A Speedpaint in Corel and Photoshop from a couple of day earlier
Listening to what’s below while looking at this pic recommended:)
Something from the lunchbreak. Sketched it on the tube and and played with some colours using my bamboo one. I think it’s a little broken. The pen has become really irresponsible, I mean – unresponsive;) Other than that, I have just added myself to the fierce community of CG-HUB (I thought I had my account there before but must’ve been wrong). Either way, my skin is thicker now so I should be alright…
…sort of. It was going really well until the moment I realized I’d been chipping away on the portal-gauntlet(yes! It’s not a shield) for two hours only to delete that layer and come back to original version. I cannot always help myself. Just love to make pixel smears with that nice textured brush. Anyways, I am not going through the feedback stage, checking it at different scales and screens so that next time I’m sitting down to it, It’ll be a matter of 15 minutes and this demon is ready bring havoc to the world…
Here’s a little gore I have been tackling recently. Full – coloured version will be up soon, when I’ve finished the extra rendering I have been putting in. I am really looking forward to have it as a wallpaper on my screen at work. The title comes from the initial idea of alternative version of Adam and Eve’s encounter of the snake. Well – I kind of got creative with the reptile here…
There are so many things at the moment (the most urgent being finding a roof over our heads) that take my spare time. This is yet another update to my mutation nation fixation(I know, I know, long gone) and an update to my earlier ball-pen “tascock” cartoon. This one is going to be more serious and messed up as this creature is only designed to be messy and fussy – more about that later. Just scanned it and put some rough colours in photoshop: layer with base colour at the bottom, sketch layer in multiply, base creature colour layer above it in the overlay mode. What’s that? You knew that already?… Well, you have all the tools to start then.
I recently received an extremely exciting email from the DVD editor of Imagine FX. They want my work on the DVD FXpose in issue #49! How cool is that?
I found myself with problem of not having enough fantasy and sci-fi themed works to fill in so had to digg in into my work in progress folders on the hard drive to see what could I come up with. Taking to account the regular, day – to day workload I’ve been having to cut down on sleep recently hence I am really happy It’s not my face that is going to be on the DVD, if you get me…
Anyhow, this is one of the three photoshop painted pieces that the Issue no 49 of the Imagine FX will include on its DVD.
It’s almost finished and from where I stand I need to give a really big thanks to a few guys from the concept art community for the priceless advise and feedback. Thank you!
Do put your artwork there when you get stuck on concepts, fellow artists!
It really helps to have a little extra input from strangers. Now, this sounded wrong:) What I meant was, sometimes you’ll get bogged down in detail and forget about obvious things that are there, right in front of you and without fixing these, there’s simply no moving forward, no matter how much time you’ve spent rendering twigs and little veins on those bloody ferns or strands of hair on your critter…
So this one is my impression of a silly vampire blood infected squirrel that simply lost the plot and one day, and had its master – the cute little fairy found out, much to her dismay, that the nasty critter, has took liking in the slightly different types of shells…
Beware, mushroom seekers…
P.S. Buy that Imagine FX before my Mum gets her hands on all of them!
I have been through a few youtube videos and other tutorials elsewhere to find out how to create those really crisp and clean outlines when drawing or tracing sketches in Photoshop. I am using a Wacom Intuos 3, with a sheet of paper pasted on top to make the pen feel more natural (it works great, by the way) and I do consider my stroke pretty confident and my hand quite steady. But to follow/trace the curve of the underlying sketch and make it look elegant and effortless – it is a bitch! Actually it is a no-can-do – for me, at least. For this example I took my “babe in the sexy outfit” image

I opened the image in Photoshop, copied the background layer (CTR + J on PC or CMD + J on Mac), created one more layer on top of the copied one (CTR/CMD+SHIFT+(ALT)+N = hold ALT if you do not want a NEW LAYER dialog box to appear, otherwise, use the same combination without ALT so you will be able to name the layer on the go, which is a good practice) and filled the layer with white colour.
There’s is a very nifty keyboard shortcut for filling the layer with background or foreground color: just make sure your background and foreground colors are set to default by either clicking the two overlapping black and white squares near the bottom of the tools palette(see image) or simply hitting D on your keyboard. From then, just CTR/CMD + BACKSPACE to fill the layer with white or ALT + BACKSPACE to fill it with black. For the purpose of this example, white is recommended;)

Then, I changed the white layer’s opacity to the point where the original sketch showed through but remained nicely dimmed allowing my new, perfectly crisp and clean lines to stand out. In my case this is around 70% and you can either do it dragging the opacity slider (located in the top corner of the layers palette) down to 70% or simply hitting the number 7 on your keyboard (if you type 7 quickly followed by 5, the opacity will change to 75%).

After that, all I needed to do is to create one more layer on top of the white one(again CTRL/CMD+ALT+SHIFT+N) to put my line-art on and I was all set for the hard work.
First of all I tried to go on about it “traditionally”, with the wacom and the brush tool tracing the lines free-hand, erasing unnecessary bits.
When you do that it is important that you first pick a basic round, hard brush(opacity 100%, hardness 100%), open up your BRUSHES palette (F5 on your keyboard or WINDOW > BRUSHES) and make sure you only tick the SHAPE DYNAMICS box changing the SIZE JITTER to PEN PRESSURE

However good this technique might be for some people, I had to give up. After a couple of hours of drawing, erasing, redrawing, erasing again I had this and was nowhere near satisfied with the result:
Worn out and disappointed I decided on the pen tool (P on your keyboard)
To be able to use pen tool efficiently, It’s options for it as follows:
TO BE CONTINUED…