Intermission...

Normal service will resume soon.

Keep Calm and Carry On up the Khyber.

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 2)

Okay, before you go any further you need to click THIS LINK in order to get some background on this post, because I'm lazy and it saves me typing up a "Previously on Back to the Drawing Board..."

All caught up?  Good, then I'll continue.

Philip emailed me at the beginning of August asking if I'd be interested in doing his second volume of TARDIS Eruditorum since his original artist had seemingly vanished.  If I said yes I would get to do any other books in the series (on the assumption I don't also vanish presumably), including a reissue of the first volume when they finally release the newly discovered Galaxy Four footage so he can write about it (don't stress if this means nothing to you, but it's a big deal in terms of Doctor Who history).

Well, I said yes didn't I?  I mean obviously I did or there would be no post, but really thee was no way I would turn it down.  So here we are about 18 months 6 weeks later and it's finally gone live on Amazon and Phil is about to announce it, so here it is...

There you go, my fist actual book cover - click it to zoom in (though I've only uploaded it at half the res of the final). Pretty snazzy eh? Well, I like it anyway.

The book is based on the blog of the same name (as mentioned in the above link), and is available to purchase in both paperback and digital forms via Amazon. Click the links, buy the book, make Phil rich.

If you read the previously linked post you'll get the jist of why it's in the style of an older and worn book. Phil preferred the idea that the "old" cover was the actual cover rather than being a cover within a cover, and I was just fine with that. I didn't want to just reuse the basic concept of the original cover wholesale though as if I do get to redo volume one then I think it's well suited, so it needed a new look. Or possibly a new old look? Whatever, I knocked up some roughs.

Of these I think the second one was the most true to the concept of volume 1 (and I quite like the sketch I did) while both myself and Phil felt the 4th one had the most late 60's feel to it and we should head in the direction. Unfortunately I used a photo to get that effect, and using a photo was a definite no-no, so I decided to keep the basic layout and head in another direction.

Since I had the layout there I started with that, basing it on the layout for scale sent from Amazon via Philip.

Then I needed something to go in there. We'd been focusing on shapes in the Open Art Group and I'd vaguely wondered if I could do a portrait using just triangles. This seemed like the ideal time to find out.

I didn't work directly from a single photograph, but rather just started laying down triangles and moving them around until it started to resemble Troughton without being so detailed as to get us in hot water over the resemblance. After doing this for a bit I checked how it was looking on the cover and added some elements to the spine.

I decided to change the nose area of his face, and went back to work on the separate image I was building the picture in. You'll note the I've chopped off a good chunk of the bottom of this final image. Mostly that was because even though I'd spent a while laying out all those triangles they really weren't needed for the effect I was looking for (that was all done by hand by the way, not with some clever exploding triangles filter). Maybe I'll get a T-Shirt printed with it on or something...

All the slight tears and damage to the book are hand drawn masks to a paper texture scanned from my sketchbook. I was initially going to just rip them from some old worn books I'd bought as reference, but it turned out that lifting them cleanly from the scans was not as easy as I'd thought, so I did them manually using the scanned reference books as a guide; it took ages but I think it was worth it. I also used those same reference books to decide on a back cover layout. This is nothing like any of them, but the simplicity of it ties in with them thematically. The quote is one I liked from The Doctor that felt suitable to me. The text on the back is the traditional Lorem Ipsum stand-in text while Phil wrote the actual blurb. The dates are wrong for this Doctor, and somehow that slipped by both myself and Phil until I'd submitted the "final" image and a friend of mine on Facebook pointed it out (thanks Ash!). You'll note it's fixed in the final cover - it would have been rather embarrassing if we'd completely missed it. The white "label" on the back is where the barcode will go as in 1968 they didn't have barcodes. I don't think they even had ISBN numbers.

This is the final "fat" cover (still with the wrong dates). This time I've included the bleed area that has to be included in case of incorrect alignment when printing. It's just rough paper texture - so I guess how damaged or clean the edges of the book will appear depend on the alignment during printing. I quite like the idea of it being slightly random. The front cover here is also the Kindle digital edition cover as at the time we didn't know that would need to change.

