Drawing on an Intuos Pro

Drawn on paper first, scanned, then traced and edited on an Intuos Pro using Adobe Photoshop Elements 11. A futuristic Firefighter.

Going for a Walk

The purpose of this piece was to play with the architectural potential of ruins and to work with layering buildings in front and behind of each other, much more effective than simply placing things side-by-side.

It also has a much stronger narrative component than my other pieces. It features two alien figures on the left "going for a walk" in the desert they just landed in, stumbling upon this vacant town populated only by a stone soldier. Train-like ships carrying more of their people can be seen in the top left corner, faded by the dusty atmosphere.

To contact me, email raccoonman.art@gmail.com

The Making of a Boat

The finished product.

And the six different sails that it took to get there...

Creature Design II

While I was making Blue Glade, I needed something to stand under the archway. So I got started without a plan, making what would eventually wind up being completely separate from Blue Glade.

The outline of a head followed by a filled-in head. The head attempting to rest on a humanoid body but not fitting. Lastly, the first draft of a successful Something. A second set of legs is shown using a redder version of the brown to differentiate from the closer set of legs. The reddish hue was later changed to a bluish one, because cold colors generally appear to be distant where as warm colors appear close.

Some detail has been added to the first one, and changing some aspects of it produced a second one. Now I'm starting to get a better grip on what I'm actually doing, which is making a family of feathered mammoths. The slope of the foreheads was important in making them organic and not geometric.

The biggest mammoth who would be the leader of the herd was made from an older thing I made one day. It amounted to nothing back then, but here I modified it to look like the other two. The shape of the rider on his back was copied from Creature Design I.

The mammoth caravan, drawn in two images. Two images because they would be the two frames of the animation that it would turn into in the end. Notice the two different feet positions for each animal, to make it look like they're walking when animated. As well as the leader riding the animal in the front.

Excuse the gritty texture, I'm still learning the basics of Adobe Flash. It's cleaner as a swf, but this one is a gif for the purposes of putting it on this this site. A simple frame animation like this really speaks so much more than a still picture. It's stunning. There are certainly more of these to come.

Blue Glade

Blue Glade was a quick project that was pretty driven by the process. I first had this vision of a wide arch with lots of bells and gongs and wind chimes hanging down from it, chiming and ringing in the wind, and a lone person standing in the middle, marveling up at them. Once the main structure was made, I thought that maybe I'd put it underwater. That idea left. Then I tested out a new pattern for treetops that makes them look less geometric (snowy treetops in this case). The tree line was level with the roofs of the towers at first, then I lowered it and made it slant from left to right. The towers in the background came in, and when it turned out that a lone person was not fitting, a little table with a brass pot took his place.

There isn't much to look at in this piece compared to my regular ones. The real focus for me was the sound of the chimes hanging from under the arch, which is ultimately left to the viewer's imagination.

If you want to contact me, email raccoonman.art@gmail.com

Photogenic Sky Squirrel

 I was standing on my street for whatever reason and saw this particularly interesting part of a tree (I wonder why). I liked the colors. Not until I saw it on my computer did I realize that there was a perfectly still squirrel having upside-down dinner, right there. If you were to put up a rule of thirds grid, it would fall right there on the top right intersection. Amazing.

And then through Picmonkey.

A Sequel

Festival

Slow Morning at the Pier

It just seemed so ideal for stringing up lights and changing out the people and what not that I had to do a night version. I've also got to say that this is the most successful I've ever with night pixel art. If If I had just taken Slow Morning at the Pier and just change the sky color it would have looked like the whole dock had spotlights shining on it and been out of place, so each color on the dock had to manually be darkened. I tried to do as many things as I could that I didn't do in the day version. The tent only increased in mysteriousness, though, and Festival is less of a visual art piece and more of a scene.

I also think that the second gives meaning to the first. The pair show how two-sided a place can be, and how the same thing can mean completely different things to different people. Somebody who goes to the pier in the morning to buy fruit will never know that liveliness of Festival, and somebody who only goes at night will never know the peace of the morning.

More is coming soon.

Orange Elephant, Blue Building

Nothing like a contemporary drawing every now and then to test our human ability of giving ridiculous interpretations to things. And yes, it does have meaning, even if it's only personal. Drawn with pen, manipulated and colored digitally.

