Here is a step-by-step visual walkthrough of how I created ‘Netties Three’, a World of Warcraft fanart featuring three elves around a campfire, with a kitty.
I am shocked, and I know and hope that you will be too, at the dreadful state the picture was in before I finalised the lineart and colours. This is a little bit worse than how most of my pictures start off- but not that much.! I hope you enjoy the process.
The first image shown is the moodboard I created which contains colours, lighting ideas and references for objects I wished to use in the image.

 Featured in the bottom- right of the picture is my own Warcraft character, who posed on his drake whilst I took a screenshot showing the colours and formation of the clouds within the game. Photos of real places were used as well as many references to buildings found in a zone called ‘Mulgore’, which is where the scene is set.

And now for the visual walkthrough;

When I heard that a film called ‘Tangled’ was going to be released, I got very excited. The trailer was fantastic- the characters were so expressive and it looked really funny, and I just loved the colours. I received the art book as a wonderful gift from a family member and was so inspired by the artwork- Glen Keane and his daughter are now two of my favourite artists. It took me a while to come up with a good idea for a picture as I wanted it to be perfect, and today I am going to take you through the process I took whilst making my rendition of this brilliant movie.

Firstly, we have the sketch stage. I stick down a basic gradient and use a pink brush for the lines to guide my colours, mostly because I don’t believe in painting black on white- I want to really feel where this picture is going from the very start.

Now it is time to properly start the picture. I decide to focus firstly on Rapunzel. I wanted her pose to be magical, but giving the nature of her story (not just the Disney version, but the original and it’s many renditions), I also wanted it to be mildly sensual. With closed eyes, parted lips and her left leg raised slightly, I feel like I have acquired the perfect mixture of the two requirements.
I use a very small- sized brush to go over the basic lines and I add more strength to areas where the lines interconnect. this helps the lines pop out a bit.

Now that I have finished the lineart, I darken the colour of it and lay down the basic ‘flat’ colours. I have added a very small gradient to the hair.

Being very inspired by the works of Alphonse Mucha, I decided to take his advice on shading and go for something extremely subtle; I use a very soft- edged brush to lightly paint in some shading, and I also add some pink blush to areas of Rapunzels body. This makes her look more youthful and appealing to look at.

After much fretting I decided that although the subtle shading looked good, Rapunzel still needed a bit more depth, and also some colour to bring her and the rest of the piece together. I cel-shaded parts of her body with purple and also added a purple drop-shadow.

Now that Rapunzel is finished, I start work on the background. First of all I lay down the basic shapes. I create a ‘squircle’ (what an awesome name), which is a square with two rounded edges and two pointed edges. I use a hard round brush to put in the light pink lacey bits and place it underneath the squircle so half of the shapes don’t show up. Then I create a brush with three ovals set 45 degrees round from each other and plant them on each of the pink laces.

I decide its looking a bit too flat, so I make a big decision and decide to use a ‘layered paper’ effect. This was inspired by a piece of art I found on an art community site. I found some nice paper and fabric textures and set them against each of the current background elements, and added more drop shadows to make everything pop out.

I am satisfied with the background elements now but I decide that the background colour needs to be a bit darker so I add another colour layer on top of the last one. The next part of the picture is the famous suns found throughout the Tangled movie. They remind me of a blossoming flower as well as a sun (I think thats the point actually), so they go well with my nice girly theme. I find an image of the suns but it is really bad quality and far too small, so I spruce it up in Photoshop, take it into Illustrator, live trace it to make it a vector, then resize it so it is nice and big. Then I take it back into Photoshop, make a brush out of it, and simply plant the suns onto the picture with one click. I add a simple orange to yellow radial gradient.
I have decided to add another element I have recently discovered, the noise filter. I have noticed that some of my older pieces lack a sort of basic, subtle texture that gives a bit more depth to the image and this tool is perfect for doing just that. The noise level is set very low and is on a medium opacity so it is not too overwhelming.

I add another paper texture to the suns which gives them a nice rich colour, then I add another sun in light purple behind Rapunzel so it’s not lonely in that lovely lacey squircle.

 I had few ideas for the flags so I was really just making it up as I went. I made a nice long line for the string and added a bevel effect to it to make it more 3D, and made a triangle brush, clicking along the string to create the flag themselves. I used the warp tool to shape the flags , added the pink stripe, and gave them all a drop shadow.

Then I did the same thing with the suns- used the brush tool to create them then warped them to shape them with the flag. I didn’t want a drop shadow on these however, because I felt that would overdo it.

