Less Haste, More Speed

Well, hopefully this is the start of a turn around, as it's only been a week since I last posted. With three speedpaints done then; not enough to show, and seven to show today that's four paintings in a week!  OK, it's actually not since I found one of them down the side of the virtual couch, but still.

Basically last weeks post showed me that I'd been neglecting things far in excess of the amount of other things I had to do, especially for speedpainting.  Usually I wait until I see something I want to paint, and then think "I should paint that."  Time allowing I do so.

Recently though there's been a disconnect between when I see the thing, and when I have time to paint, and with other things crowding my brain I've forgotten about the likely image, or my mood has changed and it doesn't appeal any more.  So now I'm going to make a more concerted effort to stack up likely candidates separately from the rest of my references, so they're easier to go through when I want to paint something quick.

Anyway, you don't care about any of that, you just want to see pictures, right?

Time Taken: 65 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all I just said about keeping references around, here's a painting I did without any.  I realised it had been a while since I'd really thought about the form of the skull - which is of course an enormously useful thing to know when doing portraits - so I thought I should paint one. This is the best skull profile with headphones and a rose I can currently do in 65 minutes.  Don't like the rose?  Here it is again with the rose removed, because it was on a separate layer and my friend Laura said she'd like it more without.  Yay for layers!

So there you go - no references (which is why the teeth are way off - I never really learned teeth in any detail), just me poking at my graphics tablet for an hour in ArtRage.

Nothing amazing to see in a step by step either (I'm doing more of these - it's as much for me to remember how I approached things in future as it is for you to see how I did it now).  The only real thing of note is that I quickly tweaked the shape of the skull so it wasn't as elongated, and I remembered that unless you have an unusually huge jaw it doesn't angle backwards like that - so I'd fixed it in the 4th image here.

I don't recall why I pointed the rose at the back of the head instead of the front - I suspect I didn't think about it at all.  Yeah, it's cliched, but I wanted a bit of stronger colour and something I could paint fairly recognisably with no reference - so rose it was.

Time Taken: 60 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on this

This, to me, is a good example of how rusty I am doing these things.  Time was when something like this might have taken me half the time; though I think the end result may have been weaker.  Even so, it's an OK piece I guess, despite not really capturing what I liked about the original Photograph, which was it's grainy old documentary look.

Here's the step-by-step (I've chopped off the top, which didn't change much), where I've not really gone for block shapes beyond that of her hair, and instead I've just sort of placed slight blob shapes that eventually coalesce into the more recognisable forms.  It still amazes me how little is needed for the brain to process that something is a face, even if it's not a specific one - that second image explains essentially everything that's going to come  by the end in terms of the position and basic form of her face and hair, while leaving the rest of her body utterly ambiguous - even though I stick to that same basic layout for it right to the end.

Swift Sugar has a bunch of photos in this style; I'm almost certain I'll be returning to them for another painting at some point in order to get closer to what's appealing about them.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on one of these (I can't link to the exact one, but it's in there)

I'm not a fan of this one.  There are aspects of it I'm quite pleased with, but overall I think it's mostly just a blobby mess.  I usually do portraits, and I like doing portraits, but occasionally I like to try something else, and this urban, near post apocalyptic scene appealed to me.  I think I could have done a pretty good job of it if I'd taken a lot longer, but as it is it's a long way from good.

I think the failings come early too.  for something like this to be effective you should be able to squinch your eyes and have the tonal range still make sense, which helps make up for slightly uneven edges and slightly skewed perspective when you get that initial read, but here it really doesn't.  I do quite like some of the worn brick, and the rubble and vegetation in the foreground reads quite well as being in shadow, but overall I think I need to spend more time on layout and getting values right if I'm going to try something like this again (and probably I will).  This was my first piece done with ArtRage 4.5 too, where they've introduced a grid feature.  In this case I might have been wise to use it.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5

I have terrible difficulty when painting with no references.  I know guys who can do it, who only use references for specific things, rather than general layouts, and I am in awe of them.  this is what happens when I just go for it.  I dare say that with years of practice I might get half decent at doing this, but for now you end up with scribbled messes like this one (and, more rarely, ones like the skull up top).

