I downloaded a trial copy of Photoshop CS5 so that I could play with some of the new painting features on my tablet. I’m still trying to find a comfortable painting technique with photoshop beyond just coloring a scanned drawing.

My biggest complaint (in any version of photoshop) is that it’s a pain to adjust the color you’re painting with. I want to paint a bit with, say, a red, and then make it a little darker or lighter the way I would on my paint palette by adding white, black, or a complementary color. If I could have the big square color picker you get when you click a paint chip out all the time that would be great, but that’s a modal dialogue and it’s inconvenient to get at. The HSB sliders help a little (RGP is worthless) but they are small and hard to adjust on the tablet.

I thought maybe I could put my color in one paint chip, black or white in the alternate, and then use the brush settings to mix the colors with pen pressure. Here’s what I got:

This kind of works, but you never get the full strength of the back color. Plus you’re limited to mixing two at a time.

CS5 also has a new mixing brush tool that works a bit like Corel Painter’s oil brush tools, just without so many settings. I had a go at those on a reference photo and came up with this:

This worked a little better. However, you get this smeary finger painting effect that looks very “computer painted”. Ick! Maybe this will work better if I find a brush I like.

Practice practice practice.

I’ll trade you one 6-story tall river otter ice sculpture on your birthday for one large assortment of German and American pastries on my birthday. As tradition stipulates, we shall meet at the Glienicke Bridge at dawn.

Bring napkins.

Earlier this week I caught myself looking at the digitizing table that’s been sitting, forlorn and forgotten in a heap of cables under my computer desk. One reason I got the poor thing was to spend more time sketching in color so that I could attack coloring illustrations with more gusto and less timidity.  I figured if there weren’t any paints to set up or brushes to clean then I would have no further excuses.

It turns out that dust bunnies can be just as intimidating as brush maintenance. However, I refuse to give the King of the dust bunnies the satisfaction of knowing he has successfully dissuaded me from yet another important activity, so it was time to paint something.

But what to paint? And how? I’ve been thinking a lot about stylized figures lately and collecting blogs from people who’s styles I find interesting. Two I’ve come across recently are Chhuy-Ing, a French illustrator, and Laura Pérez, a Spanish illustrator, and the inspiration for the painting below. That’s how!

As for what, well. . .I read Wired magazine from time to time, and they always package it along with flyers for other magazines with awfully derivative fashion photos on their covers. Everyone always looks so pouty and existential. Well I can be existential and pouty too. First, here’s the sketch. I’m proud to say both that I did it entirely on the tablet, no scanning, and that it’s pretty rough, at least for me.

I really liked the way Pérez used a few different colors for her line work, complementing the surrounding colors so I gave that a try. You’ll also notice I tried her nose/eyebrow design. She pulls it off really well, but I don’t think it’s to my taste. It’s always fun to try new things, though.

Since I was coloring things in, I figured why not go a little pattern nuts while I’m at it. At first I was going to make them all into fruit forms (the guy on the far right still looks a bit like a strawberry), but I got carried away with stripes and spots, so there’s no real rhyme or reason to it.

After chasing off the dust bunnies once I’m sure word of the revolt has spread to the King, and he’s even now amassing his forces to retake my tablet. That is, sad to say, the way of things in this war-torn land. But I am hopeful that I can get a few more drawings in before the tides turn again.

Two good friends of mine are planning a wedding in the fall and asked if I might be interested in making some illustrations for their invitations. Needless to say I jumped at the chance.

The wedding is planned for an outdoor setting so they asked if I could put together something with birds, squirrels, trees, and the like, so my first stop was the natural history museum to sketch the stuffed creatures.

Turns out there weren’t many squirrels at the museum, but there were a ton of birds. These sketches were fun, but for the invite the couple asked if I could make something sketchy and whimsical, so I played around a bit with different ways to abstract bird and squirrel shapes.

Along with the critters I needed somewhere to put them so I started playing with some different forest ideas. I really liked this idea of the bride and groom riding giant animals but it’s a little over the top for a wedding invite. Maybe I’ll save it for something else.

I was thinking about different ways to portray the forest: light and airy, dense and thick, tall trees, small trees, etc. It got me thinking about some images Luc Desmarchelier posted to his blog a while back when he was doing concept work for Open Season. I took a few cues from his use of hatching to create layers of foliage and thick underbrush. In the end though I think most of this was too thick for what I needed.

When we first talked my friends asked for something sketchy looking in pencil, probably without any color. Even so I decided to do some color experimentation just to see if it would generate anything interesting. Most of it wasn’t but the exercise was fun.

Really like this one with the two trees. I think I’m going to make it into a card for another occasion.

Back to the pencil stuff. I decided it might be interesting to think about different perspectives on the trees, such as looking up through them, or from low down or cropped tightly in the thick of branches.

Weather was finally looking up at this point so I took the camera out in the yard and took some shots of leaves and branches just to have something to look at.