But it did change. Comparing the full cover up at the top with that last cover you'll notice a few small changes that actually took days of back and forth to do.

Firstly there was the width of the spine. Phil had to guess the pagecount when I started it, and so the width of the spine is based on that guess (actually the pagecount of volume 1). When the final pagecount came in I had to change it accordingly, which was harder than I had initially planned. I'll know how to do it more efficiently next time.

Then Amazon bounced the cover. There were slight wrinkles in the barcode label that should have fallen outside the barcode area but didn't, and the barcode area must be flat white (I guess). Wrinkles removed, back it goes. Bounced again.

This time it was because the word invasions was obscured by the barcode area. Apparently Amazon figured no-one would ever do this intentionally and put in a check for it. You can't say "yes, I know, that's intentional" and get it through, so the text on the back had to be moved so it was higher. Moved, and resent.

And bounced, again. This time it was the front cover at fault (why they don't check all of this at the same time so it can be fixed in one go is anybody's guess). The first volume (and the Kindle edition) had the author as Phil Sandifer, but I guess since the first volume was published they now check the Author name on the cover against the one in their records, which was Philip. so I had to change Phil for Philip so it would go through. Oddly this check isn't performed on the Kindle edition, so that cover was approved ages before (Though it did give Phil some aggravation because some of the book closely resembled text from this website the plagiarism checker had found. Funny that).

So after all that it finally cleared and is now available from the links above with slightly different covers for Kindle and Paperback (Click and buy! Not that I make any money out of it, but making Phil rich means I can ask for more moolah next time ;)).

Phew! None of this would have been a terribly big deal if the file size of the image wasn't close to 30MB and needed to be sent to Phil and then sent by him to Amazon. Ah well, we learned a lot about what not to do next time around.

Finally, here's the cover without all the wear and tear on it. It would probably still make a pretty nice cover, but for me it's the wear and tear that really sells this one as being a book published when Troughton had just recently been the Doctor.  Man, I hope it prints OK...

More to life than simply Speedpainting

It's not very often you get to start a post by paraphrasing Ghandi, so I think when you get the chance you should go for it, don't you. This month has been a little sparse on posts as you may have noticed. Generally this happens when I get busy elsewhere, and I'm plenty busy right now. Tomorrow I start a 6 week painting class on Wednesday evenings. It worked out as expensive, but I feel it will work out cheaper in the long run (and faster) than pulling out some paints every six months and grimacing at the results. it may turn out I just suck and the whole thing will be a disaster, but at least I'll know, and so will you as of course I'll post the resulting detritus here.

As well as that I've been working on a commission (the one I said I'd be a fool to turn down). It's actually finished, completed last night, but I can't post it for a while (which is something you should be used to with the commissions by now). The good news is that I'm sketching a lot more than I was last month, although quite a bit of that is for the Open Art Group (Which you get to see anyway). Two of this month's speedpaints are sort of for the same, so I suppose I should get on and show them.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
I wanted to work on fabric and cloth a little (not a huge amount - I'll be focusing on it at some point when my anatomy is better) so I painted this flag at work. It's my flag, you get bonus points if you recognise it. That blurry thing in the foreground is my monitor, which you can't see from this angle any more as I have a new one. Actually I can't see the flag either now because it's a larger monitor.

Time Taken: 75 Minutes
This one is for Open Art Group. The focus was Self Portraits (you may have guessed). I've posted a few self-portraits before, but this one is peculiar in that I was painting from life, using a small mirror propped against my monitor. It looks like me I guess, so I'll call it a win. You may note a few of these go over the hour I usually reserve for speedpaints. That's just how it's been going of late - they're still under two hours which I think is my official cut-off time for speedpainting these days.

Oh, and there's a step by step, just because.

