A Missing Month of Speed

You may have noticed a distinct lack of posts last month.  I have no real reason why that occurred; last month was one of those strange ones that seemed to last a long time but also go by extremely quickly due to my being really busy.  Odd thing though, I don't actually remember particularly what it was I was busy doing.  Never mind, such things are bound to occur occasionally (the last time was 4 years ago), and as a result of some of that busyness (this part I remember) I have plenty to keep me busy with posts for this month, and possibly next month too.  Which is good, because it's anniversary time!

Technically the blog's anniversary was the end of last month, but that post was just saying I was going to do a blog. It wasn't until May that I actually posted any art, so I consider May 2nd the blog's birthday.  Also, even though I didn't start speedpainting for a few months after that, I count the same day as the tickover day between one year's speedpainting and the next, because I suck at remembering dates, so may as well collate them.

So today I'll go over the speedpaints I did this last month, and in the next post do an overall review of the last 5 years (actually 4.5) of speedpainting, unless I don't because I decide to do something else instead (5 Years!  Where'd the time go?)

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: The character of Sam Vimes form Discworld

As you may know, back in March author Terry Pratchett died.  This hit me reasonably hard as he was, without any hesitation, my favourite author.  Not as hard as when close friends or family have passed (and I've covered that happening on the blog before), but hard enough for someone I only met twice (at book signings, so I don't know that it really counts).  Anyway, I spent some time the day after hearing the news sketching a couple of his characters, but I didn't get to this one who is my favourite of all of them.  The character came up in a thread over on io9 a while later, and I thought "I should paint him.  Why haven't I done that yet?"

He's Blackboard Monitor, His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, or Sam to his family (usually Mr. Vimes to his friends).  He likely doesn't look like a Duke in the picture, I suspect that's just how he'd like it.  If you ever start reading Pratchett's Guards series, or have just begun, you may be confused why the drunk lying in the gutter in the first few pages is here referred to by such a ridiculous title.  That would be spoiling things, although to be called 'Blackboard monitor' is now an honor (or possibly an insult) in Dwarf politics.

None of that has anything to do with painting the picture, which wasn't terribly exciting.  I did gather some reference, but didn't work from any of it explicitly, mostly laying it by ear (or more accurately by stylus, because painting with your ear when you have no cause to is just silly).  I used a range of brushes, and right at the end decided it didn't look like it was either raining, or night time, and so used colour adjustments to increase the cool tones of the image, and motion blur to make the rain strokes look more rain like.  It is almost a certainty that I'll paint more of Pratchett's characters eventually, possibly even Vimes himself.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4, Photoshop
Based on: This image by Alraunie-stock

 Nothing special about this one really.  I was more concerned about lighting than accuracy, in that I wanted to capture the detail in the shadows, something I've often struggled with.  I was also trying out a new painting technique, that actually might work for laying down rough areas - it's very scribbly. Clearly the detail in dark shadows thing is something I need to work at more, but this came out alright, if you shrink the thumbnail down enough anyway.

A fairly by the numbers process too.  I wasn't using a grid or anything for this one, and her face ended up being a little wonky, which bothered me even though I wasn't going for accuracy in that area, so for the last stage here I took it into Photoshop and spent a couple of minutes shifting the proportions a little, though it's hard to say which bits were the adjustments, and which were bits I painted in between these two stages (such as bulking up her skirt and hair).

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese in The Terminator

You know how it is; I'm scrolling through Pinterest and see a photo I've not seen before of a character I love, and immediately want to paint them?  No? Well, that's what happened here.  Only thing was I really wanted smoke in the background rather than the nightclub depicted in the reference photo, and I didn't have a suitable brush (I could have painted that with a standard brush of course, but it would have taken too long probably, and not looked quite as, well, smokey).  So the time taken on this one includes the time taken to make a smoke brush (which was a combination of smoke photographs and the Photoshop cloud filter).  Making the brush took somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes I guess, I wasn't paying that much attention to the time at that stage.

My original intention was to switch from the smoke brush to a more standard one once I'd done the background, but I roughed in the figure with it and liked how it looked, so I ended up using that one brush for the entire painting.  When reduced it gives a nice pastel look, although it's a little hard to predict exactly what it's going to do with each stroke.  I used a 3 across grid for this one to aid with the composition - usually that's not enough to get it particularly accurate when I'm whizzing through a speedpaint, but in this particular case it's really close.  Either I'm getting better at it, or it was a happy accident.