To finish the flags, I add that awesome paper texture yet again and go into Illustrator to create a long pattered line. This works very similar to the brush tool but instead of creating a brush stroke it creates a pattern. Very useful! I take the pattern into Photoshop and warp it to fit with the flags and give it a very subtle drop shadow.

This is what the piece looks like so far. It’s nice, but the colours are too limited for my liking and the background is still looking a little bare.

As you can see in the sketch image right at the top of this post, there are vine-like scribbles  to the side of Rapunzel. Illustrator time again! I find a nice vine brush and create some nice strings of it and import it into Photoshop. I add a very soft bevel and a drop shadow.

Technically, that is it as far as the sketch shows but I still feel like the background is a little bare. The sides still don’t have anything there and the picture generally lacks oomph.

I decide that if I am really going to take the Tangled theme to a good level I am going to have to include another element of the movie that everyone (including me) loved- the lanterns. I created a very simple paper lantern with the sun logo and added yet another paper texture over it, and gave it a strong glow.

Lastly, I decide that some celebratory confetti would make the background look a little more interesting, so I find a square brush and set it to scatter, and also changed the colour dynamics so that it would generate more than one colour. I added a motion blur on some of them to give the piece a bit of movement. And now I am done!

I hope you have enjoyed this walkthrough. If you would like to see the full image please follow this link. Thankyou for reading!

Art dump time!

“Painful” Time took: 2 1/2 hours

“Masked” Time took: 2 hours

“Lypiphera” Time took: 10 hours

“Hand” Time took: 3 1/2 hours

“Ouja” Time took: Dunno! I left it half done for about a year.

Such a long title for such a short post.

This what I’ve had to go through just to get the design of a face right.
I think I was supposed to learn this through uni or something since we did have a character design module but I just wasn’t exposed to the right kind of inspiration. For instance, Glen Keane’s fantastic blog taught me so much! I learned that my lines didn’t have to be neat to mean something. I learned that my drawings didn’t have to be perfect first time. The true meaning of ‘idea development’ lies within those digital sheets. Anyone who doesn’t know who Glen Keane is needs to get themselves on his Wiki page pronto.
Anyways, so there I was collecting all sorts of various images and concepts to help me structure my own project, when I suddenly realised what a massive task it really is.
I think the moment I knew this was when I was actually thinking about how I needed to change the design of the eyebrows in my character concept. Eyebrows!
Here is a short but possibly rather useful list (at least for me) of things I found myself thinking about whilst I was drawing:

• Where the hair parting at the front is
• Where the hair parting at the back is
• What shape the eyebrows are
• How big the eyes are
• How many clumps of hair lie in front of and behind the ears
• How thick the ears are
• How much detail I should give the teeth
• Where the eyes are placed
• What type of nose I will use
• How long the front clumps of hair should be to better represent the face shape
• What main emotions the character has
• The repeatability of the image (is it easily redrawn)
• Whether to use rounded lines or slightly angled lines
• What sort of facial hair I wanted
• How much detail I should give to the facial hair

Today, I did some research. The purpose of this research was to see what I can do to improve my art to be more appealing to the masses, as I am going through a bit of a crisis at the moment and thought I needed a bit of a wake-up call.

I asked a number of friends, some artists and some not, to tell me what they thought of an image that contained two pictures; one was created a year ago, and one was created a day ago. Both are pretty naff; I created them in pencil, hastily scanned them in with my camera phone and edited them for about five minutes in Photoshop. I also asked them which picture they thought was old and which was new.

Here is the image:

I’m already embarrassed.
I won’t say much about the pictures or the results until after I have recounted the feedback from my lovely friends. One thing I will say is that I absolutely insisted to most, of not all, that I wanted honesty and not politeness- I’m not fishing for compliments with this experiment.

Subject One is a non-artist. One spoke a lot about the technique; how the Left picture was nice because of the shading and the Right picture was nice because of the more controlled lines. Nothing was mentioned voluntarily about the anatomy of the picture or the overall skill involved with the drawing process. One was able to identify after a while which picture was new.

Subject Two, an artist, was able to identify straight away which one was the newer picture.

Subject Three, a non- artist, stated that they thought Left was older, given the more ‘prominent angles’, but also that they both look good but for different reasons. The only real mistakes Three could find with the pictures is that the hands and head are at odd angles in Left, and after telling me that they ‘don’t concentrate on things like anatomy and accuracy’, I asked what they do concentrate on. They said design, appearance, colors, clothing and hairstyle. They also mentioned how Left had a feeling of ‘not much practice’.