Time Taken: 100 minutes
I don't know why this one took so long, but I'm quite pleased with how the silk turned out. It actually started as a profile study, but then I got into painting the fabric instead of her face. I quite like it, though I should have left her hair as an outline too, I think it looked better that way. Profiles of faces are a focus of late by the way, due to Open Art Group, though it was this one that made me decide I should work on them.

Taken from a Stock photo by the wonderful charligal-stock

Time Taken: 110 Minutes
Another profile, this time of Matt Smith as the Doctor from Doctor Who (copyright and trademark BBC), from the episode Asylum of the Daleks. It's not the best likeness, but it's rather better than the last speedpaint I did of him ;) My friend says his hair's too small, my brother says he looks to old - they're probably both right. Amusingly I think I spent more time on the background than I did on the Doctor. Clouds are hard!

Time Taken: 100 Minutes
Another paint taken from a Sci-Fi still, this time from Pitch Black. That's supposed to be Riddick in Cryo at the beginning. Looks nothing like Vin Diesel unfortunately. At one point it looked a lot more like him, but his head was at a peculiar angle. I fixed the angle but lost the likeness. C'est la vie.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Last one, real quick, this was just something quick and reference-less I did in Photoshop in an effort to reacquaint myself with its brushes. Might do more in it, might do less, but this was the result regardless. Annoyingly she looked a lot better earlier on, but there was next to no contrast, I increased the contrast and messed it up a bit as a result. Getting to be a running theme...

That's your lot, off you go.

Sketching for August (and the OAG)

Well, yeah. So I haven't been posting much in the past few months as you may have noticed. This isn't because I don't like posting (although prepping these sketch posts can be a real drag), more it's with me just not having much to post.

August was an especially dry month, it seemed to go by extremely quickly and I didn't do much in the way of sketching; I thought - Turned out I did more than I expected, just not the usual stuff, but more on that in a minute. I had promised another post last month, but in the end I felt that the contents of that were better blended with my regular sketch posts - the aims are similar even though the results are less exciting.

You'll notice some changes this time around - they may stay, they may not. Only time will tell. Oh, The ORG? Read on MacDuff!

Sketch Practice

So the most obvious change is that I've switched from a white background to a noisy grey for the sketches. This is because the new scanner introduces noise I can't fully get rid of without far more cleanup than I'm willing to spend, so the noisy grey hides some of that. Additionally I'll be using white more often than I have previously, and if the background is white you won't be able to see it. It's better than th epink I used to go with though right?

You'll also notice there are only two images (and none of them is the usual "bad" one. Well, I said it was a dry month, so with the exception of a couple of ones that were scribbled so quickly that of course they're bad this is pretty much all I actually did in the traditional manner last month. It's telling that it's now September the 7th, and I've already done half the amount of sketching I did for the whole of last month! So this is pretty much it.

Thankfully (and unusually) I'm pretty happy with most of it. Highlights (for me) are the high-and-tight haired guy in the lower right of the Free Sketch picture along with the three women in a triangle to the center left, also the girl to the left of the figure practice image came out OK.

High and tight looks a little like my cousin (unintentional), while the lass with the Afro was inspired by a girl serving at Little Caesars on the day we got our new cats, but nothing here is drawn from any direct reference.

Open Art Group

I mentioned Focus posts in the last sketching post (without actually explaining it seems), and then didn't post a follow up. Well, this is what it was about; the OAG or Open Art Group, aspects of which I'll be rolling into the regular blog posts where relevant.

Ben, one of the guys I work with (and a ridiculously good artist himself - puts me to shame) came up with the idea about six weeks ago. You have a group that meets once a week that consists of people who want to improve their art. Every other week you have a (fairly vague) Focus for people to work on, and then you all get together the following week and discuss them. Not necessarily critique them, just discuss.

We opened the idea up to the company and got a range of people attending, from our concept artists to programmers who've never held a pencil. It's nice to have such a good spread (amusingly the programmers are the most consistent attendants :))

So, the first focus was "Shapes & simple objects" the second was Gesture Drawing and so on.