Strangely, while this is one of the most popular images I've ever posted to facebook (44 likes), it didn't do terribly well when I posted the same thing to DeviantArt.  I can never predict what will be well received.

Time Taken: 105 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: This photograph I found on Pinterest, original source unknown.

The photo this was based on was all over pinterest for a few days.  It seemed to pop up every time I scrolled, posted by someone else.  Not terribly surprising, because it's a gorgeous photograph, while this paint based on it... isn't.

Part of the issue is that I decided to adjust the palette when I was painting it. The intention was to go with very blue desaturated tones in order that the orange of her hair would pop more.  Sadly I made those blues too close in value to the orange.  If I'd made them darker, or even lighter, the result would have been what I was aiming for, but of course I realised that to late (increasing the saturation of the orange may also have worked, as it would have altered the apparent value of  her hair), but last time I used a lot of orange it ended up being overpowering, and I didn't want to head down that road again just yet).

The other issue was that I just didn't work out the proportions very well.  I have a tendency to make the side of the face on the far side of the nose too wide, and this time was no exception.  You'd think by now I would know well enough to make the face far narrower than my brain is telling me it is, and then make it wider if I need to, rather than the opposite.  I swear I will remember this next time I do a 3/4 view because I then spend far too long fixing the issue rather than spending it on places that are more enjoyable.  You can see I also had some issues with her chin in the first image of the bottom row, but I got that sorted out fairly quickly.  She also looks as though she has a giant left breast, which is because I was trying to make it look less pointed, and inadvertently added to the size of it instead.  For what it's worth I quite like the way her face ended up, but overall this was not a great success.

All the speed, none of the finesse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* I lied about it being fun packed.

For Psychochronography, Turn to Page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

Feeble Sketching - April to June '14

Far from catching up with my sketch posts, I appear to have fallen further behind given that the last one was in August <shudder>.  That's inconvenient, and not terribly well planned.  So in an effort to catch up, I'm just going to post some from the next three months (April through June last year), because there's really not that much to say about them (or, if there was, I've long since forgotten).

On the plus side, I did do a marathon scanning session recently, so I have everything up to last month scanned, I just need to compile them (or, if worse comes to the worse, just adjust the levels and post them as is - eek).

Though based on my current track record, I'll get the next batch uploaded sometime in July...

Just a Little Board With Pulp

No, that's not a typo in the title, I mean board, not bored.  I work, as you may or may not recall, at a videogame development company.  What you may not be aware of is that a shocking number of game developers are also lovers and designers of boardgames.  Not only that, but the city in which I live has an annual board game design competition, which is obviously popular with the staff.

One of my colleagues mentioned before Christmas that he was planning on entering a game, and would I be interested in doing a cover for the box?  Sure, sounded fun. And then I forgot all about it because Santa coming has that effect on me (or perhaps it's the copious alcohol).

Obviously I did end up painting the cover (or this would be a very short post), and you can see it, and the rest of this tale after the break below (unless you clicked through already, in which case it's right there, probably on screen already,  Look!  There!  Right there!).

Oh, good, you found it finally.  So there it is.  I didn't do a logo (I was asked not to at this time, though I happily would have), but other than that, that's what's on the front of the box.  I'm not happy with it, but my wife has pointed out that I'm a big grump and never am, and that other people like it just fine.  I shall take them at their word, but there is still room for improvement.  Fortunately I may get the chance to do that as my colleague is planning on taking the concept further if it does well in the competition; with a Kickstarter and that sort of thing, at which point I'll revisit the art and maybe do some more depending on his needs.  Oh, yes, the concept!  This is from the official competition page:

Inspired by the classic novel of the same name, The Most Dangerous Game is a game of cat and mouse based on deduction and skill.  One player takes on the role of Huntsman General Zaroff as he tracks up to four Captives he has lured to his Island to be hunted for sport.

The General has Two Days to track, hunt, and kill his prey lest they otherwise escape.  The catch being that while The Hunter is visible, the Captives are not.  Using coordination, ingenuity and the resources at their disposal, the Captives must do everything they can to survive The Most Dangerous Game.

While the evil huntsman is described as such, and is painted as such on the cover, the game is designed to let General Zaroff be either male or female, and one of the original intentions was to show both a male and female hunter on the cover.  Alas that would have taken too long, and cost too much, so we settled on just the male Zaroff.  If it goes forward I'm guessing I'll get a chance to paint a female hunter at some point.

