Category: Art

Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.

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WIP – Medusa and Bats

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Slowly, pixel by bloody pixel, this thing is getting done. I’m squeezing in 15-30 min sessions of work on this between other projects, which is partly why it’s taking so long. The other reason this is taking forever is that I’ve never done something in this particular digital painting style before. But I like what I’ve done so far, and I think I’m learning something. I think once I get a few things cleared off my plate, I may reserve one day a week just for personal art so I can finally knock this sucker out.

What’s changed since the last version? More blending on Medusa’s dress, plus I’m playing with the color a bit, adding highlights and shadows in complementary colors. The cool colors are getting a bit of warmth and the warm colors are getting a bit of cool. I think it makes things pop a bit more. I added faint yellow highlights to Medusa’s hair and purple shadows ot the dress. I still think Bats’ hat is the best part of the painting so far though, with the very bold contrast between the purple and red. Makes me think I need to ramp up my contrasts in other places as well.

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Cover Art – Best S&M III

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I’m in the process of updating the art gallery with some of the cover art I’ve done this year. This was a book cover I did this summer for Best S&M Volume III, an anthology edited by the very talented writer M. Christian. When the publisher, Logical-Lust.com, and I tossed around ideas for this piece, we kept coming up with the standard images – a cropped photo of woman’s corsetted torso, a close up of handcuffs on a woman’s arm, etc. I hate the anonymous, cropped woman image. It makes it seem like BDSM is only for submissive women, specifically those who are too ashamed to show their faces and acknowledge what they enjoy. So I decided I wanted to do a fun piece of artwork, showing both a man and a woman laughing and having fun themselves, and maybe the woman is the one in charge here, or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter so long as all parties involved are having a good time. With all those elements in consideration, this is the cover I came up with.

The image was first rendered in DAZ Studio, then taken into Photoshop for postworking and effects.

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WIP – Medusa and Bats

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Here’s the latest update on Medusa and Bats. I haven’t had much time to work on it lately, so I stole half an hour this evening to do some more blending on the characters. I can see a few places where I’m going ot need to add contrasting colors, and for the life of me, I don’t really know what I’m going to do about the bat yet. He’s really, really awful looking, but I’ll figure something out eventually.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the announcements I made on Twitter yet, I have a new project up and running. It’s the Very Scary Art website, a gallery of kids’ artwork about things that scare them. The site was set up in support of DonorsChoose.org. Go take a look!

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Personal Art – Aphrodite in Stone, 2005

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Aphrodite in Stone, 2005

This is another rare ZBrush image for me. I had no idea what I was doing when I started it, and I’m not sure what I learned from it other than the fact I find ZBrush to be very confusing. I so wanted to learn how to make poseable 3D figures, but doing this piece hurt my tiny little brain. I did like the end result, however. I especially liked the hair and the sea shell she’s holding. That blue to yellow blend worked wonderfully. I think that was a texture map I painted in Corel Photopaint, so this one wasn’t entirely done in ZBrush, but 99.9% of it was.

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Personal Art – Innana

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Innana, 2004

After completing work on two book covers and a website design for Logical-Lust Publications, I put this together to post on the LL site with my bio. Done in Poser, with a background sky from Bryce, and the clothing textures and transparency maps done in Corel Photopaint and Corel Draw. It was probably something I struggled to complete at the time, but now I could knock this out in a couple days. Amazing what a few years of practice will do for an artist.

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Personal Art – Dryads

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Dryads, 2004

This was a personal project, created using ZBrush. I love the results I can get out of ZBrush, but the learning curve is steep. Setting up the dryad characters involved learning how to sculpt them in ZBrush’s “intuitive” interface, then paint them, and then pose them. I found the program to be not so intuitive, and so I haven’t done much with it on a regular basis. I know it well enough to know what I should be able to do with it, but then when I use it, I spend the next few weeks beating out my brains on my desk as I try to figure out how to get the program to do what I want it to do.

By the way, this is one of the few 3D images I’ve done using just one program. I’ll say this for ZBrush. You don’t have to go to an outside program for post-work. You can pretty much do it all right there. Which may be why I find it so damned complicated. There’s too much packed into one program for me.

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Cover Art – Eternally Noir

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Eternally Noir, 2004

I’ve decided to redo the art gallery for this website in a fashion that will make life easier for me. Rather than try to set up a page with little thumbnails that link to other pages I have to create by hand, I’m simply going to post each piece of finished art I’ve got as a blog entry, under the delightful category of “Gallery.” I’ll change the link at the top menu to go straight to this category, so you can see every blog entry just by scrolling through.

And since I’m redoing things, I thought I’d start way, way back at the very beginning of my career as a paid freelance artist. The image above was created in 2004 and is one of the very first ebook covers I did for Logical-Lust Publications. The title was Eternally Noir and the brief I got just said to design something spooky and sexy. This image was inspired by a Michael Whelan book cover done for the Tanith Lee short story collection Red as Blood, a series of fairy tales done by the Sister Grimmer herself.

The image started in ZBrush, where I created the tree in the background. I created the bloody red sky in Bryce, and put all that behind a model in Poser. Then after the final render, I took everything into Corel Photopaint to work a little post-FX magic, enhancing the highlights and shadows and adding that lovely poisonous red glow to the apple. You know, if I recall correctly, I may have actually created that apple in Carrara and mapped it in UVMapper. Can’t recall that far back to be certain.

Anyway, this turned out to be the first of many covers I have done for Logical-Lust, and the first of many that I ended up using everything including the kitchen sink to produce.

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WIP – Pilgrim for Love cover art

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Here’s the latest cover I’m working on – Pilgrim for Love by Anna Austen Leigh. The brief I got made me think of Chaucer’s Canterbury tales, the really racy ones, with a love story thrown in for good measure. The reference material the author sent made me think of wood cuts and prints, so I did some fancy fiddling with Photoshop to come up with a woodcut sort of look in black and white. Then I colored the individual pieces and added some aged paper texture to get the feel of an antique illustrated book.

This isn’t final yet, but I’m hoping it will be soon. The book comes out soon from Logical-Lust.

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Quick Sketch – Autumn Leaf

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Princess has an assignment this week to find and draw an an autumn leaf. We picked up a bunch of leaves from our backyard last night. She’s not quite done with her drawing, but I decided to do one last night before bedtime. Here’s the results. This is just a quick sketch made with Faber Castell brush pens. Again, no pencil drawing. I’ve learned that when I just skip the pencil sketch and go straight to pen, I get a much better result. Things are looser, more fluid, and more organic looking. Penciling first makes my artwork look too awkward and constrained.

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The Little Death – Inspector Slade

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More character notes on “The Little Death.” Agent Robin Helki is the heart and soul of the novel, but without Inspector Michael Slade she’s got no reason to really live. Who is Inspector Slade, and what is his relationship to Robin? How long has he been on the Fifth Precinct police force? What crime is he investigating now? And how does that affect Robin?

In “The Little Death,” there are espers and there are norms. Robin falls into the first category, Slade into the later. OverWatch has decreed that the two classes of citizens shall not interbreed for any reason. It’s simply too dangerous. Will Robin and Slade heed that warning, or take the risk? And does Robin really dare trust Slade as she slowly descends into the madness all espers fall prey to?

For anyone who’s wondering, I’m doing these sketches on cheap art paper with Micron drawing pens and a Pentel brush pen. The painting is done in ArtRage Pro. It’s a quick job, but enough to give me a feel for what Robin’s world is like.