Category: Art

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

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WIP Wednesday – the Steampunk Holiday Card That May Never Get Done!

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Steampunk Holiday Card WIP

Do you like it? It’s still a work in progress and I’m starting to think I will never get this done. It seemed like such a simple project to do when I came up with the idea, but at every step of the process, something had gone wrong. I’ve had major software problems, the biggest of which was my prefered 3D package, DAZ Studio, going completely berserk on me. (Actually, I have a far more colorful phrase to describe what DAZ Studio did on my computer, but I’m not going to use it here. However, if you ever catch me in person and really want to hear a rant, ask me about DAZ Studio 4 and how poorly it performed on my computer.) After losing three days to software problems, I finally broke down and bought a copy of Poser Debut, which worked as advertised and did exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, after installing Poser Debut, my computer slowed down to a crawl, to the point where even opening email caused a warning to pop up on my screen saying, “Outlook is using an excessive amount of CPU resources!!” Or something like that.

Anyway, this was supposed to be done the last weekend of October, which turned out to be the weekend I spent pulling three all-nighters to create a race t-shirt for my daughters’ school. That t-shirt design got a lot of nice comments back, which makes me happy, but I’ve been suffering from the time loss ever since. Hopefully, I will finish off this design before December. I will make it available as cards, even though it’s a bit late for that, but I will also make it available as an iPad case, an iPod Touch and iPhone case, and t-shirt design, and maybe a few other products. It’s going to look very nice by the time I’m done, I swear it, with a lovely swirling combination of cogwheels and snowflakes falling down onto the woman’s hair and face, and a steampunk border to go with it. You’ll love it. You’ll want to own it! You’ll demand I make prints of it available for sale. If I can, I will do exactly that. And you’ll buy it because you love me and support me and all that other crap.

Or not. You can simply just look at the smaller images I post here and leave me a loving comment saying, “Nice artwork!” I would be enjoy any feedback you care to give, monetary or otherwise 😉

By the way, if you do like the steampunk artwork, let me know. I’m working more and more on developing themes for products in the Zazzle shop, and if there’s something in particular you’d like me to draw more of – more steampunk, more zombies, more robots, etc. – I’d be happy to accomodate you.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, people!

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PerCaDraMo Day 20 – When In Doubt, Draw a Robot

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I once read a line somewhere that said, “When in doubt, draw a fishie.” I prefer drawing robots, but the idea is the same. When you don’t know what to draw, have a fall back idea. Drawing tha will usually loosen up the ol’ creativity and lead to other drawings.

Drawn with SketchClub on my iPad, using the sketchy tool. My favorite drawing app, by the by.

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PerCaDraMo Day 18 – The Disease Known as Old Age

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I wouldn’t really call old age a disease, but sometimes it’s treated as such. People get old, unless the die young. And getting older means watching your body decay, which I think everyone hates. I know I hate seeing the lines that have become permanently etched upon my forehead and around my mouth, and my neck these days looks more and more like my grandmother’s, which kind of horrifies me. I’m trying to appreciate the process of growing older; I’m only 42, after all. But even so, I find myself fighting it tooth and nail.

Some days I wish I could just accept that there’s no cure for old age.

Today’s entry was drawn on the iPad using ArtRage and SketchClub. I discovered there are some nifty features to the pen tool in SketchClub and I may start using it more often for cartooning. I like the look of the artwork I get with that program.

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Freaky Friday! Steampunk Art Experiment

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This is a little sample of something that I’m currently playing with. I switched last week from DAZ Studio to Poser Debut for my character renders. DAZ Studio 4, the free version, was so borked when I installed it, I couldn’t even click on the main menu with the mouse and get a response. So I uninstalled, tried re-installing DAZ Studio 3, discovered why I upgraded anyway (because after the last update, DAZ Studio 3 refused to parent props and other items to the character which made posing characters for scenes impossible), and then threw up my hands and said, “Fuck it! I’m going back to Poser!” I dumped Poser a few years ago, of course, because it was so borked I could barely get it to run on my computer. Poser Debut, however…

The beauty, at least right now, of Poser Debut is that it is a stripped down version of the full blown (or should I say ‘bloated’?) program. It lets you do pretty much one thing and one thing only – pose characters and render them. Okay, that’s two things, and apparently Poser Debut will let you do animation as well, but I don’t want to do 3D animation, I just want to pose and render characters for my artwork.

So this is a test run of Poser Debut, featuring a Steampunk art project I’m working on right now. I played around with the render in Photoshop, working to transform it from a basic render to a comic-book style image. It’s far from perfect, but I like the results I’ve got so far. I’ll hopefully finish this project this weekend and you’ll be able to see the end results no later than Sunday evening.

Let me know what you think of this sample so far.