart, one for the painting - yes, this was all just two layers), and a mixing pad.  The mixing pad is one of the reasons I did this in AR4 specifically.  It's called a "scrap" and you can use it for various things, such as sketching, notes, or mixing colours.  Yes, there's a colour picker in the bottom corner, but I wanted more practice at mixing paint, so the only thing I used the picker for were the first 10  boxes in that swatch sample collection to the right - after that everything was either mixed on the scrap of picked from the canvas (no, you can't do that with real paint obviously - life would be so much easier if you could).

Here's some of the development on one of the eyes.  I've glommed it all into one sheet so I don't have to write much about it.  You can also see how I worked out some of the orange bounce light from the hair that's not yet painted.  Terribly exciting I'm sure. You can enlarge images by clicking on them as usual by the way.

And here's the process on that very same hair.  I made a mistake with it at first and went too pure with the yellowish highlights, but I toned it down as I revised it.  I sort of wish I'd left the hair poking over her collar there. I would have made it the far collar rather than a split in the near collar if I had done that.  I probably should have lightened her eyebrows rather more too.  Oh well, retrospect is a wonderful thing eh?

This was almost complete - I did another pass on the bow, after this, and brought in some of the original sketch to make it look rougher around the edges (I also darkened her eyes a little more, though that wasn't done with the sketch layer, and added some contrasting colour eye makeup).  I also tried some new techniques on her skin using the airbrush tool to get a more natural mottled look and small pores.  You can't really see those in the final image, but it's visible in the closeup below.

This one in fact.  You may need to click to expand to see it,  but you can see the airbrush best in the highlights on each cheek, and where I used both the airbrush and the oil brush tool with very high thinners and low pressure to mark some of the skin mottling there.  Good technique I think, I may use it again.

And here we have the traditional progression gif; but only focused on the face since the rest of it barely changed.

And finally, I did some colour tweaking in Photoshop afterwards to see how she might have looked if I'd stuck with something more along the lines of the original colours from the mockup.  I like it a lot more in retrospect (yay retrospect, again), but since it's really too late for that now this is the only place you'll see it (at least as posted by me - I can't stop other people posting it any old where).

Robots Under Pressure

It's been a slightly packed couple of weeks.  It was my Son's birthday yesterday, and that will be the focus of this post (completely skipping over two other things I need to blog about, not including the sketching posts I have still failed to get to). The day before I had an important presentation at work (I wasn't doing the presenting, but it was my work - along with others - being presented, if that makes sense), and that might eventually be the focus of a post in about 5 years time.  Anyway, those two things were a day apart, and I was given the task for each of them a day apart as well, about 2 and a half weeks ago.

For work it was that I'd taken a screenshot of something from just the right angle that it looked good, and it was suggested that it be shown off at this presentation. Except not a still shot from just that angle.  What I was working on was in no-way ready to be presented in that way, but I said sure anyway, and then set out to make sure it wasn't horrible.  It was more work than I'd anticipated, but such is life.  I can't go into any additional detail, except that getting it to a state I was (fairly) happy to show took late nights and last weekend. This is not a complaint - it's just something that goes along with the job sometimes.  On it's own, not a big deal.

The day after this came up my wife suggested I do something for my Son's birthday.  He's been on a kick to get a picture of a Cute Robot for a while, and she's been looking at pictures on Etsy and such.  I'm generally loath to buy something I could do just as well myself (which isn't much to be honest), so she said "well, why don't you do one...  Or more?"  We ended up deciding on 7. She said 4 to 6, and I pointed out that since he was turning 7 it should be 7.  You may note there are only 6 below - explanation to follow.

Click to enlarge images, as usual.

Anyway, I had no idea if I could even do them since it's not like I have a history of drawing cute Robots.  Clearly I could do it to a degree, you can see the results above, but 2 weeks ago I had no clue, so I got to sketching to find out.

I sketched in the evening for a couple of days, and came up with a bunch of robots of slightly varying styles.  Mostly I was going for the classic cute robot vibe of the 50's, but there's some slightly different stuff in there too.  They weren't drawn in as orderly a manner as this obviously - They're scattered around about 4 sketchbook pages in all sorts of orientations - I've just laid them out like this here for easy viewing.

