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.