For "shapes" I chose circles, and just drew lots of them. This was to loosen up my wrist and get the curved flow going as well as to just improve my circles -apparently this is recommended by Vilppu in a book I have yet to buy (shame on me). Lucky you, you get to see all 15 pages of circles (various media) shrunk down into one big image (click to expand of course).

So I didn't go completely loopy I also did a houshold object (our TV remote - photo for your reference, though it was drawn - badly - from 'life'), and a set of common 3D primitives (I messed up the lighting, though it took Ben to point that out)

The next Focus was Gesture Drawing. You've seen this in the past if you're a long time reader, but I let myself slide doing it, to my detriment it turned out. If you're new the idea is to get the feel and 'gesture' of an image in a short time span. This time it's ten pages condensed into one image. I should point out that reducing the size like this does make some of them look rather better than they did originally. Some of these, even at this size, are standing in for this month's "Bad" image (some are OK though - click to expand).  The time on all of them was one minute per figure and I used a range of media (Charcoal, graphite sticks, pencil, ink brush and Sketch Book Pro)

And that's it. I think part of the reason I did less of my usual sketching last month was because of all the OAG stuff on the side. This is likely to continue to greater or lesser degrees and so I'll continue to include them at the end of regular posts, or even mixed in with them where relevant (there'll be some in the upcoming speedpaints posts for example, as one of the speedpaints was for the OAG).

Let me know what you think of the idea of including the Open Art Group in with the posts if you have any issues (no comments will mean "I don't care it's fine").

Sorry this one was so wordy, the next one will likely be less so.

Bouncing Baby Boyn

Life has been keeping me a bit busy of late. Not with huge and taxing things like "Move House" or "Build Moon Rocket", but with small things that add up, like "Play with Son" (He needs it more than usual right now since his best friend just moved away), "Ensure kittens aren't eating power cables" (We just got two kittens - I think I mentioned this last post) and "Paint a baby" (which this post is about, eventually).

Usually I manage to cram in some video game playing, some TV watching, some sketching and some reading into an average evening. Maybe not all of those things in one evening, but averaged across the week; with some speedpainting on the weekends. Right now this is not the case. I've played for 6 hours since the middle of July, I've managed an hour of TV a night (tops), I've spent a fortnight reading the same book (I usually finish them in 3 days) and this month so far I've done a bare two pages of sketching and not done a speedpaint for two weeks.

Those little things eat up a colossal amount of time I guess. Anyway, Onto the baby!

And there we go. You probably want some backstory and progress pictures. Or if you don't want them you at least expect them by now. You will not be left disappointed.

So a friend from work (We'll call him Mr. Boyn) approaches me ages ago and asks if I'll paint his son for him. Sure, why not, I'm on a roll with this whole commission thing anyway, right? Well, then things got busy and I forgot he'd asked. I even decided not to take any more commissions and posted about it here. The next day he said "does that include mine?" and I was all "of course not," because that wouldn't be very fair since my forgetting wasn't his fault. Contracts signed, reference picture handed over, start painting in time for his Son's first birthday (the painting is actually for his wife though).

The initial sketch bears only a passing resemblance to his son because I was planning on painting over it, so I just needed the basic location and scale of his features (I got the eyes very wrong, more on that in a sec). I used a grid, but by "grid" I mean "crosshair", you can see it in the picture. Not great for extreme accuracy, but it did the job in this case.

Then I started painting, and pretty quickly realised I was painting too dark. You can see the bottom two pics getting lighter as I over paint it (I cheated for his T-shirt and ear though and just adjusted the levels. I'll try and live with my guilt).

It was around this point that I also realised I'd made his eyes too small, resulting him looking sort of piggish, and rather sinister. First I opened them up a bit, and then just repainted them larger, and continued to tweak them a few times until he looked happy and cute (as they are int he reference). In the bottom right image I've also tweaked the lighting on his cheek and blocked in his mouth. Mr. Boyn approved of the progress.

You'll note that the images get lighter as we go along. This is because every time I left it and came back I'd be amazed at how dark I'd painted it last time and then lighten it up a bit. The exception is his pupils which I painted too light in the top left image and then had to darken a little. Then I moved onto his T-shirt in the top right.

