Posts tagged with keywords "ink"
When I uploaded the photos from my five-year-old daughter’s digital camera, I found some shots that managed to capture unexpected looks and expressions on people. I was so taken by at least one I decided to work up an image.
I was also partly inspired by the character “Meave” that I created in my mind for this little piece of fiction for my Lost Heroes RPG project. Here’s the relevant two paragraphs:
The young emo-goth Meave sits by herself in the school cafeteria. She numbly rubs at the healed scars on her wrists. The other kids just ignore her today. This is a good day for her. …
Meave will see her father, the god Dagda, in the distance watching her. She will run from him, run as hard as a princess of worlds that don’t exist can run. And the crows will screech through the sky after her.
During the process I ended up branching and producing a second more creepy character (which I’ve been referring to as “deadeyes”). Anyway, here are the two completed images:
(Which one works best do you think?)
Read More…
This is what three weeks looks like
Two weeks on and I’m still lacking much motivation. Things are getting up to speed though, shortly my daughter will be going back to school signifying the end of the summer and the routine will dramatically change again and in work, all our customers have returned from their holidays and have started dumping crap on us again. And it’s taken me two weeks to just sit down to write this post. Shouldn’t really take that much, but energy and focus have been lacking. I guess the dull weather since getting home has putting on a drain, especially when we had such lovely weather on holidays.
(More pics and drawings after the break)
Read More…
I also had the title “An Adventures in Graphic design and Typography!” in my mind when I started putting together this post, but I think that might be a bit melodramatic. If you’re following me on twitter, you’d have seen this image before, but for those that don’t, what do you think? Does it look like an RPG you’d play?
Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers
Don’t mind the text on the back cover. It’s just a space filler for when I really write something.
I took a short break from working on Lost Heroes RPG and end up working on Lost Heroes RPG! Swinging from writing to graphics and layout. I just started playing around with ideas on paper for the front cover of Lost Heroes as a book and ended up taking it to the end.
I don’t think my efforts are professional, but they look good, good enough to fool you from a distance! 
I’m working with my “limits” here, using what I can do well, to produce something that looks good. The above image was generated using Inkscape, Gimp and original artwork by myself. The little icons I’ve been working on all along (just check out the “drawings” tag to see more about them).
I have to say, I’m loving Inkscape as a tool more and more. I can easily move around and edit elements of the above image. And the images are all scalar vector graphics scalable vector graphics so I can print them out at any resolution and they look good. I’m not sure how they’ll fit into a Desktop Publishing Tool when I finally start to think about layout of the PDFs later for Lost Heroes.
-
-
Inital Concept (pencil)
-
-
Fleshing it out (pencil)
-
-
Fleshing it out #2 (pencil and ink)
-
-
Final Ink of Figure
-
-
Working with the Figure on Computer
-
-
Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers
Here you can see the process in a little more detail. I used pencil, ink and charcoal while playing around with it. My original idea was the abstract “angel” with the floating symbols and a rope tided around his legs pulling him back down to a graphic-inspired city scape. I imagined the logo for Lost Heroes sort of exploding from the top of the image.
I’m not particularly happy with the Lost Heroes logo. It works but its static and a little boring. Doing a little search on “typography” found me getting quite inspired, realising that the text is as much part of the picture composition as anything else. Playing around with it, I wasn’t getting convincing or pleasing results though. I ended up just laying it out and modifying the other elements to work with it.
I finally put some time aside to finish off my “Flower Fairy” image. Here it is:
Flower Fairy (final)
If you remember, I started with this:
Flower Fairy (in ink)
I’ll leave it up to you guys to decide if the final image is better. The background is done in watercolours, the fairy’s colour was done, first by copying with my lightbox, then using grey markers and ink brush and then on the computer I used gimp to colour her. I only have a mouse, not a tablet to do work on the computer. Because of the limitations of using a mouse, I couldn’t finish the fairy character how I liked. I would have liked to strengthen her outline, like the original image, but with a mouse the effort would have looked very flaky.
Here is an inset of just the Flower Fairy, to show you how the colouring came out:
Flower Fairy (final) (inset)
It’s certainly not going to used as an illustration anywhere, but I’m proud of it. I also learned a lot and the more you learn, the better the rest of you’re drawing skill improves.
Taking a break from coding or writing, I did do this little piece for my daughter Alice for her to colour in. It came out especially nice I think, so much so if I get the time I will do my own colouring. Alice’s take on the colours is not yet complete, but I might put it up here (or maybe on facebook) for a bit of fun.
Flower Fairy (in ink)
Also, a few weeks back, my wife bought me a new light box. A nice big one too. I love it, but I don’t have the desk space for it. I have to unpack it before I can use it and then put it away again before we can use the kitchen table for dinner! However, I did go back to the two projects that I had left over when my original light box broke.
I first tackled my “Britney” Satyr and used markers to add tone, planning to use the computer to chose colours.
