Category: Art

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

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing continued

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WIP – “What’s Missing?” by Helen E. H. Madden, 2 March 2011

Well, I got the sketch as finalized as I was going to get it, so I finally switched to the underpainting stage. Again, I’m still following the tutorial in Digital Artist Magazine (this was last month’s issue, with the article on using metallic paint in ArtRage). I’ve got all the basic colors laid down and some ideas for the lighting. Next I want to import some photos for texture and then get to the nitty gritty of the painting stage.

So far, I like it. But I have a feeling before too much longer I’m going to have to move this piece to the PD and blow up the size to really get the detail in the painting that I want. We’ll see. I’ll post the results next week.

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Freaky Friday! Self-portrait of the Artist with a Snake!

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“A Very Scary Self-Portrait” by Helen E. H. Madden, 13 February, 2011

This portrait will eventually go up on the Very Scary blog, where I have been working with my good friend Mich to scan in, display and review several pieces of children’s artwork that we picked up at the March to Keep Fear Alive. I’ll be drawing a cartoon of Mich as well, one that includes her greatest fear which is spiders. Mine is snakes, as you can tell from the image above.

This was drawn on my iPad, once again using ArtRage. I think ArtRage is ideal for cartooning, especially on the iPad. I do like Brushes and Sketchbook as well, but I’m more familiar with ArtRage and the fact that it has a pen tool makes it perfect for me.

If you haven’t been over to Very Scary yet, take a moment and go look! We have guest reviews written by really cool people. Enjoy the art, leave a comment, and consider helping out with the Very Scary site. We’ve got over 500 pieces of artwork to review, so we could always use a few volunteers 😉

BTW, I’m at Farpoint this weekend, so if you’re there and you see me, be sure to say “Hi!” I promise I won’t run away screaming.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing?

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What’s Missing, WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 15 Feb 2011

I haven’t gotten too much farther on this one. The whole Girl Scout Cookie Mom thing has pretty much eaten what little spare time I had. Hell, it’s eaten my entire life at this point.

Anyway, I finished up the sketch, combined all layers of the pencil drawings, and then started adding in loose shadows using the oil paint brush in ArtRage. I’ve got the thinners set between 80-90% and the loading up around 100%. I laid the oil paint down in a separate layer over the pencil sketch. I may put a copy of the sketch on top so I can continue to see it as I work. Don’t know yet though. I do know the next step will be to lay down the basic colors.

I’m going to be at Farpoint this coming weekend and plan to take my iPad with me. Hopefully I’ll get some more work on this done while I’m there.

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Freaky Friday! Ferocious Fat Felines Fly For Free!

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“Ferocious Fat Felines Fly For Free…” by Helen E. H. Madden

I have a number of small journals lying around the house and occasionally I will pick one up and doodles something in it. This particular piece was the first drawing in a journal of various colored papers that I bought 7 years ago. In 7 years, I have drawn a grand total of 6 drawings in this book, not including the artwork I pasted on the cover. It’s one of those things that I get really interested in doing a particular piece in the journal and I work on it a little bit every day, then I sort of abandon the journal for a while and drift off to do other things.

This drawing was created all in one night, or a couple of nights in a row, I’m not exactly sure which. But I can tell you what inspired it and the circumstances under which it was drawn. Hurricane Isabelle was headed our way and my family and I had evacuated to my best friend’s house to wait out the storm. Mary had a set of magnetic poetry pieces on her fridge that I started playing with while we were there and for some reason I came up with the line “Ferocious Fat Felines Fly For Free!” I decided it needed a drawing to go with it and as I just happened to have a brand new art journal and a brand new box of crayons and some brand new Micron pens, I started to work on it.

This drawing had no plan beyond illustrating that one line I had created. It ended up being a very literal interpretation of the line, with some weird random symbolism thrown in for no good reason. I like it though. I especially like the colors. The paper was actually a light greyish blue, but there’s so much green and yellow laid down, you can’t really tell.

Even though I like this piece and others I’ve created like it, I always wonder is this sort of stuff really art? Is anybody going to like it? I had fun making it, but otherwise was it a waste of time and crayons? I guess what I’m really asking is, do YOU like it? Would you buy a poster of something like this? Does the whimsical nature of this piece strike a chord within you, or do you just sort of roll your eyes after looking at it and go, “What sort of idiot would draw such nonsense?”

However you feel about it, let me know. I’m curious to see what people think.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing, part 1

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What’s Missing, WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 6 Feb 2011

The latest issue of Digital Artist magazine had a lovely article on using the metallic paint settings in ArtRage. I’ve been reading everything I can find on ArtRage lately, since I’ve been enjoying using the program on my iPad, and I decided to see if I could replicate the results of the Digital Artist article in some of my own artwork.

I decided to follow the same process outlined in the article, starting with a detailed sketch of what I wanted to paint. This is a big departure from my previous ArtRage drawings, which have pretty much been created on the fly rather than planned out. Thus this image is going to be here on WIP Wednesday rather than showing up on Freaky Friday, because it’s going to take longer to produce.

The sketch is heavily influenced by the artwork in the DA article, which was also of a robot. I like robots, so I’m more than happy to try and paint a few. I’m still working out the details of the sketch, especially the background. I have a hard time creating environments for my artwork, thus my preference for doing portraits. But I think it’s time I stretched my wings a bit, so I’m going to create as detailed a background as I can here. I’ve borrowed other elements from the DA painting as well, including the windows with a strong light source and the idea of a robot painting something. However, the theme is a bit different, as you’ll see if you check out this month’s issue of DA.