I like some of the ideas in here (Topless while not showing anything, the underwear blending into the bed and so on), but it didn't capture much of what I was actually aiming to achieve.  Maybe I'll have another crack at it one day with more planning, but not as a speedpaint - just off the cuff, this one is a failure.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on this and this

Speaking of the grid feature, as I did before, I used it a little for this one.  I've long had issues with painting things in perspective, and I've gone into some of the reasons for that before, so for this one I divided the image using a 2x2 grid; basically a crosshair.  This was after I'd already taken the original and cropped and rotated it into this composition to work from, and decided I was going to try and match the less extreme palette of the second picture more than the original.

So the crosshair helped me with the layout a bit, without being enough of a grid that I was trying to match every little thing and slowing to a crawl as a result (and this one took far longer than it should have to begin with).  This one was also one I almost gave up on, right before the last image of the top row in the sequence.  That was 45 minutes in, and at that point  the picture is usually starting to come together, and this time I just didn't feel that it was.  So I decided to give it 10 minutes more, and if it was still dreadful I'd give up on it.  The next image in the sequence was about 10 minutes later, and it had improved enough that I decided to carry on. Quite glad I did - I'm fairly happy with the end result despite it taking an additional hour.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4.5
Based on this and this

This is an odd one.  I'm not terribly happy with it - it's okay, but to my eyes not exceptionally good or anything.  So it's amusing to me that's it's been one of my most popular images for a while in places I've shown it.  Clearly I am a terrible judge of my own work.

It does mean I'll be doing something along these lines as a finished piece eventually though, because while I'm not happy with the end result it was a lot of fun to paint.  It came about because I really liked both of the source images, and couldn't decide between them, so I thought "why not have both", which has strangle turned out to be the phrase of the week.  Anyway, it was fun to blend two things together during a speedpaint.

Here's the progression, and for a change I'm handling it like a 'real' artist, blocking in the basic shapes, then the major lighting forms, and then building up on top of that.  My personal favourite stage here was the first on the bottom left, where I'd just roughed in her hair, I just like how she looked at that point.  Once I'd introduced the tule behind her, which really doesn't read as such, it just didn't feel as solid to me.

Anyway, the central two images at the bottom do have some differences, despite that not being the case at first glance.  I cleaned up her neck a little, and did some fairly major remodelling of her nose  and facial structure, as well as increasing the amount of eye makeup.

Finally I tried using some very different settings for the oil brush tool when approaching her hair (stiff brush, low pressure), and threw in some red highlights to bring some of the drama of her makeup into her hair.  Someone commented that she looked like Harley Quinn from Batman; maybe that's why this one has been quite popular.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This is the one I lost down the back of the sofa.  I did it months ago, not really as a speedpaint, but more as a test of a technique, and then I forgot about it.  Essentially I was trying to come up with a quick and easy method of painting Kirby Krackle, and this was my solution.  It's quite a nice technique for other things too, and is actually very simple - you can see the crackle as you paint, rather than having to run a bunch of filters after the fact.  While  prepping the following image was in fact the first time I'd ever seen the images look like that, as I'd painted the above one with all the layers in place.

So this is less a step by step and more of a 'how did I do that?' (again, as much for my future reference as your interest).  For those curious it's four stacked Photoshop layers  The bottom layer (on the left) is the actual painting, the next layer is the rough pattern to be seen in the krackle, with fairly low opacity to let the painting layer come through (in this case it was a noise layer with the Reticulation filter run on it, and a 25% opacity).  On top of this was a threshold layer, to give it the hard contrasting dots look.  Finally I threw in a red multiplied layer to give it the slightly garish look of Kirby's energy or nebula renderings.

Working that out took a while, but this particular use of it took only 5 minutes.  Its not a great picture, but I found it a lot of fun to play around with.





