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liveinabin

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  1. liveinabin
    Thanks for your input guys. Our snake now gets to chew her food.
    I've also edited a rock in the lower right foreground that was bugging me and done other tiny paint edits in the background, that you won't notice.
    I'm going to stop now, I'm getting all George Lucas with this.
     

  2. liveinabin
    A heck of a lot of work done today. Did the mosaic logo (by hand ) yesterday and, well, everything else today.
    I'm calling complete on this, well 1.0 at any rate (the repeat logo at the bottom is the end label)
     

     
    There. I got to do all my favourite mayan bits, the lovely close-tiled mosaic work and their weird almost circuit-like stonework.
  3. liveinabin

    Damn and blast!

    By liveinabin,

    Here I am, trying to do a lovely logo in mayan-style mosaic, using Corel Painter X's excellent mosaic function and it doesn't blasted work!
     
    So, I look online to discover that, indeed, the mosaic feature is currently broken under the current Mac OS.
     
    Damn. I don't mind working freehand but not really on something this intricate. Why is it always the things I want to do that are 'broken under the new OS'? This happens all the time.
     
    There, here is a Mac rant. You don't hear them very often so feel free to cut and paste into any heated OS flamewar
  4. liveinabin
    Just a little bit to show today, albeit a fairly important bit. The addition of the gun and holster marks the end of the main painting. I've stared and stared at it and I'm not sick of it yet which, by my standards, is a keeper.
     
    The brightness level has also been lifted a touch across the entire picture. This is because of my new Spyder3pro calibration thingy. Wow, these things are good. I thought my macbook pro screen was set up pretty well, but after one pass from my new toy, the colours just pop and the black levels are awesome.
    If colour is in any way important to you, even just for viewing photos on screen, then you MUST get one of these. It even samples ambient light and can adjust on the fly! Man, I love technology.
     
    Only downside is, after spending all that time putting all those lovely dark tonal bits on the floor and walls, my post calibration display shows that I almost wasted my time, they would have printed BLACK! Hence the brightness adjustment. Of course, you probably saw all the detail anyway as your display is probably too bright
     
    Well, that's what I've learned today, everybody's computer displays are too bright and too blue.
     
    Or my display is too pink and dark. Time will tell!
     

  5. liveinabin
    Hallo hallo hey hey hi-de-ho and chirrup!
     
    Erm.... difficult to know how to start these little monologues, aside from "I've been painting!". Well, doh!
     
     
    Oh well...
     
     
    I've been painting!
     
    Today's work concerns mostly moody lighting. Our hero, standing backlit before the nameless terror, well, the snake.
    Snake's done, by the way. I've put a bit of mood and colour into the linework.
    I've painted like this for a while now, with a layer of black linework over the main paint layer. I do the main body of the painting under it and then paint into the linework. The newer versions of Corel Painter make this really easy. I just select the linework layer and make a layer mask from the transparency. I can scribble like a dementee and only the linework gets painted. That alone has saved me about 6 hours each painting.
     
    Aaaaaaaaanyway, notice that there's not a huge amount of detail on the man. Since the focal point of the picture is the snake (and possibly the crown), the eye wouldn't have the foreground in focus.
     
    Just gotta paint the gun and holster now. And the logo. Yes, the logo. Where's it going to fit? Well, thing is, I've painted this picture full label size as it'll scale up nicely for the manual cover (which is 300dpi, label is 600dpi) but, on the finished label, it's going to be reduced in size a bit, windowed in a crumbling stone surround.
     
    Well, that's always been the idea anyway. Still figuring out the finer points of the logo.
     
    It'll work, trust me
     

     
    That said, I get my monitor calibrator to tonight. So, chances are I'll discover I've got all the colours completely wrong!
  6. liveinabin
    Has it really been a week?!? Good grief, how time passes.
     
    So, onward and upward. I've decided to get the background and snake totally finished before I do anything with the hero.
     
    This time, I've focused attention on getting the light and texture of the snake right. Well, not RIGHT as cobras are scaly but that doesn't suggest scale well (if you see what I mean ), so a more python-like smooth body works better here. The floor has been given texture and perspective with a Mayan brick design. Everything you see in this room is of mayan origin, by the way. They also have lovely mosaic work that I'll be using in the logo.
    I've picked out the crown as the focus of the light in lovely clichéd movie style And, not being one to rock the boat when it comes to lost temple decoration, the treasure is, of course, covered in cobwebs.
    Oh yeah, I've brightened the light source at the top of the picture by slightly erasing some of the linework.
     
    I think, aside from working a little to soften the rather harsh black snake outlines, I'm done on the background. There's a whole load I could edit and 'neaten up' there, but I'm positive it would kill the painting. I've actually been forcing myself to use bigger brush sizes and not zoom in much when painting so as not to get bogged down with the minutiae (stops to check spelling of minutiae, my god I got it right!).
     

     
    I'm going to have a bit more time next week to paint, so expect more updates soon. There. I've promised No more sloping off to play Telltale software's excellent Sam & Max games for me.
  7. liveinabin

    A bit more detail

    By liveinabin,

    Not much time for painting last couple of days. However, now the colour palette is set, I can start adding detail starting with the focal point, the snake.
     
    From reference photos of Cobras, I'm just roughly defining the scales, and accentuating the light sources playing on it's head - partly to make it more three dimensional, partly for a bit more drama. I want a real slavering beastie. I used to love the monster artwork in the Dungeons & Dragons guide books and that's kinda where I'm going with this.
     