Next week I hope to have the sketch finalized. Then I can start the underpainting stage, something else I don’t normally do with my ArtRage doodles. We’ll see how this works!

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Freaky Friday! The Blue Devil

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“The Blue Devil” by Helen E. H. Madden

Another iPad drawing, using ArtRage. Have I mentioned how much I love both the iPad and ArtRage? Have I?

Seriously though, this time I opted for a smoother look and used the airbrush for all my coloring. I have a fondness for bright, contrasting colors and the combination of orange/red, bright blue and violet happens to be my current favorite.

I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this yet or not, but I picked up a stylus for my iPad. I didn’t use it too much on this drawing, as it was mostly finished by the time I got the stylus. But I will use it for the next one. It’s easier to see where I’m starting my stroke when I use a stylus. When I use just my finger, my view of the start point is blocked by my hand.

I’m posting these to my deviantArt page as well, and making each piece available as postcards, magnets and mugs. So if you like this week’s Blue Devil, you can buy it here! Just click the “Buy this print” button on the right to see the merchandise. And thank you for your support!

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WIP Wednesday – The Cookie Thief, final

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“The Cookie Thief” by Helen E. H. Madden

Well, here it is, the final version of “The Cookie Thief.” It’s not really finished, but I’ve done as much as I want with this image for now. So I’m letting it rest and moving onto another WIP next week.

What I learned from this WIP. I like the Brushes app for the iPad a LOT. It’s very easy to use and responds very well. I still love ArtRage, but Brushes is far less buggy and hasn’t yet crashed on me like ArtRage has on a few occasions. I think Brushes is great for anything painterly style, including certain cartoons, but I’d still go with ArtRage for ink style line art for now.

I also learned the importance of keeping stuff on separate layers. I screwed myself by painting the thief and the cookie jar on the same layer initially and I had to go back and fix that to make it easier to shade. I also think I would have been better off working back to front, getting that second jar done first before working on the cookie jar and then the thief. Of course, this would have implied I’d had a plan when I started this piece…

So this is it for this piece for now. I may try to set things up so that I can export the Brushes actions for this painting to my desktop and create an AVI of that so you can see the work in progress. That might be a bit long to watch though. I spent forever on this dang thing. We’ll see if I do that or not.

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Freaky Friday – Lucy

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“Lucy, Bitten” by Helen E. H. Madden, 23 January 2011

After doing all those brightly colored sketches on the iPad, I really wanted to do something a little different. Using what little I know of color theory, I decided on a palette of light green, dark red and creams. This gave me a more subdued painting with a minimalist approach. I opted to use ArtRage’s watercolor brush this time instead of the pen tool. The watercolor brush is more transparent and picks up the texture of the paper, where as the ink tool doesn’t seem to reflect the grain of the paper at all. I also used the airbrush, chalk and crayon tools, but mostly this was done with the watercolor brush.

I like it. I wanted something more ethereal and I think I got it. As I worked on it, it made me think of Hamlet’s Ophelia, and I almost titled it that. But then after I painted the rose, I realized I needed to add the bite marks, and that changed Ophelia to Lucy from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” I have never been able to read through “Dracula.” For some reason, that book just drags for me. But the character of Lucy has always hung with me. Poor Lucy. A bride who died and then had to be killed again. I think that was the only part of the story I really liked.

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WIP Wednesday – The Cookie Thief again

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WIP – “The Cookie Thief” by Helen E. H. Madden

I keep working on this a little bit at a time and I think it’s coming along well. It’s certainly not bad for my first real digital painting. By ‘digital painting’ I mean a work of digital art that I draw and paint in the computer using tools and brush strokes that mimic traditional painting like oils or acrylics. Yes, the stuff that’s been showing up on my Freaky Friday posts is also digital painting, but I consider that more cartooning, which is it’s own weird beast in the realm of digital art. At least it is to me anyway.

I decided to add another jar to the background. I have no idea what should go in it yet. Nor do I think I’m quite finished with the background, though I don’t know what else to add. I may just concentrate on finishing up the two jars and then leave it at that. I can always work on more complicated paintings later on.

Working in Brushes on the iPad has been great, but I’ve discovered that I can only seem to focus on painting digitally for a few minutes at a time. Unless it’s cartoons, and that’s because with the cartoons, I know what I’m doing. With the digital painting, I’m really just feeling my way around in the dark, and I think I keep losing focus after a short time because I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Or rather, I don’t have much confidence in what I’m doing. I’ll keep at it though. I think this particular image looks promising so far.

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Freaky Friday – Astronaut Bob, what happened to you?!

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“Astronaut Bob, What Happened to You?!” by Helen E. H. Madden

Yet another iPad, ArtRage masterpiece. I love the dayglow colors in this one, and the way the brush strokes from the watercolor tool gave the space suit a wrinkled appearance. I had some trouble with this one initially because I drew it in white ink on a dark background, and then had to figure out how to color it between the two extremes of light and dark. My first attempt at coloring this failed massively.

These little sketches are so much fun, and very easy to do on the iPad. It’s sort of like throw-away art, art that I don’t really feel the need to fuss over because it’s a) drawn on the iPad, not an expensive sketchbook, and b) nothing more than a quick doodle, really. I think that allows me to be more experimental and free with what I draw. It’s no big deal, I can draw any stupid little thing I want, and so I do and the results turn out pretty well anyway. It’s nice to know I can do that and get away with it!