His actual shirt had snoopy on it, and I thought it would be nice to remove snoopy and leave him with a classy white. I wish I'd kept snoopy as keeping him wouldn't have been that hard and I could have hidden a lot of the wrinkles in the black parts. I'm kidding, but painting the T-shirt plain white was a lot harder than I expected, especially as I was leaving details out.

Bottom left I realised his mouth was a little wrong and his nose to small so I fixed them. You can barely tell can you? It was a little more noticeable full size so I think it was worth fixing. I then went back and finished his T-Shirt and added his shorts and hair (which went more smootly than I was expecting). Originally I was just going to leave the bottom black as his shorts were so dark, but once I finished his shirt it became obvious that I would need to add them. They weren't in the sketch though, so I just freestyled it. They came out quite well given they took less time than any other element in the painting.

After that it was just a case of blending the background colours, tweaking the shadows, painting his right arm (our left) and adding some knitted texture to the blue blanked to his left (our right). Oh, and painting his ear, which I almost forgot about so it was just sitting there unfinished almost until the last minute.

I changed very little from the original photo during painting. I mentioned I removed snoopy, and the only other major changes were changing the multiple shades of the blanket to flat blue, and increasing the amount of bounce light from it onto Boyn Jr. I think it went extremely smoothly overall, and while I'm not 100% satisfied (am I ever) it's a good likeness and he doesn't look creepy, which is what can easily happen in paintings of young children in my experience. For the record I was lucky in the photo I was given to begin with - their son is honestly adorable.

Were they happy with the result? I'm guessing yes as Mrs. Boyn has been quoted as being "speechless". I'm going to assume that means she liked it, rather than she couldn't think of anything nasty enough to say about it :)

No reference image for you (I forgot to ask permission) and no animated gif this time either as I didn't save all that many revisions for this one (They're almost all shown above).  So, apologies for that, but I'm sure you'll live.

The Best and Worst Sketching of July

Life's funny, full of little jokes. After my last post saying I wouldn't be taking any commissions for a while I remembered I'd already told someone I would do one for them. So I had to do that one obviously. That's done, and there should be a post about it this coming weekend. So with that out of the way I renewed my vow, and then had an offer I couldn't refuse, so I'm probably doing another. You won't hear more about that one for a while, but really I quite literally could not refuse it without kicking myself later.

So with all that going on, as well as other things (New kittens in the house, son being sad because his best friend's moved to Canada, wife starting college in a week etc) I've barely done any sketching so far this month. Luckily last month I was a mite more productive...

Free Sketching

I'm really going to try and get through this one with a minimum of writing, honestly (TOO LATE!), but I think I should point out the ones I really quite like. The Two guys to the left of the Troll (lower left) came out pretty well, as did the guy to their upper right (past the sketchy woman). The girl almost in the middle, who's darker than those surrounding her is pretty good too (and done in Charcoal for a change), while the rest are varying states of "not terrible".

Figure and Perspective Practice

Nothing outstanding here, but some fairly solid ones. I'm quite pleased with the poses on the guy and the girl (and the dog) in the top right corner, as well as the bowing figure below them. There's also a quite dynamic looking figure over on the left hand side; very sketchy, but I like the weight and balance of it. Have I mentioned recently that I don't copy these from other pictures? I think I need to reiterate it on occasion for people who don't regularly read the blog. Sometimes they're based on the memory of a picture, but usually they're just made up. Same with the free sketching.

From Reference

These on the other hand are most definitely based on photos. The two girls were based on a couple of thumbnails on pinterest, the headless chap in the middle is from some old photo of a bodybuilder back in the 1940's and in the lower right it's Jean Luc Picard (but not a very good one. Charcoal again though).

If you're wondering why some of the sketches look choppier than usual it might be down to the new scanner. It's a lot harder to clean up the general noise of the paper grain that it was on the old one, so some of them still have "dust" around them. It's pretty minor, but if you notice it that's why it's there.