I had one rule when sketching - I could look at all the robots and reference I wanted until I actually picked up a pencil, at which point other Robots were off the table for reference.  Everything else was fair game though - the Robot with the wings was based on a squirt bottle for example.  The animals in the lower right were from reference, and I drew them in order to have something else to place in an image if I needed to. Just as well I did as my wife wasn't keen on the wet tiger, so he got switched to a cute baby penguin instead.

That tiger pic may get done yet though - cats and Robots seems to be pretty common (as do robots with hearts and robots with balloons - these are all cliche stacked to the heavens), so I thought it would be funny if it was a tiger instead.  I mean what's a tiger going to do to a robot?  Behave more or less like a regular cat to a human is my guess.  I think it's sweet, so I may use the idea at some point in the future one way or another.  That Robot with the leash and umbrella is based on a Davy Lamp we have by the way.

After sketching I did a mockup of how the finals might look.  This was for two reasons; firstly I wanted to make sure the idea might actually work when done on toned paper, and secondly I wondered how difficult it would be to hack something together if it turned out I sucked at drawing them for real (did I not mention that - those are all physical, not digital pieces, except for this mockup).  Turned out okay, but I figured I'd have to do more work on them than this if I did them digitally.

My wife had picked out her nine favourites at this point, and had the list ordered.  I had a choice of ways to transfer them from sketches to final 8x10 images,  and eventually settled on scanning them, blowing up the size with a printer and then tracing that over to the final paper as a guide.  Other options were using a grid (pain in the arse to erase when finished), or just re-sketching at a larger scale (too much potential for mistakes, and thus wasting my nice toned paper).

Above is the one of the seven I didn't get to because on the last day before his birthday my son had a large tantrum and put me right off bothering with it.  I did tell him he can have another if he can be good for the rest of the week, so this one may eventually see charcoal.  You can see that in this case I did resketch parts of it (on sketch paper) because I wasn't terribly happy with his head.  I also swapped out the balloon for the butterfly since two balloon robots is overkill.  I then gave the other Robot this one's heart balloon.  These got printed on regular printer paper.  I flipped some of them - this was to make tracing easier in some cases, in others it was to actually flip the result when I inked it.

And here I am drawing one of them (I adjusted the contrast on the middle image so you could see the lines after tracing - they're practically invisible otherwise).  Pretty simple setup - Traced the printed blowup on tracing paper, taped the tracing paper to the toned paper, rubbed the graphite from the tracing paper onto the toned and then proceeded to ink it (with a sharpie fine liner, although I switched to a thicker marker for Robin just to mix things up a little).  I used two shades of grey and black Prismacolor markers for large areas of tone, and then white and black charoal for the shading, except for a white gel pen for the strongest highlights.   Colour was added using Prismacolor pencils, and the penguin was filled white with a white paint marker.

Other than the borders I didn't use a ruler for any of them - I'm quite pleased about that. Each one took between 90 minutes and two hours, so not an insignificant amount of time given what else was going on - and in addition to the work thing I slipped on some ice (no major damage, just aches), got (and have) some tinnitus in my right ear, my wife's car broke down, and we suffered another bereavement just as I was beginning (we were no longer close, but I had a great deal of respect for them back when we saw each other regularly).

The only downer with the actual art was the one with the two robots holding hands ("Heart")- My fixative spray for the charcoal decided to spit all over that one, and left a stain.  It's actually a cool effect - but I would have planned something for it if I'd known in advance...

And that's that.  Me and my wife framed them, and they're ready to go on his wall.

I don't usually do this, but if you want to see them larger (and in the unlikely event you want to order prints), you can see them over on my Deviant Art page with the following links:

Balloon
Penguin
Oil
Sunflower
Heart
Robin

So, what do you think?  Did I do an okay job on these retro bots? I would not rule out doing more in the future, but it isn't currently planned beyond the possible 7th for my son.   I'll update here if that one does happen I guess.

