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| October 09 |
October 30th - Space mosasaur again
I went back and tinkered with this one a little bit. I’ve been comparing pictures of gas clouds in space with clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. And they look a lot alike. It’s like particle physics are the same throughout the universe! Who knew?
Well, it sure makes things easier for artists. So I roughed out some big fluffy cumulus clouds and packed ‘em full of stars.
Then I didn’t feel like painting the underside of the water’s surface, so I got a pic off Google. Photoshop’s real good at making photos look like a part of your painting, you know?
Now the mosasaur looks all rough. I need to fix him up, and define his starry tail, too.
October 29th - Orange and gray clouds
These clouds were interesting to paint.
I started with a background, which was a round gradient from orange to gray, sort of like a sunset on a cloudy evening. First I tried using just the Smudge tool to make clouds, but that was taking too long. So I just painted in some cloud shapes, then swirled them with Smudge afterward. I tried changing the brush on the Smudge tool, and got some really great effects. And just with the default Photoshop brushes, too! I had fun making them all varied and cool looking.
October 28th - Runaway with shading
Here’s all the shading done on an orange and gray gradient. It kind of gives it all a nuclear holocaust sort of feeling, doesn’t it?
I went a bit overboard with the spiffy Photoshop grass brushes there in the foreground. I wanted to see what they could do, so I tried lots of different things. I might just delete that entire layer and do it over again.
Otherwise, I’m satisfied with the way it’s coming along. I just hope Aura likes it, too.
October 27th again
Starting a new commission! This one is for Aura, who requested a scene from a fanfic where her character is escaping from some kind of evil government test facility. Hence the spotlights. :-)
Also, I'm trying out Wordpress for this blog. It still has some kinks to work out, but you can see the progress so far at netraptor.org/blog.
October 27th - Zappity final
Here's the final version, all glowy and sparkly. Now I can finally draw something else! Also, I got rid of all the viruses, but it involved a lot of looking stuff up and running of weird programs, and about a jillion computer restarts. Also AVG Free is a absolutely worthless virus program. It never noticed all the nasties hanging out in my computer.
October 26th - brief update
Sorry about the lack of updates, folks! My computer is riddled with viruses and trojans, which were responsible for placing those redirects on this site. And the scans have taken so long in the evenings that they've eliminated my drawing time for the past few days.
Which is a shame, because this pic has opened my eyes to the possibilities of Photoshop. I thought you could only do impasto effects like that in Painter! Must ... try ... out ...!
(Impasto = large chunks of paint that stick up off the canvas.)
October 22nd - shading!
Ain't he purdy?
Now I just have to finish the rest of this pic and make the lighting effects a bit more refined.
October 21st - zappity WITH STYLE
Now with flashy decals!
Shading coming soon.
October 20th - zappity
My commission pic in progress. Got the background colors mapped out, and I'm working on the light sources before I start shading Mecha. When you're doing reflective metal, knowing your light sources is important, because they determine where the shadows fall.
Mecha shoots magic into the darkness!
October 18th
Just a small Mecha vignette today. This was a concept for a commission I'm doing.
October 17th - WereShadow
Because it amuses me greatly. :-)
October 15th - Darkspines WereSonic
What happens when you put these two Sonic forms together?
You get something like this.
Seeing as the last couple of games have been giving Sonic various dark powered-up forms, I was pondering what a Darkspines/WereSonic mashup might look like. I think he makes the Fleetway Super Sonic look kind and cuddly. Tee hee. I might draw another version of this and finish it up all nice. Something for Halloween, you know?
October 13th - baby snails
We interrupt this art blog for something completely off-topic.
A few weeks ago, I stepped outside and looked down into the flowerbed. I saw all these funny little specks in the mud. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that they were tiny snails. Hundreds of them. I stuck a penny in the mud as size comparison when I took a picture.
I pointed this out to my neighbor, who went and poured an entire container of salt into the flowerbed. The snails vanished. But there were plenty of spots that she missed, so I know that there are now zillions of baby snails burrowed down in the roots of all the shrubs around here.
Gosh, I hate snails.
October 11th - Sparkly
The New Agey pic is coming right along. The trouble is, the mosasaur just looks like he's not meshing with the galaxy. Maybe I'll erase part of his tail, so it looks like he's coming out of the black hole in the center.
I'm not real happy with the galaxy, either. It looks too chunky and not cloudy at all. I'll play with it some more and get reference of real galaxies.
October 10th - mosasaur
I've been wanting to draw a good underwater pic for a while. I guess it's all the Finding Nemo we've watched lately. Anyway, I went with a mosasaur, because they were my brother's favorite growing up. And also I got to see a skull when one was here at our museum. These suckers could take some serious bites out of you.
I'm coloring mine like an orca, because they have snazzy markings, and there didn't seem to be any msoasaurs with orca markings in the google image search.
I think I'm going to make him swimming in galaxies. Because they do it with whales and dolphins, so why not big swimming lizards, too?
Except he has salamander vibes. I think it's the tail.