Slow Morning at the Pier

Slow Morning at the Pier has been added to the Pixel Art page

Once again, the same scale as House of a Friend. After Music Over a Level Sea, I was anxious to keep trying out the people. I have two musicians on the far left performing under a gazebo, a fruit salesman and a carpet salesman to their right, a blacksmith on the far right with a woman walking her dog and a pottery salesman to his left. This was all part of an effort to give it life and make it look natural, which the birds and dogs also helped with. The most important thing was matching the colors so that they all work together in unifying the piece and making it somewhat friendlier. Interesting to think that the whole thing started from the tent, which was a shot in the dark considering that tents are made of curves. I figured out soon that the whole thing would go onto a pier. That goes to shows the non-linear process of digital art. Unlike physical drawing or painting, things get moved around and recolored at a whim. It's more like writing a story.

I'm looking at trying a new scale and turning back to a more architectural focus. More work in the coming weeks.

A Preview of an Upcoming Scene

One of the curviest possible structures now arguably mastered by squares.

Creature Design I

 I was basically fooling around in Paint when I decided to try and replicate a sketch I planned to turn into pixel art: a monstrous insect preferably with a person riding on its back. So I got a person from an older piece for scale and worked next to it.

 The initial sketch, about three inches long.

In its beginning stages, the outline was progressing well. My focus was getting all of the curves and angles right. Making sure that the wing, for example, was rounded so that it made sense with the perspective.

 The finished outline. The different hues of green stood for the different areas where I would put the actual colors in the next stage.The bug's silhouette didn't change much from this point. I wasn't really focusing on making it look aerodynamic, but that turned out to be one of the treasures of the piece at the end.

 I worked from a color that I had already found a while back, thinking it would be perfect for this kind of thing. I made the outline of each shape darker on the bottom and lighter on top to show the positioning of the light source.


Detailing. I made the lighting more complex to show the roundness of some parts of the bug; the dark purple shell where it meets the top of the head is a good example if you have sharp eyes. Shadows were also added in areas like the space under the wings to show how despite their 2D nature, they do actually do lie over the surface of the bug instead of being stuck to its body. If you stood back and compared it with the last step, it looks almost the same. The most time consuming step with the least impact. Yet it's also the most important one because this is really where the life comes from. I recommend clicking on it for the large view to see it in better definition.

A rider, reigns, and some kind of tattoo to show possible origin. The tattoo really turned into a focal point. But I like the color blend. Now its ready to be put into a real scene.

The Unnamed Creature then and Now

An interesting comparison.

With its rider absent, the reigns lie coiled on its back.

As always, there's some kind of deviation from the original. The first one couldn't go alone, wherever it's going. In other words I had a feeling I'd need two when the time comes that these go into a scene. In some ways, I almost like Bug #2 better. Its extruding tongue and stubby feet give it a very different attitude from the first.

Please tell me what you think of this post in the comments, and how you think I should continue with this Creature Design series.

Music Over a Level Sea

Music Over a Level Sea has been added to the Pixel Art page.

This one took a couple of hours. I used the same scale as I used for House of a Friend, which is good for getting lots of detail in the architecture without loosing the pixelated feel. It also gives a pretty good standard for the sizing of the people so that I can manipulate their stances in a way that gives the viewer some idea of what each person is doing, like with the three musicians on the roof. This is my first piece that has people as a focal point.

I recommend clicking on it for the large view to properly enjoy all the details. Its a very horizontal piece, making it inconvenient for viewing on this page.

From Sketch to Digital

Below is a simple pen drawing, the first phase of a long but rewarding process. Normally I would have scanned it, but with limited resources at the present time I took a picture of it with my Fujifilm Finepix S4200. The unbalance in lighting isn't ideal, like the dark mass at the bottom and the radiance between the upper and middle ships, but it didn't matter in the end.

Next, I put it through PicMonkey, turning up the brightness and the shadows in such a way that I got an almost black and white version. I then put it into MS Paint (primitive and old school to some but extremely effective and quick to me), and paled down the whole shape until all gray bits on the edges became nothing. Then I refilled all that was left in black. I follow that process for every piece on the Illustrations Page. After running back and forth with this process a few times, I got the shape below.

Next, I filled it in. Three or four minutely different shades of gold for the main ship and a strong electric blue for the moon in the background.

 

Desktop wallpapers modeled after this piece are available on the Desktop Wallpaper page for 1280x800 screen size and the iPhone 5.

Pixel Art Steampunk Robots

The aesthetic and almost sculptural value of the robot has recently occurred to me. Maybe these will go into a future piece.

House of a Friend

 House of a Friend has been added to the Pixel Art page.