Just a Couple

Hello, good evening, and welcome, to another enthralling post.  Yeah, I had trouble keeping a straight face over that too.  Anyway, despite the title there is only one picture for your perusal today, but there are two people in it - plenty of step by step stuff though, if you're into that sort of thing.

I still haven't compiled all the sketches from October to December to show, and now of course I have January's to do, and then February's in a couple of weeks.  I'll get to it, and probably not all in one post either, but this weekend I'm working on another painting (digital), and then there's another facebook portrait to do, and I want to get a traditional piece done and work on my perspective skills and speedpaints too, so as you can imagine, things are a little cramped for time right now.  Also, TV show season, not helping...

Anyway, on with today's performance.

And there we go. If you don't know them then we shall call them D and J.  Partly to maintain anonymity, but mostly because it mean's less typing.

So J (the man) came to me in mid January and asked if I could paint a version of his favourite photo of them as a couple for Valentine's Day.  I agreed, and having known him for a few years I was already familiar with the photo.  You can't see the photo, but there will a comparison of a sort as we go along.  It took a little while for him to get the picture to me, but when he did I got started.

First of all I needed to sketch out the image.  For a change I decided to measure it really, really carefully.  I could have used a grid I guess, but since I needed to make some compositional changes there would have been multiple grids to work from, so measuring worked almost as well.  But less accurate.  Despite all my care I still muffed a few key points, mostly on J,  as in the photo his head was leaning forward at an angle, and I didn't do a great job of realigning it.  His eye is a bit high, his mouth a bit narrow and his right side (left of the image) is the wrong shape.  I rechecked scales and positions occasionally as I went along, and fixed most of them, as well as his chin (this was accurate to the photo, but since his chin was tucked in the photo the skin on the side was being pushed out a little making his chin look smaller.  He pointed this out to me much later and I felt very foolish for not noticing it).  Anyway, we'll come back to all that later, but let's get on with the painting for now with a note that I also thought it would be a great idea to paint them to one side of the painting.  J pointed out I was an idiot (my word, not his), so I repositioned them to the middle later on.

So a very rough colour pass here, and the beginning of blocking out J's tones.  After this I didn't touch it for a while because I got really sick for a few days, but you can see I was trying to make some changes to the colour of the photo.  Oh, wait, you can't because I'm not showing you the photo.

So here's a comparison of some of the colours from the Photo, compared with the tones I was going for.  These are averaged from similar locations on each - J's cheek and head, and D's neck and shirt.  Bottom Left swipes are from the photo, upper right swipes the painting.

 You can see that there's less variation between the average flesh tones in mine - an effort to unify the painting.  My colours are also pinker in an effort to warm the original up as it felt quite cold to me personally, and I wanted it to have a warm and inviting feel instead.  The bottom right comparison is showing the difference between the darkest tones on the photo and painting - both are off the shirt.  Despite the desire for warm tones I also wanted some colour compliment in there, and this was my solution - making the shadows a more complimentary shade.  Yes, that blue really is the darkest the painting gets (or as close as the compression will show).  Black tends to deaden things a bit, though it's very usefull sometimes it wasn't conducive to the warm and inviting tone I wanted, so I went with blue instead.  I have to say I'm actually surprised at how light that blue is now I'm seeing it next to the original black - It never felt that light when I was painting.  One of those illusions I've written of before.

Aaaanyway, the background in the original was also near black, so I've bumped it up to a nice brown here.

At this point I'm in the middle of being sick for part of it, and almost over being sick for the rest.  This likely explains the vast differences in how I blocked out J and D here (I did J while sick and while getting sick, D was done when I was basically recovered).  Not much else to say, which hopefully will be the case for the rest as there's a way to go yet.

Oh look, that was quick, her face is finished. It really did seem to go very quickly in fact, I got her painted in a few hours, and then barely touched her face until at the very last minute I added some extra highlights.  J never asked for any changes either.  If only all paintings could be that easy!  The only major revision from the block-in was her left eye, which needed moving, and the expansion of her right cheekbone (I habitually make them too small - need to work on that).  For some reason her nose is still my favourite part of the painting.