So, anyway, back to the tale...

Tyler, my colleague, got back to me in mid January and asked if  I was still interested.  I was, but at the time I was a little way through working on my next book cover for Phil Sandifer, and I knew I was going to be held up with that and some other things for a couple of weeks.  I let him know, but said I would do what I could to get to his cover ASAP, and I'd scribble up some composition ideas in the mean time.  I had one brief - It must look 'pulp adventure' - and a rough idea of the premise of the game and the characters involved (I say rough, nut Tyler wrote me about a 20 page in depth description with example pictures and everything - it was pretty epic).  The idea thumbnails are shown above.

There were some other ideas too, including the hunter in his trophy room, but I didn't sketch those out.  Yes, they're very rough, and yes, they're hard to read and sort of messy. They did the job, and as you'll see the one finally picked was surprisingly close to what I ended up painting.  I'm actually quite pleased with some of these, since I was doing them on a tablet, which I've never done before, and I had no reference at all while sketching; so a pith helmet, a fedora or a rifle being remotely recognisable is a major win in my opinion.  Anyway, we picked the one 2nd row down in the middle, with the green snot all over it (they were supposed to be palm trees, don't judge me!).

So the first thing I did was go gather some reference, lots of it.  But I couldn't find anyone in quite the poses I wanted, which meant I needed to take some photos to work from (I know, I could have just winged it, but Tyler didn't want it to look comicbook like, and that's the best I can currently do without a good reference).

I scheduled time with a model (actually a friend of my wife's) to stand in for the Archeologist (that's the woman with a machete), and since she didn't know anyone broad shouldered enough to stand in for the explorer (and I didn't want to ask anyone at work because I was frankly too embarrassed) I decided to do that myself, knowing I'd have to adjust for my less than heroic gut.  I ordered a cheap Pith helmet online (which turned out to be a bit crap), and went to a local costume store to buy a cheap Fedora (which turned out to be surprisingly awesome).

I actually wanted a Panama hat, not wanting the Explorer to be too much like Indiana Jones, but ended up with a fedora anyway.  Not an Indiana Jones one, a slightly more vertical one with a slightly wider brim that's actually from a 4th Doctor Doctor Who outfit.

With all that in place I was ready for the photoshoot, and then the weather was awful and the model couldn't make it.  My wife stood in for her, and ended up in a jacket I never would have thought of if the model had come 'round, and which altered how I wanted the Archeologist to look.  Less fortuitously it's a really dark blue crushed velvet jacket that reads almost black in the photos, but I didn't know that at the time - to the eye it's perfectly visible.  Then I set up some lights and popped the camera on a timer.  You don't get to see the full photograph because my wife would kill me, and I'm a bit mortified myself, but only fair you get to see something I guess.

Yes, I'm facing in completely the wrong direction, which caused some issues later on, but nothing major; I just flipped the photo for some of the next step, and then flipped it back for the rest.  I had more photos, but this is the one I mostly worked from. On the left you can see my wife's arm, and how dark the jacket came out.

Next step was working up some line art. Due to wanting to wait on the model and the Pith Helmet (which didn't arrive in time for the photos in the end anyway) I'd put off doing much more than researching, and this unfortunately left me with only 10 days to paint the thing. If this was my full time job this would not be an issue, but it was a bit tight given I'd only be able to spend a couple of hours a night on it. For once I was determined to ensure I had a good starting point, and so took the first three days of my time working up the sketch to the best of my ability.  First I removed the horrible greenery from the initial sketch, and then worked over that.

I reworked the poses to better match the photographic reference - sadly the result turned out less dynamic than the initial sketch, but I didn't really twig to that at the time.  The blocking of the figures was done with the aid of a grid to keep the proportions straight, and as I've said, the photo got flipped so that the body of the explorer was in line with the initial composition.  I didn't stick too closely to the grid though, as I needed to compensate for my stomach and wanted the rear arm in a better position (I used another photo to refer to there).

After that I just started sketching in details on top of the block-in, using the photos as reference, and the reference I'd collected for the background.  I left the hunter out, intending to get to him later.  I did cheat on the Explorer's hands, because I could not get them to look right - in the end I took the two photos I was using as reference and just traced over them, and then adjusted the forearms to match.  Time was tight and I wanted to get painting.

When I say 'painting' I mean digitally of course. I can paint with real paint but I'm not terribly comfortable with it, or good with it, or quick with it. Digital was fine for this assignment, so I went with that. After the line art everything else was done in ArtRage.