(As a by the by, Blogger has been having a lot of technical issues today, making writing this post a lot more arduous than it usually is.  No matter to you, but it sure was to me)

Feeble Sketching - January to March '14

Well, I have no idea where the last 6 weeks went.  I know I've been busy, but it's not like I have a lot I can show for it.  3 speedpaints since the last speedpaint post (I think that's an all time low), so I need at least one more before I can post about those; a book cover - which was a fair time sink, but not that bad - and again it'll be a little while until I can post about that; and a whole bunch of work stuff that's off the table for years to come, if I can ever show it at all.  So I've been busy, and when I haven't been I've been spending my time playing video games and watching TV.  I have sketched too, but not in a terribly constructive way.   All in all it's been a bad few weeks for anything worth putting on the blog, and let's face it, it's not been the best year for it either.  Hopefully things will smooth out soon.  Until then, here are some terrible sketches I did between January and March of this year.

So January was the most productive month of the three, but as you can see, there wasn't a lot of quality in with the quantity.  Of all these sketches there's only one I actively like (the woman close to the top left corner), and the rest is downhill from there.  I've been told the more fleshed out sketch on the right side (near the top right corner) looks a bit like 'Flowers' from Agents of Shield, and while I watch the show it wasn't consciously supposed to be her.  The only other sketch of note is the large headed tentacle fellow near the middle bottom.  He's actually based on a pattern of condensation I saw on the garage window one morning.  I should probably take him further one day, but for now this is as good as he gets.

February had some moderately better stuff than January, but not a lot of it.  This is basically everything I drew that month, bar a handful of thumbnails so faint I couldn't scan them.  Really not much else to say about any of them really.

Again, this is basically the totality of my sketching in March.  Well, I say that, but it's only if you don't include all the robots.  Nothing exciting, though I'm quite fond of 'bewildered superman' near the left side, and I really have a soft spot for the woman in the bottom left.  For some reason she reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer, despite looking not a jot like her (Hmmm... I should do a Michelle Pfeiffer painting soon).

So that was it for three very disappointing months. I think the next handful were fairly sparse also, but things do pick up a little further along.  Maybe I'll get around to posting the next few next month, leaving only one post before I'm back up to date.  I actually finished off my latest sketchbook today; the first one that took over a year to fill (which should tell you something).

Sorry for the lack of, well, anything, recently.  I'm hopeful I can get that turned around fairly soon.

Social Profiling № 9: Smile!

And here, finally, is the post I was planning to put up last week.  All the prep work on the images was done for that post, so this should go fairly quickly.

Before I begin though, I'm going to digress and mention (for my own future reference, as much as your general interest), that in the last week one of our cats has gone missing, and we have a large hole in the house boarded up with plywood from where the new sliding door was supposed to go in, but couldn't because of rot in a support beam.  The frustrating thing about the later being that the former could have come home, but would have no way of letting us know because his usual entrance is now covered with boards.  Bugger.

Oh, and a stray cat showed up at one point (possibly to relay a message from the missing one, which was useless since we don't speak cat), stayed over night but ran away when it was time to call animal control.  One of those weeks.

Anyway, enough about me, and on to the wonder of fake paint!

You may note that there are two versions of this painting above, each a slightly different colour.  No I'm not trying to riff on Andy Warhol (but running out of steam after two images), I just can't decide which version I like best.  The original is on the top, the second one is colour tweaked in Photoshop.  Neither of them is the colour of the original photograph, which was straight black and white.  You can enlarge all the images by clicking on them by the way - some of them you may need to.

So, learning from my terrible layout sketch from the last one I decided to A) Forego all that m'larky up front and just start painting and B) use a grid this time.  I didn't use a grid for long, just long enough to get the big bold shapes in roughly the right places.  I stopped using it somewhere in between the first and second stages above.  Even then I put his eye in the wrong place.  It didn't take long for me to notice and fix it, but long enough that  it irritated me when I did.  It's more or less right in the last of these stages here.  For this one I saw no reason to change the composition of the Photograph at all - the original photograph was already fantastic, so I left it as was, but just painted it in sepia tones.

Here's me, refining the facial features.  There's really not much else to say about this one.  Hmmm, OK, so the photo this was based on had a fair amount of damage in places, so I had to infer quite a bit about the left side of his mouth and chin.