Then I moved onto J.  His hair looks terrible here, like a small sideways mohawk, but  I knew I'd get to it eventually.  First up I needed to move his eye.  I was a little lazy, and instead of repainting it I just grabbed it and rotated it with a tool and painted over the cracks.  Can't do that easily with real paint, more's the pity.  Also repainted his jawline and straightened his nose along with starting to fill out his other eye and mouth.  No cheating there, just painting.

This was actually a few days later, but nothing terribly exciting happened between the two steps.  I wasn't happy with the stubble on his temple, but figured I'd revisit it. His ear is just blocked in at this point, and his chin will change, but otherwise his actual face is finished at this point.  One stage I missed was a change to his upper lip either side of the philtrum - it was quite deeply shadowed in the original photo (probably because his head was dipped), so J asked me to lighten it up a bit.  This is after I did that, so there are no public records of J's dark lip.

Incidentally, this got me wondering what that top lip bit is actually called - I mean it's clearly distinct from the actual lips that women put lipstick on, and men can't grow moustaches on, but as far as I know that part of the body is just called the Top Lip (with a matching 'what's it called?' under the lower lip, also called a 'bottom lip').  The division between the upper lip, and the top lip (see? Confusing!) is usually called a Cupid's Bow, but is also called a Turbucle (I looked that up). It's most odd - especially as almost every bit of the nose has a name (do you know what an Ala is?  'cause I do - It's the bulgy flared bit around your nostrils).

So if anyone knows what the bit of the top lip that grows hair is technically called let me know in the comments below.  I did search for it, but all I got was Philtrum, which is the bit in the middle.  Anyway, moving on...

So J got back to me and asked that I update his hair.  Not fix the bit I wasn't happy with, but update it to the style he currently has.  By has I mean hasn't, since he shaves most of it now, leaving a small amount of stubble on the sides.  Fair enough, especially since I wasn't happy with his hair anyway.  The only difficulty here was that J has a prominent Coronal Suture (I looked that up too - it's the ridge where the front of your skull meets the back at the top).  Getting that right without making it look like a weird mutation (it's very common) was a little tricky without exact lighting reference, but I think I got it close enough.

I also shifted his chin, as J noted that it was in the wrong place.  Again this was me taking the original photo too literally and not taking into account the changes in the anatomy stemming from him moving his head.  Surprisingly easy to fix, and made a huge difference.  I also tweaked the line of his face for about the 400th time, but since what I changed is now behind his chin you can't see it.  His ear is also finished here, and while my favourite bit of the painting is D's nose, J's ear is probably the bit I did the best job of.  Just the right amount of red shift.  Very pleased with that.

D's hair came next - and this is really here to show that I had to paint it twice, because this first attempt was awful.  Part of the issue was my rushing it, which ended up taking longer than when I did it properly the second time.  The other issue, compounded by the rushing, was that the range of colours I could use before her hair started to look too purple or too orange was very very narrow.

Most of it's shifted very slightly into the purple in the finished one  - brown being dark desaturated orange, over the top of the blue I was using for black - Halfway between orange and blue is purplish red.  Looks brown doesn't it?  Yay, illusions!  But this meant that too shifted in one direction looked orange, and in the other direction too purple, and too saturated became red.  You can see some of that explosion of purple and orange here (I kept the saturation low enough to more or less avoid red).  Anyway, I didn't like it so I repainted it properly.  Took less time and ended up looking far better.  Typical.

After that Jay asked me to expand the sides a bit to give the option of fitting more frames.  That wasn't too difficult since the background was just cloudy looking sky.  I also signed it, but unlike the way I usually do it I painted a block and cut the signature out of it.  Why?  Because doing it the other way oddly made it stand out more unless I made it a shade or colour that was barely visible - this way the eye is less drawn to it, but it's perfectly visible if you want to see it.  I quite like how it looks, and I guess that means I now have three ways I can sign my pictures; whichever best suits the given picture itself.

So then J went and got it printed for Valentine's Day.  He brought it to show me the printed result before framing it.  I was expecting a 12x14 image or something, but this was more like 4 or 5 feet across!  Terrifying thinking of my artwork that big - every flaw right there, bigger than life.  Looked okay though, so that was good - I just really hope his wife liked it (not spoken to him since Friday), because you can hide a small picture you don't like on a shelf - but there's nowhere to hide a 5ft picture except in the garage facing the wall...

