Ballpoint and paper

Tomorrow I have a conference call with Lori. She and I have conducted business for a couple of years now and she recently got me a gig doing a logo redesign, plus a t-shirt design derived from said logo. It should be a pretty simple project.

On a different, more personal note. My wife and daughter are on away for a week. Jamie went to Henderson to help my mom pack up the rest of the house before it sells. Serenity went with her. I hope my baby girl is being good, but chances are she's gonna make the entire effort interesting.

Now onto the book talk. Tonight I was going to do some digital sketching. Perspective drawings and technical cutaways of some new concepts for the Daedalus Air Ship. My creative brain is orbiting the recent Feng Zhu studies I've done and I'm itching to pop the vehicle sketching DVD back in. But instead of copying him stroke for stroke, in an attempt to replicate his concept, I will follow along only audibly while working on my own concept. This way I can allow a portion of his method to guide the ebb and flow of my idea but keeping the design unique and productive to my goals.

Tonight, however, I will be instead working with ballpoint pen and paper. Knocking out some thumbnails that I can use during the process I just described above. I'll be able to do these while I watch TV. So it allows for some productive me time.

Finally, I have a great idea for the opening sequence of images that will lead into the prologue of the book. It will be akin to Brian Selznick's master works (The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonder Struck) but with a psypher art style.

Good night.

Weird creature

Tonight I loaded up another Feng Zhu DVD. I love this guy's wide range of techniques. He drew this piece with pencil on white paper. I worked digitally with Sketchbook Pro being the primary software.

Unlike his approach I can't change the width of the pencil on the fly and drop in broad strokes of value so my drawing has a lot more crosshatching. At the end of the demo I kept on working on the piece by dropping in a warm grey multiply layer and then going over it all with a white color pencil. I also through in a 10% opaque dark green multiply layer to add more depth and color.

On the down side. I've been all over the place with regards to my style of choice for the art in my novel. I think what I'm trying to do is sample a variety in hopes of finding a good blend. Only time will tell.

Detailed environmental drawing.

A couple days ago I started this drawing. I followed along with Feng Zhu (one of my favorite artists) from beginning to completion. This is his concept. Feng worked with ink and marker and according to the DVD, which didn't appear to be sped up, he finished in approximately 2 hours. I tried to replicate his technique using digital. I worked mostly with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, as it has a great ruler and ellipse tool. It took me a total of approximately 6 hours to do this as I would constantly pause the DVD and do my own thing.

This was a very fun exercise. I look forward to doing more as I continue to work through the rest of my Gnomon DVD collection. Eventually I will go back through and attempt to apply the things I learn to my own universe and characters, primarily those from my novel.

Below you can see the step by step process I used.

The first step is roughing out some quick guidelines. I laid down the horizon line and started to draw out diagonals that recede to the vanishing point. Next I dropped in some more vertical lines and extra horizontal lines for measurement. At this point I wasn't using Sketchbook Pro, but Corel painter. I used a clear plastic ruler over my Cintiq monitor to get the straight lines.

Here I started freehand drawing some more forms and dropped in some value to help  define the main building in the foreground.

Still working in Corel Painter I continued to quickly sketch, making sure to work the entire piece and not linger in one area too long. This is important, because I would otherwise obsess over details that don't matter yet.

At this stage Feng started inking. So I switched over to Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. Using the ballpoint pen tool and the  ruler and ellipse tool I was able to create lines with consistent angles. This is important in perspective drawing as it helps to reinforce scale. If an object or building structure repeats into the distance it needs to do so without question.

I was unhappy with the upper structure. I had eyeballed the perspective but it didn't read as I wanted. So I erased it with a plan to remake it.

Here I "rebuilt" the upper structure using some tricks with perspective drawing to ensure that the shapes repeated into the distance with accuracy.

At this point in the DVD, Feng made a photocopy of his drawing and sharpened the image to clean it up and make the line work read better. Since I was working digitally I flattened the image and brought it into Photoshop, where I adjusted the levels to resemble the photocopy Feng had.

Back in Sketchbook Pro I used the felt pen tool to start blocking out shadow shapes and help some of the suggested forms pop more.

The pen stage is just about finished here. I added some figures for scale. Now you can really tell how big this structure is and threw down a dark frame to give the viewer a focused point of view.