  8. liveinabin

    Happy Accidents

    By liveinabin,

    The process of painting seems to me to be one string of happy (usually) accidents. You start out with a pretty solid idea of what you want, but that's always a poor relation to what you get in the end. This holds true for traditional media, but increasingly for digital. Indeed, the whole element of chaos (or lack thereof) is what kept me from digital art for so long. I remember stating at college (long ago) that I'd NEVER paint with a computer.
    Photoshop was the first step away from paint for me, though still a very tight set of tools, but Corel Painter really tipped the balance.
    Now I've got a processor fast enough to really let it rip, the possibilities open to me now are, frankly, terrifying. It's like the cereal isle of a well stocked supermarket. The bewildering variety is just too much. I've been reading various paint tutorials about toolsets that I've yet to use, textures and effects and the pandora's box of the brush creator - which offers near infinite variation in tool creation. It's scaring the crap out of me!
     
    So, blinkers back on for the moment. Maybe try a new gizmo every week and try to stay focused.
    This weeks beauty was 'Square Conté 22', a slightly customized soft pastel. Brilliant for getting colour down, but surprisingly adept at more subtle blending. In fact, all of the picture so far has been painted with just three brushes, Square Conté 22, Grainy water blender and my old faithful, Blender brush - the smeary great blob of colour from which happy accidents spring!
     
    So, progress. After slinging all that colour at the canvas, now I'm reigning in the detail on the background. Partly reinforcing original detail features, mostly bringing forward and refining those little 'happy accidents'. The task at the moment is figuring out where the light sources are, and what colour they are. I've definitely got a man off-camera right with a diffused blue spotlight but the red ambient light and the hole punched in the ceiling (lighting the foreground sand) were just the result of scribbling with Mr Square Conté 22. Bless him.
     

  9. liveinabin
    Hallo all. David Exton here, artist of a fair few homebrew labels and manuals for the AtariAge store.
    This is a bit of an experiment, and a risk. I thought it might be nice to have a little blog here charting, step-by-step, the progress of a new piece of art from conception to completion. I say risk, as I'm not usually the kind of person to show works in progress. I feel I'm rather bearing all, as it were. Still, I hope it'll be interesting for you, as well as providing impetus to me to keep going if I know I must post something.
     
    That's the idea, anyway.
     
    SO, here's the new work. I say new, the brief came up last October, but the game wasn't finished, I was working on other stuff and Albert (and I) had the Holiday Cart to wrestle with. The game in question is Stephen Engelhardt's very pretty new game, Cave In. A real Indiana Jones piece, this, which both gives me lots of thematic ideas and provides all sorts of problems too. After all, Lucasfilm have one or two lawyers and I don't want to sail too close to their intellectual property.
     
    By the way, please excuse the needlessly verbose manner of my writing. I feel I must explain that it's because I'm English. Just read it all out in a C-3PO voice and all will be well.
     
    The Design
     
    So, how to get the content and excitement of the game across without looking TOO Indy? Well, Stephen was kind enough to furnish me with a load of material on the game so I could pick and choose.
    Turns out we have a big snake boss! Awesome. And a crown to retrieve. Both good, strong elements.
    The snake could be the main picture element, guarding the crown, with the hero trying to get to it. Very simple, direct, dynamic visual storytelling that would work on a tiny cartridge label.
     
    So, as with all the artwork I do, the next stop is picture reference. I used to spend loads on books and lots of time in libraries, but it's SO much easier now to get good stuff from our old pal, Google image search. And half an hour later, furnished with pictures of cobras, cowboys, Raiders of the Lost Ark stills (for colour reference) and lots and lots of Mayan architecture (which might be nice to decorate the backdrop) I set to work.
     
    First step. Freeform scribble. Lead with composition, as composition is king. Place your elements, add detail, refine, refine again.
    And we have this:
     

     
     
    Very rough, but I'm pleased with the layout and Stephen likes it too. Usually it'll tale longer to refine before the design is nailed, but heck, I really like this.
     
    Linework
     
    Now everyone has their own way of working but I have to lead with linework. So we have two layers, snake+man and background. You'll see why I separated them in a bit. Some artists would lead with throwing some colour down, but I don't have the courage for that. Even with the benefit of an undo command, the blank canvas is still a thing of terror.

     
    And that's as far as the image got for a while. I just couldn't figure out the colours. Not only that, but my computer (a 2004 iMac G5) was not up to the job of painting any more and a new machine was needed. One huge hiatus later, one brand new Macbook Pro, 4Gb RAM and a lovely great 23" Apple cinema display and I'm back on the project, if only to justify the astonishing expense of my new purchase
     
    Paint
     
    Cool, I found a really great free image service, morguefile.com. Lovely hi-res images of, well, anything. While browsing this wonder of generosity, I came across a lovely image of a shaft of light streaming into a lovely red rock cave. It had just the mood I was looking for!
    So, back in the saddle once again, I can now throw some colour down. Just digital pastels for now, very nice for large expanses of colour, and set at 75% opacity to blend nicely. I work quickly because that way, some control is relinquished and happy accidents can happen that can be developed into the final piece.
     

     
    OOOH! Atmospheric, and probably dark as hell on your monitor When my bank account manages to stagger back to it's feet, I must remember to sucker punch it again with a calibration device. Incidentally, here's why I had two layers of linework. I've reduced the opacity of the background lines top blend in with the paint while keeping the foreground nice and black, for now.
     
    Still in it's very rough stages but I reckon I can make this work now.
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