After a couple of hours spent mucking around with this film ref image, I think I've actually made it worse than it was before! Just so I don't feel like it was completely wasted time though I'm putting it up here anyway a lesson to myself not to over-fiddle.

Another lunchtime speedie from film ref. I'm not too happy with this one so far, might play around with it a bit more if I get time.

I've gone back to working on this one for a while...

secret garden party here I come!

Here's an update on three pigs picture.
It's pretty much just straight rendering from here on out, so no more explanatory text I'm afraid! By this stage I'm doing things intuitively (but not always correctly!) so it's quite hard for me to break it down into useful info... sorry!
anyway, here's the art so far, still got a hell of a long way to go...

Just had some work featured in the superb online magazine Carne.
It's a free downloadable image heavy mag with loads of cool work from artists and photographers.
Go and have a look!
carnemag.com

and another speedie:

and another one....

Lunchtime quickie from a screengrab. Just under an hour.

Hello again

STAGE 4 continued:
When I got to the stage where I was happy with the sketch of the four central characters I created a document with the dimensions I wanted (I normally paint on a canvas roughly 5000 x 3000 pixels in size) and pasted them in. Then I spent about an hour just moving and scaling them around the page until they were sat in a space I liked, which ended up being fairly central.

STAGE 5
I hate doing backgrounds, I find them really dull to paint compared to characters, but in some cases you just can't do without them. In this painting quite a lot of the "story" is going to be told by the background (house blown down, bath broken etc.) so I've got to put a bit of thought into it. Firstly I drew a load of rough and quick directional lines and circles over the image marking wear the viewers eye flows around the page, and some other lines where I WANT it to flow.
The picture below is a little bit misleading because it looks like I drew the outline of the buildings/furniture etc then shaded it in, when actually it was the other way around. I slapped in some very quick tone using just the direction lines as a guide, the aim being to define and emphasize the characters. Once that was done I went back in and scribbled some rough outlines of a broken house over the blocks of tone. The main thing to point out I suppose is light pigs = dark background dark wolf = light background; this was so neither faction was more prominent than the other but both stood out against their respective backgrounds.

Having got that out of the way (and because I find backgrounds so tedious!) I went back and started working up the outfit of the wolf. I wanted her to have a sort of military/ringmastery vibe. I internally debated for ages on wheter or not to go fully nude; I normally try and avoid it if possible for a number of different reasons which I can't be bothered going into right now. In this case however the wolf just didn't look right with pants on; I like the brazen-ness it gives her character to be (nearly!) fully dressed but still essentially naked.

Then I started throwing some quick and dirty colour in. At this point I nearly threw my wacom pen done in digust and washed my hands of the whole horrible mess. Sometimes things just don't go the way you want them to! I gave myself a bit of a break from the pic and worked on some other stuff for a couple of days.

A few days away gave me a better perspective of where I was going wrong, and I went back in and started tweaking colours. This is a bit too brown/purpley at the minute, but compared to the monstrosity above it's a masterpiece!

Most of the tweaks from now on will be fairly self-explanatory so that's pretty much the end of the written portion of this run through I think. So now when I say "I did a quick sketch and then started colouring it" this is an approximation of the process that goes on. Hope it was interesting!

This is the second pic I did for Bizarre magazines editors page of one of their staff members.

Just found out my Missy Malone pic made it to the cover of the excellent Milkcow Magazine!

Hello!
I realised today that while I sometimes post process gifs and WIP shots, I always neglect the most important initial parts of a drawing. I've just started work on a new fairytale picture and I thought this would be an excellent oppurtunity to rectify that omission. So without further ado, here we go!

STAGE ONE: THE IDEA

I can't really give any pointers for how to get "the idea" in the first place, as it can come from any number of places; something you see in the street, something you read in a book or watch in a film, or something that just suddenly occurs to you. In this case, my missus said to me "why don't you do a picture of the three little pigs?" and immediately I got a couple of images in my head - a sure sign that it's a good idea!