At this stage I went back to work in Corel Painter. I tried different tools in Sketchbook Pro to get the look for Prismacolor marker, but it wasn't working. With Painter I am able to use the Scratch Board tool at 30% opacity on a multiply layer set between 20-30% opacity. What this essentially does is create layers. Each new layer added with the same settings contributes value so it's like having the marker dry and going over it again. 

Almost done. I added some more value to really bring the closer objects forward. Finally I added some white highlights to the edges of hard surfaces. 

Feels good to draw agian

It's been a few weeks since I carved out some time from my schedule to do some detailed sketching. I know I did those black and white sketches last week, but this here is a more involved perspective exercise. I will be using this approach when it comes time to render out the vehicles from my book.

I won the Gnomon Workshop Art Contest a few months ago, but never finished watching all the DVD's. So today I decided to take a day off Web Design and popped one into my PC. I followed along with one of my favorite artists, Feng Zhu.

This image is a quick thumbnail sketch in which I got four quick ideas down to evaluate the silhouette and pick one to move forward with.

Loosely based on the top right thumbnail. This exercise made use of perspective and center line measuring by eye. I didn't use a ruler or straight line tool for a single line as I need to practice drawing with my entire arm and pivoting from my elbow.

Without a plan

I have heard from numerous mentors, "Without a plan, you plan to fail."

That has never before rung more true than my recent reintroduction to Web Design. I was so excited, almost intoxicated by my accomplishment with my new website that I failed to step back and look at the bigger picture.

I had created a smooth animation, but as I add more to it the file size is becoming unmanageable. So now I've decided that I should compartmentalize each section; I will make each "page" of the site a separate movie clip (SWF) and then import them as they are called for. And that's where my new obstacle lies.

I created a busy main timeline. Almost every element I animated exists on that timeline and the layers exceed 50. Luckily they are properly named, but still... 50 layers! So now I have to move some things around and adjust the pacing. I pretty much have to reverse engineer the layout and rebuild the site with better planning. It will probably take me a few days.

So maybe I didn't plan to fail, but it does seem that I planned to waste some time. Oh well. At least this wasn't done on a paying job, where time is literally money.

On a good note I have the preloader working great! The code is easy to understand and I will be able to use it in some cool looking ways a little later. Also the contact form is all but ready to go, the only thing I'm waiting on to do the final tweaks there is an actual web server with PHP. That can wait.

The real question is what do I do now? Do I go upstairs and continue working? Or do I unplug for the night and get on some Assassin's Creed Revelations? I still haven't finished that game... Decisions, decisions.

Virtually private

I've been getting a lot of friend requests on Facebook recently. Some from people I don't really know. Some are professional contacts that I've done business with in the past . And others are people that I've kept at an arms length for personal reasons.

I have a specific persona that I conduct through my Facebook account. Imagine it is similar to my blog, but with less censorship. I admit I use profanity and even partake of a guilty pleasure or two. The point is that I am not accepting all friend requests, because I don't want everyone to know me on a personal level.

I have said it time and again and I will continue to believe in this. My Facebook is reserved for my closest friends only. If you do not have my phone number, or if you do and I don't answer your calls; then you will not be granted access to that area of my life. It's nothing personal, just a personal choice.

Constant improvement

As most of you know by now. I am once again delving into web design. Most of my close friends and family know my personal feelings on the subject, but some things are better left unsaid.

I will admit that I have never aspired to be a master web designer. Clearly, there are people with a much higher aptitude for writing code. I will say this, however; I am ascending beyond my previous understanding of it. As I work on the third version of my portfolio website I am embracing more challenging concepts.

Luckily whatever knowledge I had absorbed over the years has managed to linger. I can remember the basics of HTML, CSS, PHP and even some of the fundamentals of Actionscript. I am finding similarities in the more flexible languages and I know that with time and perseverance I will only become better.

My goal is not to commit myself entirely to Web Design. I am only doing this for the income. I have already surpassed my initial goal with regards to my own portfolio site; doing things with the interface I had never attempted (including animating elements using only code).

I am carefully considering plans to expand the layout into a multiple page format, but that will have to wait. There is no need for such an ambitious website for me. Not yet. I can say this though. When the time comes for me to offer more content, whether it be related to my book or artwork. I will tackle the challenge head on.

Now I only have 1 more thing to fix and then I'll hang up the Web Design gloves until a paying job lands in my lap. I have an new goal already cooking in my head. More on that in a couple weeks.