"Britney" Satyr (colour attempt #1)
While I like the image, I was dissatisfied with it. So I ended up leaving it at this stage. I then dug out my water colours and tackled my Freyja concept (warning nudity):
Read More…
It seems so much easier to blog about my drawings than anything else, it’s certainly not for lack of topics to write about. Probably because I have something tangible to show and talk about. So I picked up my pencils and started doing some work on Sunday. I started drawing this female Satyr, based on a signature character from Lost Heroes RPG. This is my second attempt, but it’s not perfect. The character I imagined is older and more womanly, but I like it and planned to colour it using the technique I was practising in my last post. My wife described it as a “Britney Satyr”! However, as I was taking my pencil sketch and colouring it using markers, my light box gave out all I’ve got right now is the ink image, which loses a lot of the detail.
Female Satyr (in ink)
Once the lightbox broke, I then reverted it to pencil and started attacking a subject I’d like to take on. It’s the story of Freyja and the Brisingman necklace. Because I’m knee deep in Norse mythology at the moment writing for Lost Heroes, I’m thinking a lot about the Norse gods and Freyja, Goddess of love and to a much greater extent than the Greek Goddess of Love Aphrodite, she is also the Goddess of lust. I’m going to try it in watercolours, just because I have the itching to do so.
(The picture contains nudity… so follow the more link to see it) Read More…
Satyr Colourtest #1
So I’ve been playing with some new techniques and some new equipment. The above image is the first colour image I’ve done in a while and it was coloured very quick. I used a “lightbox” to trace the original pencil sketch (which you can see below), then used a selection of toned coptic markers to give it shadow and depth. And finally, using gimp’s hand-drawn selection and “colorify” I was able to colour it in less than 30 minutes. I’m not sure I’m going to continue the image first, it was more for a test of techniques and equipment but I certainly like it. There are lots of little computer tricks I could have applied and I really didn’t go into depth in my choice of colours.
Read More…
If only it was true. My nephew introduced me to his cousins by announcing I could draw anything. I wish. However I did, over the Christmas period, drew for him Spiderman, the Hulk and Batman that he could colour in. Certainly nothing exceptional, but fun to do.
I’ve also taken to doing lots of really quick sketchs these days. I carry a sketch book, a pencil, pen and eraser in my bag now. Sadly I don’t really get the chance to sketch everything I’d like to sketch, its simply not possible with small kids. You can’t tell them to sit and wait for five minutes while I do some scribbles on a pad. So in some cases I’ve taken to snapping a picture on my phone and then when I have a quiet moment, sketching from the image on the screen. Not particularly great, but the best I can do.
So I gathered up some of my best sketchs:
I find it’s fun and liberating trying to rush the sketch and just get something down on paper and at the same time trying to find the right details to capture what made you pick up the pencil. Something like the way to beat procrastinating about writing: just write something, anything, as quickly as possible. I’m finding more and more that I’m not just sketching the object, but whats around, beside and behind it.
I particularly like drawing the buildings in Paris. You just keep adding details and the picture gets more and more elaborate, the longer you’re at it.
The great thing about sketch books is that they are not just practice, not just reference, but also inspiration to yourself. In fact I’ve ditched my electronic PDA as my note taker and reverted back to an ordinary notebook and pen for those reasons. I can do little sketches, draw lines and arrows beside my text and the notes themselves become inspirations for my writing. And now that I’ve finally got my desktop back at home, I can finally get back to doing some serious writing again.
After all the votes were in the font used in “Option 2″ was the winner. More than a few people said they’d have voted for “Option 6″ if I modified it a bit, but after playing with that font for a while, it wasn’t working. Anyway, until I spend money on a genuine graphic artist, this is my working logo:
I could spend time messing with effects or by adding colour, but I think for the time doing it simply will be fine. Now all I have to do is setup the webpage!
(Strange… Wordpress seems to be stretching the image in the post, but if you click on it, you’ll see the original).
Unfortunantly I haven’t been able to write much these few weeks. The main reason is our desktop PC at home is waiting to be repaired and my laptop has become the only computer left in our house – so to keep myself and my wife sane, we’re sharing it in the evening. This forced me off the sofa and digging into my art stuff again.
(Hopefully this post comes out alright on LJ, I can never be quite certain how my Wordpress posts translate to LiveJournal style anymore)
Demon Icon
This picture is one that I did a while ago. I find creating and designing these little graphical symbols quite engrossing. My little sketchpad is full of the previous design iterations for theses. I should really scan in some to show of the thought processes. This one is mean to represent the “Demonic Legions of Hell” for my Lost Heroes RPG project. I know it doesn’t have any traditional iconography of demons, but that is in part intentionally as the design is more subtle that way.
Olympians Icon #3 (Colour)
Olympians Icon #2 (Black Background)
Olympians Icon
The second image I’ve only barely finished. This again was intended to be part of my Lost Heroes RPG project. It’s meant to represent the Olympian and associated Gods. I did quite a variety of designs, finally settling this one. But I’m still not completely happy with it. In fact I did two further varianets of it, which you can see below. The first one I wanted to highlight the rose more so I used solid black for the background and tried to add texture with some hatching lines. The second one, I used colour to highlight the rose, a big departure from the previous icons I’ve done. I’d rather keep to the black and white motif (easier to print) but the colour would does look quite nice. Perhaps I should play around with using greys as well as black?
(More new art and a poll after the “link”)
Read More…