The next bit unfortunately doesn't have a lot of documentation because most of it is going on my head; pondering situations, scenarios ,positions and compositions etc. I finally half settled on the idea of three "pigs" (cute pink curvy blonde women) who had just been having a lovely bath when the evil "wolf" (tall, athletic scary woman) blew their house down. I considered making the wolf both a big nasty Wolf or a scary man, but as the pigs were going to be really dominated I thought it would be a bit rapey, so went with a woman instead.
During this process I'll normally make a few scribbled notes and doodles on whatever paper I can find lying around. Here's one I scanned in:

All the writing (apart from "dinosaur", I've got no idea where that came from) is stuff that I thought might make good reference or prompts to remind of ideas so I don't forget.
At one point I was thinking of drawing one of the pigs still in the bath, but decided against it eventually. Here are the doodles:

STAGE TWO: INITIAL SKETCH

This is where I actually start the drawing proper. I liked the general composition of the doodle in the first sketch, so I scanned that into photoshop and redrew it in slighty more detail. If you look closely you can see the "cuts" in the image where I've grabbed a section of it in photoshop and pulled it around to a postion I like.

At this stage I'm still not entirely settled on anything, just doodling around the image trying to get shapes I'm happy with. It generally involves putting each character on a separate layer in photoshop and scaling them around, changing limb positions and so on. Once I've got a composition I think will work and an idea of how I want the final image to look I'll move onto the next stage.

STAGE THREE: REFERENCE GATHERING

I should say that I don't actually think about this process in stages, I'll just do it as I find necessary. I might get reference first, or not at all. Sometimes I go straight into drawing in Photoshop and skip the doodling stage altogether. I'm just writing it out this way because it's a general approximation of how I work and makes it easier to read. Okay, so, stage three.
This is the part where using all the ideas, sketches and notes I've got so far I'll start googling for images that might be useful. This can range from images that might be good for anatomy to stuff that might have the "look" I'm aiming at for the final finish. For this image I ended up with a ton of stuff ; old master paintings, disney images, pinup photos, nature photography and more. I probably won't use half of it but even just looking for it is useful because it helps solidify in my head exactly what I want the picture to look like. I normally keep all the images separate or paste groups of them together in one image (ie "wolf", "laying pig" etc) but for the purposes of demonstration I've pasted a few of them over the sketch so you can see the relevance.

STAGE FOUR: GETTING ON WITH IT!

Now's the time when I stop procrastinating and doing all the things I do to distract myself; "accidentally" looking at porn when I'm reference gathering, writing process essays that no-one will ever read and anything else I can and will do (unintentionally normally; I LIKE drawing!) to delay actually getting started. Just straight drawing from now on! Using all the initial ideas and all the reference I've gathered I'll start tightening the loose sketch up and trying to fix any composition and anatomy issues. For example you might notice that the previously standing pig is now kneeling. That was because I wanted her head at a certain height for the composition, but she just looked too short and stunted standing up so I got her on her knees. I also pulled out the laying pigs arm a little to balance the image and tweaked the pose of the wolf a little to make her appear more arrogant.

So that's where I'm up to so far. All this is still up in the air though, and I'll keep pulling the poses and composition around right through the whole process. One thing that really is invaluable and I do it A LOT is flipping the image horizontally. Seeing the picture the other way round will often make me notice mistakes that I hadn't otherwise seen.

Ok, that's it for now! I'll post more as I do it. Hope that was interesting enough and I didn't ramble too much!

For a while now I've been working on a portrait of the stunning Nina Kate. She's a British clothing designer who runs her own company Jane Doe Latex and does modelling as well.


And some details...


Hope you like!

Readers of Bizarre magazine may or may not have noticed that I've been doing some illustrations of various staff members over the last couple of months for the editors page. Once the relevant mags have been out for a while I'll post up the images so non-readers can have a look too.

Here's the first one, the evil Dr. Blackthorn!

A bit late notice I know, but if anyone is in Bath on Sunday swing by the Fringe Arts Bath street market in Saw Road where I'm going to have a stall. Come and say hello; any blog readers will get a discount on purchases!