This piece, by the way, is of the person's father, who has passed away - as has mine, you may recall.  This bit is relevant.  So when my Dad died my mother commissioned an artist to paint his portrait to give to my Grandmother.  I was never terribly impressed by the painting (though it is vastly better than I could do, especially with real paint), there was something off about the eyes that lost a lot of his character.  Anyway, I didn't want the same thing to happen here for someone else, so I put more work into it than I probably otherwise would have.

I have no idea if I succeeded in capturing that character or not, but I did the best I could.  Oh, and another coincidence - this person has also hired me before.  Two out of four - it's not like I get hired all that much! Very strange coincidence.

Oh, and I cropped it off, because it hadn't changed before the next set of pictures, but I'd blocked in his left hand here too.

Some very minor work continuing on his face, mostly at his hairline and at the base of his nose, but the majority of this sequence is spent on his right hand and shirt.  I never did get around to detailing out his little finger, but I don't think it's noticeable in the final piece unless it's pointed out... Which I just did...  Way to go me, now you can't unsee it.

Not much to say about the shirt, except that I've shaved off an awful lot of his shoulder since that first block in, giving a bit more definition to the cloth and his neck.

I've also painted in some of the damage that was in the original photograph in the third one here.  The small pieces of damage I didn't do, because they weren't helping the piece, but this big swath of light burning in the bottom and the right of the picture I thought looked great, so I added it here.

Finally getting to making the camera look like a camera.  I debated over whether to do the lens freehand, but eventually I used a stencil (I argued, with myself, that if it was a real painting I could cut a mask out of a piece of card for this bit).  Only the outer circle was done with the stencil though, and I painted over the result afterward so that the circle wasn't too perfect and in conflict with the rough nature of the rest of the picture.  More on the camera in a moment.

Here is also where I painted in his hair, and did some general blending before adding the trees.  Painting his hair was interesting - I went a little too detailed to begin with, and you can still see the remainder of this as a slightly noisy patch right at the top of his head.  Painted over that with a bigger brush though, and ended up getting it to look like his fine buzzcut even though the individual strokes are quite large.

I faired less well with the trees behind him, but I got them to the point where they weren't too distracting.  I was tempted to leave the background being much more stark and graphic, but I wanted it to be evident that he's outside, so the trees had to happen.

Finally I took it into Photoshop and played with the colour values for the second version.  The bit in Photoshop took all of 10 minutes.

If you're interested, the camera is a Falcon Minette, or a Miniature, or a Minicam Juniour (my money is on the former). Apparently these were made back in the 40's, which feels period accurate to the photo, though I had it pegged for the 50's when painting (which it could be - they made things to last back then).  The easiest way to tell is from the label around the lens.  Amusingly I didn't think of doing the corrections to see what it actually said until I was finished and working on the thumbnail for the post, at which point I'd painted the logo from a reference that was backwards and rotated and blurred.  I'm quite pleased at how close I got to the real thing as a result.

And that, for this tale, is the end.

Social Profiling № 8: All in the Eyes

Well, this was embarrassing.  I'd started prepping for today's Social Profiling post, when I realised I hadn't written the last one! So now this is that and I'll write the new one later.  How did I miss one? Well, I painted it way back at the end of February, and as you may recall March was, well, a little full, so I honestly thought I'd already written the post, when in fact I'd not even prepped the images for it.   It's been that sort of year.

So, anyway, I'm getting to it now, just over 4 months later.  Oh, and I didn't post last week because it was a choice of painting the latest Social Profiling picture (not this one, remember?  I just mentioned that, try and keep up), or writing a post, and painting won.  Then I hurt my back, so that painting took longer than planned (in terms of days from start to finish, not actual hours spent).  OK, all up to speed now?  Good, lets look at this picture then.

And there we have her.  OK, all done, onto the next!




I'm kidding, obviously. Just because it's late doesn't mean I'm going to skimp on the coverage, though I've obviously forgotten some things what with it being 4 months since I painted it.  I'll do my best though.