Okay, and finally, here's a closeup of the painting at the size I painted it (The linked one at the top is only about half size. Oh look, it's the ear - I was quite pleased with that bit),  and below is the animated gif of all the stages I saved at.  Keep an eye on that top lip, whatever it's called.  I moved the first few frames over so there's not a big jump when they get repositioned, and the final extended background isn't shown either - but you can deal with it, right?

Social Profiling № 7: Sunset Bear

It might be a puppy, but Sunset Puppy sounds vaguely rude to me for some reason so I'm pretending it's a bear.

It's been a while since I made one of these posts, mostly because I thought I was done with them.  If you want to read the preceding six you can go here and work from the bottom up.  If you'd rather skip six bland posts from history the basic premiss was this: ask for people on Facebook to volunteer for me to paint their picture. I got to choose the picture and the theme (if any), and four people, randomly chosen, would get a full best of my ability painting, and some of the others would get something too if I could be bothered.  Of the people that signed up I ended up painting seven of them, and it was quite fun.

This year (two years on) I decided to do it again.  Same message on facebook, and twice the number of people signed up.  Again the pictures were randomly chosen, although there were some surprising coincidences in the people who ended up getting picked.  This time I let people pick their own photos for me to do, and all of them will be painted with a more speedpaint mentality than before because, y'know, free work?  I'll get to the coincidences later, but here's the first of the paintings, which I did a few weeks ago.

And there you have it.  As usual there will now be a step by step breakdown of the picture, but even though this was done with a speedpaint mentality I'll still break down individual steps a little because this took 5 hours.  Yes, speedpaints are usually an hour or two, but they're also a lot smaller than this as these are intended for potential printing, and speedpaints usually aren't, though they can print surprisingly well (The big images here are reduced in size).

You may note that I didn't paint the person who signed up on Facebook.  Coincidence number one - none of the people picked submitted their own photos to be chosen. Two picked pictures of their children, of which this is one.  The other two picked a spouse and a parent.

Okay, so I'm presented with a photo of a child I don't personally know, and I need to paint them fairly quickly.  Where to begin?  Same place as always - at the beginning.

Here's the initial sketch.  At first glance this probably doesn't look too different to the final layout.You'd be right.  Other than some tweaks to the location of his features (mainly his upper lip and left eye) this is the same as the final image.  I did do some measurements off the original image, but the majority is just eyeballed.  Again, this is very much a speedpainting mentality, and as usual it bit me on the behind later on.

The only other thing of note here was that I cropped some of the photo down for the paintings composition.  While it was a lovely photograph it was the child's face and his action of holding up his hand that I liked, and thus it became the focus. I'm not sure if his hand is up because he's waving, or to show what's stuck to his glove.  Ultimately it was an uncertainty I liked, and tried to capture that in my rendition.

These show the early development of his face and the overall colour scheme (click to enlarge of course).  I realised pretty early on that I had his eyes a bit small, but I wasn't sure enough to fix them at this point.  I thought that maybe after I'd fleshed out some of the rest of his face it would turn out I was wrong and his eyes would be the right size after all.  Wrong of course, but one can dream.

Here's the picture going through a transitional period.  I had begun to flesh out the rest of the image - specifically his hat and hand, as well as tightening up some of the elements of his face.  Here I'd finally realised for certain that his eyes were too small and I'd started to work on widening the right one as non-destructively as I could.

Which I failed at and ended up just repainting it.  I also realised that his left eye was not only two small, but too low and so that got repainted higher, and his other features also received some tweaking, with his nose getting wider, and his lower lip getting thicker.  Obviously his coat and hands received quite a bit of work here too, though his actual hat, a fairly large part of the image, was basically done in one pass and then never touched again.

After that last I did a little more tweaking of the lighting around and on his face, mostly trying to capture some of the bounce of the sun from the orange lining of his hat back onto his face.  You may note that this has lightened his eye somewhat.  I also reddened his nose to make his face look colder, it's just a touch, but it goes a long way.