Subject Four is an artist, and showed a great preference for Left, mentioning how the face has more expression. They seemed to prefer the sketchy lines as opposed to the cleaner lines on Right, and insisted that both are ‘good in an anatomical sense’. They could naturally gather a lot more information about Left as you can see his entire body as opposed to just a face and shoulders; “The one on the left is a rebelish type of guy, cool and such, independent, street fighter in a way; and the one on the right would be a knight in training? Or something like that. The common hero.”

Subject Five, an artist, relayed how Right is nicer than Left because it is what they prefer to view. They also agreed that the more controlled lineart and consistent shading on Right is more pleasing to look at.

Subject Six is not an artist, and was very confident in stating that Right is newer than Left as it looks like it was drawn with more confidence. After asking what they liked and didn’t like about the style of the pictures, Six explained; “I really like both of them, the guy on the left’s attire is nice, the ball and chain and ripped sleeve. The one on the right I like his expression, the collar and details on his ear.”.

Now, this may seem like useless information but there are several key points I can ascertain from my questioning (which is better than nothing!)

1. Skill appears to be less important than style.

2. Cleaner lineart makes the image look more professional.

3. Anatomy appears to be less important than content.

4. Consistency appears to be more important than skill.

In conclusion, it would appear that artists concentrate more on the anatomy of a picture and also the level of skill involved, whereas non-artists are interested in the content itself, such as the colors and concepts (clothing style, hair style, etc).

Three points that can make my art process a lot more enjoyable not only to me, but to others aswell. Although the research and the questions seem a bit vague, the interviews were admittedly done on a whim. I may plan to create a more controlled and effective questionnaire to gain more information at a later date.

So, which one is the newer picture? The one on the right, of course.
Personally (and naturally), I can see a clear difference between the two pictures and although I appreciate the fact that the right image would need values rendered to make it better, the lines and shading are more confident and controlled. Also I think that the left picture shows lack of spacial and proportion awareness; the figure is thin and malformed because of this. When drawing the left picture, I was making a conscious effort to draw of a particular style, what I called back then ‘manga-style’. With my new picture I just.. drew and saw what came out. One thing I have also learned from my thinking is that at this early stage in my development as an artist, it is bad to put a label on my work. This may not be the same for others, but is certainly the case for me.

I am a sucker for customising my Mac, it’s something of a hobby that I enjoy doing in my free time. I have a nice dark itunes theme, a pretty Adium skin, a nice Chrome theme.. I could go on. But one thing that I generally struggle with, surprisingly enough, is wallpapers. Sometimes I put characters up on there or inspirational pieces of art that I want to soak into my subconscious as I paint away in Photoshop, most most of the time I would like something neat, smart and detailed, really showing off the size of my screen and the lovely dark themes.
I thought of making a tiled background out of simple shapes, sticking to black and grey, maybe some blue in there (dunno if you can tell, but I’m really digging the black and blue scheme right now)… and I gave that a go using BGpatterns.com. The site is nice and very useful, but it didn’t really work for wallpapers.
Then I thought.. fractals. So I set out on a journey to find a decent fractal maker for Mac.

Fractal |ˈfraktəl| Mathematics
noun
A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.

I went to the  app store first and bought a nice little Fractal maker called, funnily enough, ‘FractalMaker’. This cost me 69p, which is about the limit of what I would spend on an app these days. This was my very first attempt at using a fractal program and I have to say it confused me a little bit. I understand that all fractal programs work in (very) different ways but.. this was ridiculous. I was practically unable to create my own color scheme due to the ridiculous amount of points on a gradient I would need to edit. I was practically unable to make my own fractal and pretty much had to stick with the given presets. Boring. I wanted to create something original.

Fractalmaker's renders were 'bitty' and difficult to customise.

Somehow, after doing a lot of research, I managed to get Apohpysis on my mac. This is apparently the king of fractal programs but was only available on Windows.
Luckily, some people had made a Wine ‘hack’ that has enabled Mac users to emulate the program. The adequately named ‘Apophysis for Mac’ is installed very easily and within seconds I was running it. I thought this would do the job for me, but… no. I was clicking on things and the renders were grainy and certainly not something I wanted to have as a wallpaper.

Apophysis renders were grainy and generally not that nice to look at.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% certain this is just me not being very good with fractal programs and I’m sure that they work brilliantly for most people- but it just wasn’t producing the right results for me. Plus there was little to no creative input since it’s all down to things like maths and formulas.