Starting to close in on some ideas now.

I’ll post more when things are finished.

One of my goals this summer has been to buckle down and finally learn some 3D modeling techniques that don’t require include statements and callback functions. I started out working with Blender, an open source 3D modeling package, after seeing a demonstration by Roger Wickes. Blender has some impressive features and an impressive learning curve to match. It’s capabilities are impressive. If you haven’t seen it check out Big Buck Bunny, an animated 3D short put together by Blender volunteers.

Blender is great, but as my job hunt continues I’ve found that a number of employers would really like to see some experience with one or more of the popular commercial packages. I’ve shied away from these in the past because they are all so darned expensive, but it turns out that Autodesk (who for some reason seems to own just about all of them), has a student program in which you can get free licenses for extended periods. Hurray!

I’ve spent the last few weeks learning Maya, which it turns out is not that hard, at least for basic modeling. I’ve been through a few tutorials, but I decided a few days ago to try and make something for myself, so I started on a model of the hacker crab I designed for the corporate training materials. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Here you can see the wireframe of the model. The model itself is in blue. The orange and yellow objects are bones which rig the character like a puppet so that I can articulate his arms and legs for animation.

If I turn the surfaces on you can get a better look at the model. In this form he’s a little blocky, but that’s ok. Maya uses a system called subdivision surfaces that round over blocky geometry like this to make a smooth model algorithmically. This means that the model itself contains fewer polygons, and so is easier to store and manipulate. Pretty clever huh? You can thank (among others) Edwin Catmull, computer scientist and current head of Disney Animation via Pixar.

Here’s what my crab looks like with all the bells and whistles turned on. It’s still pretty primitive, but not bad for a first attempt I think. And I didn’t even have to write a makefile.

The last of the concept designs for this training material. For this one I was given free reign to try come up with whatever I could. Given the look of the other two I decided something completely different was in order, so I got out the pencils and just went for it.

The concept for this one centers on this little crab character, a charming but hapless hacker. Each of his exploits provide an example of a common attack strategy of real-world computer criminal including here: network monitoring, social engineering (as in disguises!), and dumpster diving.

Another in the series of training material illustrations. For this concept I wanted something a little more avant garde than the fairly traditional style of the last proposal, so I decided to personify (robotize?) the concept of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. That way I could show him/her/it performing the various functions of the regulations like inspections, network security sweeps and written exams.

Again I went for ink line drawings, but this time I did them with brush and ink to get a rough feel to the lines. Keeping to a limited palette I added color as a sort of cutout style with scanned in paper textures.

I think this last one is my favorite. It shows the robot doing a network security scan.

I’ve been working on a series of illustrations for some corporate training materials. As part of the effort I created a number of character and style proposals as examples of different directions the project could go. These pieces were from storyboards of some of the early designs. The story follows an executive at a company who carelessly loses a laptop with customer data on it, resulting in bad press for the company and disgruntled customers.

These training materials will be shown to people in a number of different counties and cultures, so we needed something that would look generic enough not to be any specific ethnicity or style, but still charming (hence the hair and stature).

For these guys and gals I drew the characters and set pieces by hand and then vectorized the line art and added digital paint. This way each component (head, body, arms, legs, etc) is a separate piece that can be animated later in flash or after effects.

More to come . . .

A great big thanks to everyone who came out to the KU Design Department’s Senior show. I think things went really well.

If there’s one great thing about the show it’s seeing all those talented people. But if there are 2 great things about the show they are: seeing the people, and getting swag! Designers and artists have the best business cards — lets face it — and I don’t know about you but my bulletin board is now overflowing.

Which got me thinking . . .

If you’ve ever seen the movie American Psycho then you know how important a business card can be. Crisp letting, off white, thick textured paper stock, even a watermark. Not all of us can afford the trappings of power like that.  Some of us have to make our own.

Here’s the front of my card:

And this was the original back (minus the contact information):

I liked this idea, but the image had some issues trying to be light enough to represent a pencil test but dark enough to show up on the card.  Plus it didn’t leave much room for the contact info, so I took another run at things in gouache.

This is the back I ended up using, cropped tightly in around the character with contact info to his right.

With the senior show fast approaching I’ve been working the past few weeks on logos and other identity and personal branding items. The general rule for branding is usually to be as consistent and unified as possible, which is of course very good advice, and also very boring. I’ve tried to work along a few themes but I’m having too much fun to stick with a single thing.

If you’ve been to my portfolio site (you have been to my portfolio site, right?), then you’ve probably seen my alsoalso circle logo.

This text logo is great, but I’m an illustrator after all, so I wanted something a little more image based. I found this bulbous little umbrella character in my sketchbook.

Based on this little guy I tried a few referencing the alsoalso logo.

Since umbrellas have been such a big theme in things so far, I need some clouds too.

So far this ink and dashed line aesthetic has proven to be pretty flexible. I made these signs for my senior show display.