I got a commission shortly after finishing this, so I've not started on any of the others yet, but they'll be along sooner or later (I might cover another coincidence when I write that one up).  The commission I can hopefully cover this weekend (I had meant to post this last week, and had most of it written. Somehow got sidetracked from finishing until now).

Speeding Toward 40

Some of you may have noticed there was a bit of a gap between the last two posts. Since I started the blog there have been only five occasions that I haven't succeeded in posting more than once in a month. Last December was unusual in that the sole post was on the first day of the month, and then I didn't post again until almost two weeks into this month, so I think that's the longest gap in posts so far.

 Fortunate then that I wasn't just twiddling my thumbs the whole time, but managed a reasonable amount of productivity. I did some sketching, went on holiday, did some cool things at work, built a reasonably big Lego kit, knocked out that cover for Phil (it was basically finished already though), completed a commission (which I can't show for reasons I won't go into, but it took a reasonable amount of time and turned out reasonably well - it was reasonably challenging as well), and did a handful of speedpaints, the sharing of which is the focus of this post. For a change, I'm reasonably happy with the amount of work completed. There's that word again - I think I use it a reasonable amount.

Let's get started then eh?

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on: This image by Ahrum-Stock

I realised I wasn't terribly good are reproducing things in perspective without a great deal of time spent on measuring things out back when I was working on, well, pretty much every image I've ever done. I also realised recently that I've done very few paintings or sketches where the subject was human and they were not also white. A quick review of all the speedpaints I've done shows that before this one only 5 were of people were not caucasian (and of those you could only really tell with two of them). Out of about 160 pieces, most of them featuring people, that's pretty poor going. So when I saw the photo by Ahrum-stock linked above I thought "I should paint that! It's a really cool photo, it combines both of my weaknesses, and I really, really need the practice."

I quite like the result. I mean it's a long way from perfect. It's only looks vaguely like the subject in the photo, and the perspective is still a ways off (as it is for almost all of the speedpaints here - I think I may just need to suck it up and do the measuring for these types of shots - even if it means slower speedpaints). Still, taken on it's own merits it's a pleasant looking piece. At least I think so - and I think that so rarely it's probably true (Others have told me too though - I think that's probably a better measure).

I did capture a timelapse of my painting it - though it was recorded after the fact, so you only get the completed strokes, not what I was doing with the software at the time. Even current technology has some limitations, so it was this or nothing. If you don't want to watch it you'll probably do fine looking at the step by step image I posted further above.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on: A photo of Jung Se On I found via Pinterest.

Another 90 minute one, another person of a different ethnicity to my own. Not much to add except that I'd been meaning to paint this one for a while but kept chickening out as I didn't think I could do it justice. I was right as it goes, but there are elements of the color I think came out well - and some things that may require further exploration in future. Possibly with another picture of Jung Se On as I can think of worse people to be constantly staring at for 90 minutes.

As you can see I had to move and repaint her eyes a few times over the hour and a half, even though I actually did a little measuring before I laid down the paint (I need both more practice and patience with this part obviously - I usually do better when I'm not speedpainting). You can also see that I painted over her hair with the background colour at the last minute - this was to draw the attention back onto the face as personally my eyes kept being drawn to the top of her head, and I felt that might be a common issue.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on: The photo from this blog post (found on pinterest).

Decided to mix things up and paint a profile, using tools in ArtRage I wouldn't usually use (I think it was felt tip pen and chalk). I really liked the source for this - really nice colours and the combination of the scarf, her glasses and her hair made for an interesting composition.

For once I think the layout art I did was pretty good, but I can't say that for the end result. I'd challenged myself to do this in 30 minutes, and so it was done, but I spent more than half the time getting the lineart right, not leaving me with much time to actually paint.  I'd love to go back and do something similar with a bit more time spent one day.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on: This image by Random Acts Creative

Now I'm probably in trouble with the wife for saying that Jung up there was not hard on the eye, so I'd like to say that if I was into dudes I suspect Raj here, LL below and Ahrum at the top would likely not be considered munters. Just saying.