So, I did what I do every time I get stuck with a piece of software; I find out how I can do it in Photoshop instead.

A simple Google search and I found two very interesting tutorials that produce slightly different results.
Tutorial one focused on how to produce  3d-ish swirly thingie-mabobs (dictionary term), with which I succeeded in creating a relatively nice image that was certainly a hundred times closer to the results I wanted:

I edited the layout after duplicating the ‘swirly thingie-mabob’ a few times. I loved the idea of the drop shadows within the shapes that make it pop out.
I was very pleased with this image but it didn’t look much like the image in the tutorial, which looked much smarter. So I experimented a bit with things like the scaling and the angles in which the shapes were multiplied, and this is how it turned out:

A much more pleasing outcome with more aesthetically pleasing shapes- although I was disappointed in myself for almost recreating the image shown in the tutorial.

I found a second tutorial and this one had a slightly different approach that really helped open the door to a lot more options. Instead of making 3d shapes, make something a little more simple where the shapes don’t overlap but it still looks interesting.
So, I took so basic shapes from the Photoshop library, applied the technique used in the above pictures, and created this:

This is really more an experimentation on colors than shapes for me, and although it certainly is more simple it still has a nice effect and has inspired me to make more fractals.

Feel free to use these images as wallpapers (it is what they were designed for after all) and check back soon for a tutorial on how I made them!

Yesterday, for some unknown reason, our internet wasn’t working so I had the whole day to not get distracted by Deviantart, Facebook and Twitter.
This was an annoyance, challenge and a gift; I had to speak to a client about their commission and I couldn’t, I was supposed to book house viewings and I couldn’t… and I actually struggled for things to do without the internet. After a few minutes of panicking, I decided to sit down and do some work. I managed two pre-paint sketches (one of which I can show; the other is a commission and I like to keep them a secret until they are finished), a full image.. and a poem. I will stick the poem up because this is a creative blog and if anyone is going to appreciate it, it’s the people who are reading this.
Also, the poem is really bad.

This is one of my sketches. Like many of my pictures, this one came to me just before I was going to sleep. I am lucky that I don’t always need to put my ideas down on paper straight away; I’ve trained my brain to remind me of them first thing in the morning, which it did. That’ll do brain, that’ll do.
It’s a picture of my Blood Elf Hunter, Lucari.  I know I shouldn’t be indulging in Warcraft fanart at the moment but I just had to! I really wanted people to get an idea of what he is like, and once this has finished it will; the elaborate jewelry, the pipe, the grubby, loose shirt.. Oh, and that’s his dog in the background, Goliath. Trust me, he looked more like a boar before I made some changes.

Awoo! This is a very common theme- the big full moon and the silhouette with the spooky leafless trees… But I hadn’t done one so here is my take. The design of the… er, let’s call it a werewolf.. was rather loose and used a lot of things that I enjoy drawing on a beast. The big claws, swishy tail and the raised feet (not sure how to describe it, really)… I wanted to give it wings but decided against it since it would clutter it up too much.
The texture in the back is a real moon- it started off as a simple grunge texture but when overlayed a stronger texture over the entire image it sort of disappeared, so I lowered the opacity of the block color to bring through some of the blue and stuck the stock image on top of it.

Sigh, I suppose it’s time to show you my poem. I insist that this thing is published somewhere since someone must like it, I suppose. I am not an expert on poetry and I certainly wouldn’t call myself a poet (this is the second poem I have ever done in my life and it still doesn’t beat that other one.. it was about dragons, and any poem about dragons immediately tops the list), but I was inspired momentarily when I stepped outside.
As a side note, you are not allowed to reproduce this poem and it is copyright to me.

O Autumn sun

Of winter warmth
and summer light
how early do
the stars shine bright
now that the dusk
is summoned soon
it won’t be long
’til it is noon

The flowers close
and beasts do sleep
the moistened clouds
like maidens weep
to leave the dew
on fresh green grass
to bathe the birds
on morning pass

The circle spins
what she has given
it comes from earth
it comes from heaven
next fall will come
after seasons four
and thus the circle
spins once more.

I did a bit of reading on the Divine Proportion and I made my own template of it. I made this around the basic shapes. It’s more like a sort of concept I think, rather than an illustration. I used some of my favourite colours and a ‘theme’ to base the picture around; mostly ‘old’ or ‘vintage’ assets were used.
I’m relatively happy with the result, especially as it took me little time to complete, and has helped me learn a bit about composition. I hope to be doing more little things like this to help build a small stack of themes, hopefully with my own illustrations also.