Initially I was intending to treat it much like a speedpainting, and while bits of it were done in just the same way I do those most of it ended up not being that way because I painted the shirt and hated how it came out - you'll see I revisit it near the end.  It did mean I had a pretty solid base to work from for the rest of the picture though.

You may wonder why the sky is yellow.  It's because many pulp adventure illustrations had yellow skies.  I'm not completely sure why, but if I had to guess I'd say it was because they could print the title on it and it would stand out really well, and more dramatically than if it were blue.  This influenced the rest of the palette too, with the blues being slightly green skewed, and the few reds pushing more into brown.

Next up I moved to the Archaeologist's jacket.  Since velvet had since occurred to me to be a poor choice of fabric for her, and since I could barely see the reference anyway, I decided to turn it into something in leather, while keeping the same basic cut of my wife's original.  Not a lot to say about it other than it was the only thing in the painting I didn't have a half decent reference for, and so I'm quite pleased that it did in fact end up looking like a leather jacket.

I felt at this point that I should probably paint their faces and get that out of the way.  The process was as simple as having my original photo as a reference for lighting and angle and then referencing several other photographs to make him a little more chiseled and heroic looking than me.  Chief among these other refs were Richard Chamberlain and Stewart Granger, who'd both played Allan Quatermain in film versions of King Solomon's Mines. I didn't get to the ear, partly because it was late, and I completely forgot about it - I would finally get to it much later. What I didn't get to was tweaking his fairly bland expression. I wanted a look of quiet desperation, but managed this instead. I fully expected to have time to come back and fix that, but in the end time ran out. Maybe next time.

Not shown here is a similar process on the Archeologist (refs included Aubrey Plaza and Michelle Rodriguez as Tyler stated that she should be Latina), and the Explorer's arms. Like the ear I didn't get the rear arm finished before calling it quits for the night, and I didn't bother coming back to it until much later. I've also worked on the Archaeologist's tie and shirt some; these being vaguely modelled after Rachel Weisz' initial look in The Mummy (minus the pin stripes).

For the plants I just worked from various photographs of jungles and tropical islands.  I thought this bit would be easy, but it turned out to be one of the more grueling parts of the whole painting.  Getting foliage to look suitably dense is harder than I had thought, and oddly it doesn't really depend on using all that much more foliage (something I should have known from my day job given it's something I've done research on in the past), but rather it's placement and value.  I ended up using a similar technique to the one I used on the hair of the Archeologist; a round brush with stylus pressure controlling size rather than opacity, and long smooth flicks of the wrist.  This made things extra problematic, given that I'd hurt my wrist the day before (don't ask.  Wasn't because of anything rude, but it was embarrassing and I don't want to make this gargantuan write up any longer than it's going to be already).

This image is here purely so you can check out the metal on the knife before I covered it over with rust.  I was quite pleased with it, but alas I felt the blade needed to be rusty more than I wanted to show of my slick reflections.  I've included the mountain too, because why not?

Another dreadful photograph to give you nightmares tonight.  My pith helmet (which was totally pith) had finally arrived, and I needed reference for The Hunter.  I forgot to ask my wife for aid in this before she went to bed, so I snapped a selfie of myself wearing the helmet under a near overhead light.  My old corduroy jacket was standing in for a Safari Jacket, and I grabbed a broom to stand in for his rifle, though that ended up being pointless and not terribly helpful. I sketched the fellows face based on that and a few other references, and then painted it - adjusting the lighting to be more like one of the other photographs, which I felt was more representative of sunlight. I worked predominantly monochrome here, partly to aid him work with the yellow sky, but also because that was much easier than doing something more colourful, and I was running out of time.

Oh, and I added the mansion. That's my least favorite part of the painting - it's terribly bland, and a little out of scale. On the other hand, I was fairly careful with the perspective, so that should be right at least.

Then it was time for the various things I'd missed, such as finally returning to work on the shirt (adding definition, contrast, and better shadows), add his ear, and finish off his right hand (personally I think that's my favourite thing in the whole painting).

And then I was done. Signed it, and sent it off.  Tyler seems happy with it, which is the main thing, and a few people familiar with the game have said it captures it pretty well, as well as the whole pulp adventure thing, so I guess it was a success, despite the actual creation not going terribly smoothly. There are definitely places it can be improved, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do just that, but for the time being this is where it's at.  Tyler entered the contest on Thursday evening, so best of luck to him!