Anyway, this one is way off, but again looks reasonably good on its own merits if you don't compare too closely with the source. I have to admit, I mostly chose this one because he looks like he's doing Captain Jack cosplay (Harkness, not Sparrow), and that's sort of awesome.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on: This image by LL

Yes, I painted another white guy - I just liked the source material though - the colours were great and I thought I'd take the opportunity to experiment a little again. This time I pushed the colour far more than I normal would be inclined to, and I used much "thicker" paint.

The perspective is all wrong as usual, but there is some likeness to the source and I really like how I got the colour on his back and shoulder to work with the background colour - that's a look I like and would happily try for again.

If you were curious as to the title of the post, today is my 40th birthday, so these mark the final speedpaints of my 30's.  Did I improve since I started a few years ago?  Well, I certainly hope so - but I also have a long, long way to go.

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part...1)

There are many fictional conceptions of time. Quantum Leap postulated it was like a ball of string, many other shows and films conceptualize a river, with the future being down stream. Doctor Who simply says it's, well, 'timey wimey' (says it a lot actually, even I'm beginning to think it's getting old), but in the case of this post we can think of it as an Ouroboros; the serpent with it's tale in it's mouth. The end as the beginning.

While this is part one of this increasingly lengthy saga there is a part zero of a sort, you can read that here, and the posts for part 2, 3 and 4 if you click the numbers. The tangentially related A Golden Thread can be found by clicking its title. I highly recommend you do read part zero if nothing else - time travel is complicated enough without you skipping all the slow bits.

"Time can be rewritten" is a popular part of Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum, and in this case it sort of has been.

In one version of history I created a speculative book cover for the first entry in the series based on his popular blog. He liked it, but already had another artist. She continued to work on his books for many years, while I went off and had a quiet life with the occasional portrait commission. That is not this version.

In another he liked the spec and hired me on the spot. The cover was a disappointment to me if not him and I declined the opportunity to continue ruining his delightful book series. That too is not this version.

In this version I failed to do the first cover, but got to do the second. Given what I had learned doing the spec for book one, as well as in the intervening time, I was quite pleased with the results. I have done covers for him ever since, with the Who ones being "themed" to a degree, but with volume one being a bit of an odd duck as it was in a completely different style by a completely different artist. Time to fix that, time to go back to the beginning.

You may note that this looks remarkably like the speculative cover I did two and a half years ago, but hopefully more polished and in a lighter blue (since one thing I've learned is that blue prints darker than you'd expect). This shouldn't come as a terrible surprise of course; I'd already designed it once, no point doing so again. Since I needed to make it print res anyway I thought I'd tweak it as I went along. Owners of the digital edition may note some small differences in the wear of the front cover - the explanation for that is further down.  By the way, as always in these posts you can click most of the images to enlarge them.

The reason the above image exists is all down to Phil wanting to expand Volume 1.  Initially this was to be just a major re-edit of one of the essays (due to the new availability of a formerly "lost" episode).  He felt that might not be financially viable, so tested the waters by dipping his toe on Kickstarter.  The resulting flood allowed him to purchase the scuba gear required to survive it, and also to not only add the essays he'd planned, but several others as well.  The new book is substantially revised and covers stories right up as far as the 50th Anniversary's An Adventure in Time and Space.

When he did the Kickstarter video it was my Spec image he used for the campaign.  He asked first of course, right before asking if I'd also revisit it for the actual cover.

The first thing I decided to do was to replace the front on image of the doctor with a more natural one, while also removing his hands from his pockets to be replaced by the more iconic hands on lapels pose. I needed to see if Phil agreed with this change, so I quickly traced a photograph of Mr. Hartnell at a small scale and ran it past Phil, with some other possible variations in shade in case he wanted it different. He didn't, and was very pleased I'd included the detail of his ring, as it's relevant to the book. You'll probably note that at this point I was still working with the darker blue of the spec cover. I knew I would need to lighten it up, but at this point I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted it, so I left it as was.

