scribbly paint test

doodles from hanging out on the banks of the Danube

(Surprisingly like a very clean version of the Charles River in Boston.)

Raindogs and custom Photoshop brush rambling

A quick smooshy sketch. Man, I'm such a one-brush horse right now. I promise to post .abr (Photoshop brush file) later, if there's any interest (leave a comment?) Here's a general feel for how it works:

I created it with the idea of making a digital version of the filbert brushes I use when I'm painting in watercolor. I tend to sketch at lower opacity (30%, flow of 20%...ish), and once I'm pretty happy with values, I crank both settings up so that I can paint faster. Something like opacity: 90% and flow: 30%, with lots of sampling back and forth to blend. The key (for me) is that it's not a full range of tip sizes: it's kind of fat and squishy, since I've set the minimum diameter to not much smaller than the max diameter. And Transfer is always on (check in Brush settings, hit the F5 key). Transfer is a friend.

Couple 5 minute sketches, trying to catch this idea...

It should have been a tardigrade.

Last of the samurai sketches

superfast smudgey face warmup

and a real media sketch, one of the 5 minute poses from life drawing....with a whole lot of (ninjaesque) happy lies added on the caltrain:

the kurasawa kind of manliness

Just scanned most of my scribbling from the past weekend's Dr. Sketchy's in SF. (These are 3 hour sessions where local artists show up and do life drawing from a model in costume, usually 5-20 minute poses.) I particularly enjoyed this round, since it was held in a Utretch art store and therefore really well lit, instead of a dark bar...seeing the page definitely helps.

I threw a layer of Japanese handmade paper on multiply over the scan of my rather boring sketchbook.

watercolor sketches

I didn't get all that much drawn while in Japan, but it was a wonderful trip with lots of city and rural hiking and waaaay too many photos. And lots of wagashi (tea sweets). More posts later!

Another sketch for another iOS game....

Filomeno: sketch for another iOS game

And the original rough sketches:

fluffball was being really cute today

Watercolor doodle of my cockatiel hen, who can be incredibly sweet occasionally.

watercolor doodle!

ShantyTown painting notes: behind-the-scenes for other artdorks

I've been doing a pretty shanty job adding thoughtful commentary on process in this blog, probably because by the time I'm posting images it's usually pretty late/early and I just want to go to sleep. This time around, I created a folder and dumped images into them as I went, so a few days out from making a painting I can still give a coherent presentation on the choices that happened. 

<--- First, there was this card. A card so aesthetically out of character for certain game that all of the players in said game started cat-calling or generally making up, well, shanty town shanties whenever it went into play. What was everyone's objection? Mostly that the card art was so obviously in the wrong style (the term "Simpsons" came up a lot) as well as utterly failing to convey what a shanty town was. What is happening on this card? Some kind of weird drug deal out of grounded tree-houses between mask-wearing RenFaire guys by the light of the full moon? It was actively distracting from gameplay, and it's the reason I'm doing this series of hypothetical Dominion card repaints.

So shanty towns. They're not usually very chipper places; crushing poverty, houses sculpted out of refuse, no sanitation. But it's hard not to think of mostly modern incarnations (everything built out of that ubiquitous corrigated steel siding, nylon tarps, and old tires); and the art direction for Dominion (and specifically, the card set this is form, Intrigue) dictates that the setting be some form of 1000A.D. - 1700 A.D., essentially some time in which tyrannical, hereditary monarchies were still a popular form of governance. My first idea that sprang up from a 10 minute sketch was something like this: moody and crumbling, and somehow made of non-anachronistic materials.... (Lots of wood? Rope, and maybe disgusting pieces of old cloth/hides?)

I started trying to refine this sketch into a painting, but...with no idea of what the actual houses were built out of, I sat there tapping my stylus a bit and going, "Huh." (All those European History BAs out there? Salute to you guys. All my background knowledge is in the cognitive theory of attention, and also monkeys.) So I shantied off across the internet for an hour, trying to answer the question, "What does a slum town that springs up around the edge of a vaguely European nation/state capital in the 1200's look like?"

As you can tell, I got distracted and drew giant bugs and desert warriors in the corner. But hey. I did some research. Haystacks and old rushes and broken wagon wheels: sort of like the litter of the 1300's? And while I was at it, I was really trying to solve the communication problem that the original card didn't meet: the art on the card should be about getting an abundance of desperate people to do your bidding, and it's also about a town or region. (Human interest is important, but the shanty town itself has to show up at 2"x3" from five feet back.)