Oh Dear

Okay, so I though this one came out really well, right up until I finished it and stood back.  At that point I gasped in horror because I'd buggered up her eye in the most amateurish way possible - one is far higher up than the other.  She's a Frankenstein's monster!  I did worse sketches in July, but this was far and away the most disappointing.  I've not even cleaned the image up all that much, so you get to see that paper grain I was talking about.  Blech!

And for this month that's all you're getting. The focus posts are probably moving to another post (at least this month they are), so watch out for that in a few days.

Oh, all right, have a bad sketch of one of the new kittens done in Sketchbook Pro (which I bought last week but have barely used).

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Speedpaints

Back once more with the monthly speedpaint roundup. A little different this month, but we'll get to that in a minute. I decided at the Blog's birthday to try doing at least one speedpaint a week for the year, and so far I've managed to keep to that; so I have another four for you to see.

In other related news I'm taking a break from doing the commissions for a little bit in order to focus on improvement. People still want them, and I'd like to do them, but I feel bad taking peoples hard earned when there's improvement to be had (plus, they're a lot of work), so on with that for a few weeks before the money raking (hah!) can continue.

I've also co-started a group at work dedicated to that very improvement. I'm very happy with the response so far as we have artist and non artist alike all wanting to improve. We're not doing lessons and such (so far), it's more like a Weight Watchers type setup where we all admit that we suck and give each other support to improve. Expect to see some of my results appearing in the blog in future - right now I'm drawing a page of circles every night for two weeks, I'm sure you can hardly wait to gaze upon those those now can you?

OK, enough preamble...

Time Taken: 1 hour

My friend took a photo of these peaks in the Gower (look it up) with her phone and then posted it to friendface. Naturally I jumped on it immediately and, with her permission, painted it. It's not an exact copy, but it's close enough, and it's been a while since I've painted anything landscape like. If I'd spent about another hour on it it could have looked really good I think (not planning to though).

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

San Diego Comic Con was this month, and appearing on the floor were the three trolls from The Hobbit which many people took photos of. I thought that might be fun to paint, so I had a go at it. For the fun of experimentation I used very thick paint (fake, in ArtRage, obviously) and a low load. The result isn't that great as just as I was getting into it something came up and I had to leave it and then I didn't get back to it in a timely manner. But I also grabbed this:

I realized that I could "rewind" the painting by using undo because ArtRage seems to have an infinite number of undo steps per session. I took the chance to do what I've rarely done before and grabbed some work in progress shots of a speedpaint. It's odd that these were saved after the fact, but nevertheless they give a little insight into my speedpainting process (Which I think varies a bit every time). I did this for the other paints this month too.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes

I guess I've had this flagged for painting for ages. It's based on Stock by the intriguingly named pretentioustwat on Deviantart. I was originally going to paint the whole thing, but after viewing it full size (which naturally didn't fit on the screen) I thought just this crop of it might work too. I also decided (experimenting again) to make dark blue the darkest it could go, rather than black. I quite like the result.

Which is not to say its as good as I would have liked. I messed up her hands something fierce, but I suppose it's good enough. 15 Minutes in I almost gave up on it as obviously no good could come of it, but I'm glad I kept on. Interestingly it was only when it was finished that I could take a step back and decide the lack of black (or at least near black) had worked. Until then I was convinced it would be far too obvious, but in the end result I don't think it is until you really take a good look at it.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

This is by far my favorite paint of the month. It's far from perfect, but it has that loose look I really liked about the portrait of the man from the last speedpaint post, but with a more finished feel. It's loosely based on this photo, though I have no idea where that picture originates from unfortunately.

As an experiment I saved the undo series as a video and uploaded it. You don't get to see the actual settings used or the occasional mistakes I made (since they were undone during the process and therefor not recorded), but it's a lot less stressful than doing it real time (as I've done before).

And so there we have it for another month. I don't think I'll be posting progress pictures for speedpaints ever month, but if you think I should feel free to let me know. I'll may post them for paints I really like though, as that's possibly worth the effort.