Once the style was chosen I needed an image to replace the traced one with. I felt that using an image directly traced from a photograph was most certainly pushing my luck, and furthermore it felt like a cheat. So I did a sketch including his head, which was a bit rough and ready, so I did a better sketch of his head separately. I'm really not sure why I bothered with his head (twice) since we weren't going to use it, but I think I felt the body needed a head, and then when I wasn't happy with it I wanted to get his likeness a little better. I turned this into a vector image after scanning it so I could scale it as needed for the cover. Like James Cromwell I thought "That'll do pig," but also decided to flip it to better match the composition before dropping it in.  Now it's to late to do anything about it I notice that flipping it has the monocle tucking into the wrong side of his waistcoat.  Ooops.

The ring is on the correct side though, so that's something.

Here's the in progress cover with a lighter blue and the new posed figure on the front. On the back is the sketch of Mr. Hartnell, and you'll see it migrate around a bit in the next image. I liked the idea of someone doodling in the head on the back cover, although in one version there's a different head sketched in pen (which is how I'd have to do it if I really wanted to do this as an actual sketch of Mr. Hartnell would be pushing our luck again) - Eventually I dropped the idea. Even though I like it I feel it's not really appropriate for the mainline series of books.

I also threw in a torn price sticker. This is actually the same price sticker I used on the back of volume 4, but with more of it intact. I thought having years of pricing stickers built up would be interesting and give some real age to it, and while I didn't quite do that I did do something similar. It's a sort of 'fake old book' trope I suppose, but one I liked and had held off doing until now (this was before I did the cover for volume 4). I really wanted a 'Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale' sticker mark on there too (not the logo though, we'd be pushing our luck yet again - that mark isn't just copyrighted but practically sacred). I resisted the urge. There's always volume 5 for something, maybe a fake coffee ring instead (and before the cries of 'cliche!' ring out too loudly, I do in fact have book with a tea ring on it right next to me... I don't drink coffee).

In this set I'm just fiddling with the layout of the back cover, the amount of wear and tear and the tinting of the blue. Not terribly exciting, which is why I've stuck them into one image. The only thing of note is the method I've used to change the colors - a method that will only really work with this one. As well as the grime layers I have over the top of the image (along with the wear) I have a gradient colour layer which can be set to any gradient of colours I like. The image underneath is in greyscale, as seen in the sketch/vector image above. Using the gradient colour layer (It's actually called a gradient map), you can easily tint the greyscale to any selection of colours you wish. This made it very easy to get the range of blues I wanted to go with without having to individually tweak dozens of vector layers individually.

The last one is of course the final cover with the wrong blurb text on the back, and the spine being much wider than needed, allowing me to scale it more easily when the final page count came in. Print owners (or those looking at the top image) may note that the wear and tear is different to the final book, while digital readers will see it's the same as the one in their download. The reason for this is simple. Phil wanted to put the digital copy out early for his Kickstarter backers, and needed the front cover in a hurry. I snagged this one, and off it went. Then, when I went to do the print cover I realised that I'd somehow put the wear and tear for this book onto Volume 4 when that shipped and had failed to notice when I grabbed the previous digital copy.

This isn't such an issue with the digital version (though it is extremely embarrassing), but on the print version it would be highly obvious when both books are on the same shelf. Couldn't have that, just won't do. Fortunately, while I had accidentally replaced the wear on the fourth volume with this one, that meant that the wear originally intended for Volume 4 was still floating around. I went and found that (I often do the wear on a separate image before bringing it in onto the actual cover - in this case I'd pulled the wrong one into Volume 4's image, so all I had to do was pull Volume 4's (intended) one into this one. Confused? Yes, I was at the time as well.

So now here are two volumes where the Print and Digital versions have slightly different covers (the other being Volume 2 - the print says 'Philip', the digital 'Phil'). I'm okay with that, so long as one doesn't look substantially better than the other I guess. Phil didn't seem terribly bothered by it, and I guess that's the important thing.

I apparently had more to say than I thought.

One last thing... As with volume 4, Phil got a proof copy done, so here are some photos of the finished article.

Phil's post on the book launch can be found here.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1 (second edition) can be purchased here
Merchandise for the series is available here (Volume 1 mug and shirt coming soon)

Now, about the slightly unusual title - Really, I had to use that it, how can you ever pass up the chance to use a word like "Psychochronography"?