flukeout luke's illustration & web design blog

I’ve been playing a bit of magic again, and loving the awesome artwork. I did a cover of one the cards I liked this morning. It’s a work in progress.

Things to remember:

• Use a low opacity brushes to slowly build up colour
• Try to find a better way to paint the background, large protoshop brushes leave their telltale signs (especially with lowered opacity)

I’m happy with it so far. Right now the city in the background and the wizard pretty much share the same colour scheme. I should try to differentiate that a little bit to bring him to the forefront. Maybe I can do some out of focus type blur for the background.

I had trouble mimicking the range of colours in the spirit thing from the original. There’s some yellow / beige / peach / green / blue in there and it all somehow fits together. Something to keep working on.

Here’s the original:

So I had this idea to do an illustration showing that the Easter Island statues have an underground component. I finally got it done and made it into a tshirt design.

I don’t think it makes a great tshirt design – it’s a pretty illustration and has lots of little details to look at. On top of that, many of the comments suggest people can’t make out the underground part very clearly. In retrospect I agree, and have some ideas on how to fix it. I don’t think I’ll resubmit an updated version, but might revisit it in case I want to make a print.

Anyway, it’s up on threadless.com for voting. Click the little banner below:

About a week ago I picked up a copy of ImagineFX, a digital sci-fi art magazine. It’s a really great magazine, full awesome art and tutorials. Anyway, it inspired me to do some digital painting of my own.

Lately I’ve been learning to play blues on my acoustic guitar, so I wanted to paint a guitarist. I like the look of those old school guys, but none of them are that recognizable (at least to me), so I picked Mark Knopfler instead.

Here’s what I came up with:

I’m pretty pleased, but also feel that it needs a bit more work to feel really finished.

Here’s how it went down.

I used this reference photo.

I placed the photo into my Photoshop CS2 document and started painting using my small 4×5 Wacom Graphire tablet.

First, I tried painting from the unaltered original photo but it wasn’t turning out very well. I was having a hard time picking out the key shapes and details, and was also screwing up the proportions.

Here’s how it looked:

Not satisified, I decided to adjust the contrast (via the Curves dialog) of the original photo to help simply the image. Once I was happy with the contrast adjustment, i started painting.

This helped a lot, and my painting was fairly close to the original.

Here it is:

I used a chalky brush to define the outside of the black areas to make it seem more like a non-digial piece. I found a brown paper texture and a photo of a Fender Stratocaster to complete the piece.

In the future, I plan to use this technique as a starting point to a painting. Once I establish the general shapes / shadows, I can fill in the smaller details.

Name inspired by that crazy north Ontario inventor. He of grizzly suit fame.

I drew this with a pen and coloured in Photoshop. Had to use the mouse as my pen tablet is at work, so the colouring’s a bit sketchy.

I was drawing some pigs for Donna’s mom, overdosed on cuteness, and came up with Griswald.

And here are the cute ones:

I wanted to create an error message that fades from a bright red to a lighter shade on the ActiveState website Komodo beta page.

After a bit of research I found the Moo.fx Javascript Library, which was super easy to implement. I triggered the colour transition using the window.onload event. (I used Simon Willis’ function to add the event to the window.onload handler).

I’ll add a link to the beta page so you can experience the beauty yourself.

I was looking through my projects folder and found this motorcycle. I remember at the time that I was painting it, I was really happy about the new techniques I was learning about. I was also really excited about maintaining momentum and to keep on painting and learning. That was two months ago and I haven’t finished it. Regardless, here it is. I’ll make some time to finish it soon.

I thought I liked painting. Rather, I wanted to like painting. Turns out I don’t. I wanted to like it like I like drawing. But it’s not the same. I don’t have the same control. What I visualize in my head doesn’t materialize. Maybe it’s because I never learned to think like a painter. I can certainly think like a drawer. Or any other piece of furniture.

“I don’t like the colour. FUCK!! Meh. Groan” – Donna

Maybe my frustration is limited to physical paint. I’ve had better success with digital painting.