So at the bottom left corner there is the compostion that I think I can make cover all of the demands: shanty town is understandably a slum and a town, some human interest going on, middle ages, poor, and also kind of dark. This is that image, blown up and with some middle gray dropped over it.

And then over the course of 3 hours: a whole lot of value control, subtle composition edits for size, making sure clothing and architecture make reasonable sense, and a whole lot of rendering....(Put on some montage music, if you've got it.)

(I'm not so happy about the color, but I told myself I'd do this in less than 5 hours, so the color was left pretty vague, somewhere around "icky 8pm smoggly night fog", as frequently seen around San Francisco.)

<--So here's how my final card repaint came out. (Just to be clear, I'm doing these as a design exercise and just for fun; I'm hoping Rio Grande Games doesn't mind. I do actually own all of the real paper cards, and play the heck out of them.) The scan of the original card came from http://dominion.diehrstraits.com/?card=shanty+town, and if you're like me and all this reading about it makes you need a Dominion fix, you should head over to http://dominion.isotropic.org/. 

Final note; everything in this post was done digitally in Photoshop CS4 or 5. Woo. (Except the paper textures; scanned those from my favorite sketchbooks, Canon cold press something or other.)

waiting for the 10:40pm Caltrain

Tiny super-fast sketches, 4rth&KingSt station.

DominionRedux: Duchess sketch

I am excited for this babe, because despite a quick googleimage trawl for "duchess"+"oil painting" revealing primarily bored women, and bored women with ugly babies, I think a card that gives you +2 coin AND lets you clean up the junk off the top of your deck...come one, give the lady some credit. Plus. Since she comes with any given Duchy, you know that she's got huge...tracts of land. Amirite?

Bonus link: At the moment, she is lookin' a little too sassy about holding the purse-strings, maybe? http://goo.gl/g5Qf7

[Update: So much fun, this picture]

A quick 20 warm up paint

DominionRedux: ShantyTown

DominionRedux: I love Dominion and I love painting. So just for fun, I'm painting my versions of some of the original cards.... [ Original art of Shanty Town at diehrstraits.com]

DominionRedux: Envoy

DominionRedux: I love Dominion and I love painting. So just for fun, I'm painting my versions of some of the original cards.... [ Original art of Envoy at diehrstraits.com]

What Other People Wore Today: Teddybear vests and hair capes

(Drawing my own fashion statements would be very boring: I own black jeans and two black hoodies, both exactly the same.)

Why did all my siblings grow up into evil villains?

Sketched entirely in Photoshop, hommies. I finally scanned all the paper types that I used to draw on in highschool, and it feels like coming home, even if I'm just hanging out on an overlay layer.

Susabell

20 minute paints each

Sketchin' some jackets.

.....Yeaaaah, the animal thing was a good kick in the paints, but became a drag by day 9. Been slamming my uneducated head into how to draw people better over the past few weeks, since I've been cheating my way along on really skant knowledge for far too long. Cannot recommend Messeurs Loomis or Vilppu enough, if anyone else ends up in this cul-de-sac.

I can't seem to get designs for the Shift (a comic I'm working on with my friend Max Gladstone) settled at all, and a lot of that seems to be due to a big gaping hole in my skill set that I'm trying to repair right now.

With a little help from my friends... (Day 9)

A Fail Whale permutation. http://goo.gl/sf8gC :)

Raptorington returns (Day 8)

Raptorington returns, the scrawny scaley sissy that he is. ('bout 45 minutes of messing around in Photoshop.)

He's from a short film I made back in 2008. Dan says he's gained weight since I last drew him. :)

(The animation is here: http://youtu.be/ILEihs3cbmg )

We wuz jest havin' a friendly word w' 'im (Day 7)

more DF art and other doodles

I find it very charming that for Harry Dresden, "Evil Subconcious Version of Self" translates into, "Probably just a version of me that knows how to use hair product and owns cooler black clothing".

This was just painted from vague memory, but I wanted to read the scene again when I was posting this...and look what I found on google books! As part of my mission to destroy someone else's productive day, here's a link to tasty, tasty story.

This silly picture is still popping up in the background from time to time, when I'm hanging out with friends and fooling with paint and half my brain. :) It makes me miss falling asleep by the fire in my old apartment so much...

Finally, a doodle for use as profile ID on random sites.