Unlike the last one, or the next, I decided to actually do a sketch for this one.  'Save rework with repositioning things,' I said.  'Should be pretty easy to just measure it,' I said.  'What a complete idiot,' I said, two hours later.

You see I wasn't using a grid or just eyeballing it, but actually measuring things with my stylus, calipers and thumb.  I learned two important things: 1) Trying to measure from a photograph reliably without actually touching it is a mug's game (because the image is obviously skewed slightly in your vision, unlike a real thing, which isn't flat, so can't be skewed).  2) Lineart can be deceptive.  You see I thought that looked fine - I still think it doesn't look too bad there, but when I painted over it...  Well, see for yourself.

Arrrgh!  What have I done!  It is the end of times! The dogs are cuddling the cats! Rains of bloooood! Etc, Etc.  Yes, this didn't turn out right at all.  Was it because of the skewed photo effect?  Or a miss measure of a distance or an angle somewhere?  Don't know, don't care - the results are freakish either way.  Poor woman has had her head swelled up like a balloon!

See how deceptive that line art was?  Or can you see it even there (I can't, evidently)?  Well, anyway, I needed a quick fix.  Oh, how sad that I laid it out first to avoid rework later, for it was all for naught.

So, I threw up a big grid (4x3ish), and massaged things a bit.  The grid wasn't on the painting, it was mostly just to use to see what was lining up and where.  That helped a lot as you can see above, though her left eye was still slightly off (What is it and me with left eyes?), but I fixed that as I went along.  Oh, and remember last time I said about there being coincidences in these images (of course you don't, the last was in January)?  Well, two of them ended up being for people I've done images for before.  This one is of these guy's mother.

Just a good mid point to see a full image.  It was here that I think the most important part was painted too.  I really wanted to get her eyes right, and I think I got very close.  Lovely eyes, even on the original (fairly grainy) photograph, so I felt it vitally important to capture them as accurately as possible.

So here you can see more development in the face and hair.  I've broadened her jaw on the right image as it was a little flatter than in the original photograph, and was starting to make it look like she had no chin.  The hair I kept super rough - I felt that that way it wouldn't draw away from her face particularly.  Oh, and purple hair?  Totally badass.

After that I just roughed in her shirt and hoodie (not too much detail, for the same reason as the hair), and added her necklace.  I suppose I should go into how I painted this, as it wasn't my usual method.  I used ArtRage's oil brush (as usual), but this time I had it on a higher opacity paint (less thinners), but with very little pressure.  I thought that might capture some of the noise I was actually digging in the original photograph, and I think to some degree I succeeded.  Yay.

OK, off again now.  I have to send some text to someone that's been delayed by a week due to that bad back, and I also need to write another post  - but not for today, so don't come back too soon.

Really, I'm gone.  Try not to think of the balloon head stage when going to bed tonight m'kay?  Nightmare fuel right there.

Speeding Through It All

Whenever I do a speedpaint post I think to myself "Well, I only have 4 or 5 images to show, how long could writing that take?" and then I actually go an look and it's more like 6 to 8 images, so it's going to take longer than I thought.  6 to 8 isn't bad going, especially since it feels like I've barely set aside any time for them recently.  And I really haven't - most of these are very, very quick studies, for various reasons.

I still have a lot on my plate  over the next few weeks, but it's not always easy to find the time in between my day job, and the stuff I do for Dr. Sandifer.  Last week, as an example, I was working on an image for work in my spare time. It wasn't an official image, but I needed to demonstrate something at a presentation, and didn't have time to both write the presentation and do the artwork without working on it at home.  No, you can't see it, at least not yet.  Maybe one day, when what it refers to is no longer under wraps.

SO yeah, I've been falling behind on my art practice, and I'm honestly at a bit of a loss to where all the time goes, but it does go, and it goes fast.   Speaking of fast...