October 9th - Character sketch
There's this character of my husband's that I keep trying to draw. I've never had much success in capturing her in the way I see her in my head, but this one is a bit closer. Her name is Sera (as in "phim"), and she's sort of like a mortal angel. She has wings that only appear from time to time. I have this idea that she's also one of those on-fire Christians who will start conversations with random people on the street about Jesus. She picks up bums and takes them to lunch and stuff like that. Hence her shirt.
Because throwing her in with our cast of mages, dragons, demons, half-demons, robots, and monsters just tickles me.
October 8th - WereSonic
I know a lot of people hated the idea of Sonic being a werewolf thing in Sonic Unleashed. But you know, I liked it. I mean, Link got to be a werewolf in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Besides, WereSonic's design is just gnarly.
October 7th - Completed starfield
Here's a closeup of the finished pic. You can see the full sized one here in the gallery or on my DA account.
See all the little faint stars, and all the detail? This was such fun to paint! And I found the tutorial. It's very good and detailed, so I won't quote the whole thing here. There were some crucial steps I had forgotten, namely reducing brightness and increasing contrast. And you don't rotate the layer, you enlarge it. That makes the teeny stars much brighter.
Hmm ... maybe I'll do one with a planet next.
October 6th - Starfield
I've had a hankering to paint a deep space picture, particularly after looking at those nifty pics from the newest orbital telescope. This is just the start of one, because I'm trying to remember how in the world you do the background stars.
I remember that you make a layer of all black, then go to Filters > Add Noise. Then you increase the contrast. Then you duplicate that layer, and rotate it 90 degrees so you don't get patterns in the noise. (Or even ... signals?)
But I don't remember what you do after that to get the semi-bright stars. I'll look up some tutorials.
October 5th - reported attack site??
I found an iFrame code on my front page today, reporting netraptor.org as an attack site. I removed the script in fury and looked up what that means. Apparently it means that Google thinks my site is insecure. So I hopped into the Google Webmaster Tools, which are supposed to warn you about vulnerabilities. It didn't find any. I don't know why I had that script on my site. *fumes*
Anyway, here's a silly scribble of my husband's characters. Carda is a mage who has time and space powers, while Eddie is a rock star. They're fan-geeking about each other.
Well, it amused my husband. :-)
October 4th, '09
I stayed up late last night working on this. I'm tired now. Anyway, here's the rough of the pic with colors. The background is still all the darkest tones. It'll be a lot lighter when it's done.
Some nice folks on Deviantart gave me some tips on pterosaur anatomy. It turns out that pterosaurs were built more like bats: their wing membrane connected to their legs, and their legs stuck straight out, again, just like a bat. Funny how evolutionists don't think bats evolved from pterosaurs, though.
A person on DA remarked that these guys in flight would resemble a butterfly, because of the shape of their profile. So I put butterfly-esque markings on their wings. I want the bird in the foreground to be lighter, though. A lot of predatory and sea birds have light bellies so they don't stand out against the sky and scare their prey. I wanted these guys to have cream-colored bellies and be dark on their backs, but my colors are still too dark. Ah well.
October 3rd, '09
Remember this pic?
Well, I decided to finish it. Here's the refined sketch:
The trouble with drawing dinosaurs is that nobody can agree on what they look like. Wanna see something funny? Look up "velociraptor" on the Google image search and compare the heads. All the heads are different!
I'm running into the same problem with these guys, who are Quetzalcoatli. Except with the position of the legs. I usually go by skeletons as the best authority on head shape, position, etc. So compare the hind legs on this picture to the leg position in this picture.
Were the bottoms of their feet carried turned inward, or pointed upward? Dang, I wish these birds were still around so I'd KNOW these things! Bats seem to carry their feet with the bottoms turned up, but bats' wings are built into their feet. Quetzalcoatli could walk.
And then the million dollar question: is the skeleton posed wrong?
Bleh. The dilemmas of a paleoartist.
Also, the face looks mean. I don't like mean dino faces. Even my predators have smiley faces.
October 2nd, '09
I'm about halfway through the tutorial at the moment. I've applied a background gradient and I'm laying in the colors. Hmm, it's coming out a bit green. I may deviate from the tutorial to make it exactly how I want it.
And those dang wings are just too dark.
October 1st, '09
I've had a fascination with wings lately. Blame this pic and this pic. This was a random sketch of a human face turned away at, what, a 3/4ths angle? Then I added flowing hair and wings. Ahh, I love cliches.
This time it's dragon wings. This pic came about from pondering my Charr and Dusk story. Charr eventually finds his mate again, but she's been maimed and disfigured in some way. Just as he's had his horns cut off, she's been slashed across the face so badly that she looks like she has a permanent snarl. Also some of the little spikes on her eyebrow are broken off.
Whatever they did, it really made the bad guy mad. I just have to come up with a really interesting bad guy. But bad guy dragons are a dime a dozen, which is why I don't think I've been able to come up with one.
The reason this pic is so dark and detailed is that I'm going to try out this tutorial on it. And you do all the dark shading first.
Created on 10/01/2009 06:44 AM by admin
Updated on 10/30/2009 09:59 PM by admin
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