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

 So I spent a while messing around with brushes and the new color picker I have for Photoshop.  This started in the last speed post, as you may or may not remember, but I carried on with that theme for a bit.  This is just a simple greyscale sketch with no reference used.  Not very exciting, but there's something I like about it anyway.  I painted the background with a fairly random brush, and then filled in the details with a more detailed one, basing those details on the shapes formed with the big random one.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This might be the shortest paint I've ever done.  I was mucking around with brushes, did a scribble with this one, and could basically see this on the screen.  All I had to do was fill in the other tones.  Once I'd done that he looked Native American (or American Indian if you prefer, I know there's some contention over that), so I sketched in the feathers.  I quite like it, even if it is pretty rough.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

I feel bad about this, as I often do when I can't give an original source for an images reference, but I liked the photo and painted it because I was in the mood, and only discovered I couldn't find the credits after the fact.  Yes, I'm a terrible person, and no, a reverse image search didn't help much.  If you know who's photo this is, or who the subject is then let me know and I'll credit them properly, but until then, you can find the original here.  Very poor show on my part, especially so as it's one of two images with this issue this post.

Still, this was more messing about with Photoshop. In this case I went ahead and used the Gaussian Blur filter, because why not? And it gave the picture a nice depth that I wouldn't otherwise know how to achieve (not without spending longer on it than intended anyway).  After that I threw in two layers, one for the quick layout, and one for the actual painting.  I didn't add any additional layers after that, and when I was done I turned off the sketch layer.   Nothing too taxing, and I'm not a huge fan of the result, but I've done a lot worse.  Nothing too fancy about the method of painting; I picked colours and painted them - I really wasn't thinking about this one terribly hard, which made for a relaxing paint even if not the best result.

Time Taken: 65 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

More brush tests.  This time a spiky one, a noisy one, a flat one and a cloudy one.  I don't much like the results here, but I'd honestly be hard pressed to tell you why.  Is it the colour range (which I'm pretty sure is way off the source photograph, which was my own), or bad perspective, or what?  I think I need more practice on environmental paintings.  The clouds came out well though.  I like that cloud brush; I think it will prove very useful on occasion.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

Used another filter on this one, right at the end.  Ran sharpen on it and liked the result, so I left it.  This one is the other one with no direct credit.   Image search returns a Japanese term that apparently means Personality Hairstyles, which doesn't help much.  The original is tucked away here, but again I will gladly give credit where it's due.

So I quite like this one.  Again it was the result of mucking around with brushes, but I like the result.  For all that though it's a little embarrassing looking at the stages picture here because I didn't notice until quite late that I'd put her eye in completely the wrong place.  When I finally did notice it didn't take long at all to move it to a better location, but it does look a bit strange.  My original intention was to paint the whole thing with the spiky brush you can see I've used in the first stage, but I quickly realised that that was going to look awful, so I switched to a more traditional one for the rest of the painting.  I picked this one because I really like the graphic nature of her shirt,  I'd be tempted to make a more finished piece out of it if I had any idea who to give the original credits too.  Maybe I'll just do something unrelated, but use this as inspiration.

Time Taken: 25 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC
Are you bored with these quick Photoshop brush tests yet?  Well, the good news is that the next one is in ArtRage.  This one is a wolf - hopefully that's self evident, but maybe not.  All done using one brush type (it's the spiky one again, only really big), and black and white.  There's not much else to say about it, I just let the brush do most of the work to be honest.  Yes, I had to provide some guidance, but it's the brush that provided the nice sketchy finish.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all that I needed a break from Photoshop (though I did convince myself that I might be able to do a finished piece in it at some point), and went back to ArtRage.  This piece is based on 'David 12' by faestock.  I liked the expression.  I wish I could tell you more than that, but I just fell into my old speedpaint habits for the most part.

Oh, and I cheated, sort of.  You can see there are some marks on the step by step stages above that disappear at the end; two on the right, and one in the middle at the top.  That's my "grid".  It's not much of a grid, especially since I eyeballed it, but it did help a lot with getting the layout worked out, so I may be doing that again.

Since it was done in ArtRage, and because I remembered before closing it, I managed to record a timelapse from my undo stages.  It's a bit jumpy right at the beginning, but it settles down before I paint the portrait proper.  You can even see me add those marks.

There you go, 7 paints for the price of 4.  I'll be back again as soon as I get time, but until then, arrivederci.

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.