Progress report on "The Unearthing"

I've had a piece, "The Unearthing", in the works for ages now. I started it over a year ago, but then got distracted by Coggingtons cards and work and life and the like and it was shelved with the aim of me picjking it up to finish sometime.
Well, that time is now so I'm soldiering on with it now.

Check back soon to see how it looks.

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Always learning!

I am currently designing a greetings card for someone. I can't put the design in progress up on here until after the card has been given to its recipient, obviously but I can chat a little about it here.

Last night, I sat up far too late. I wanted to get the card finished, or as near to finished as I could last night and mostly achieved that.

The image on the card is set in space and I had been putting off doing the background because I thought it would be massively time-consuming and hard going. So I cast about on the interwebs to see what I could see regarding spacey backgrounds that don't need a photo.

The result allowed me to do this, which I am very happy withs:

The gaps in the starfield are mostly covered by picture elements in the finished piece.

Now this is where I get twitchy about Photoshop. I always used to draw and paint the old-fashioned way where if there was a mark on the paper, it was because I'd physically put it there. With a drawing tablet and photoshop, when I'm using plain brushes, I feel that's ok. It's not "cheating". Using textures was something it took me a while to feel comfortable with using. The effects you can get off them are brilliant though so I have started using them. I try to use my own photos as a texture where possible, rather than download textures/photo references.

The starfield above was mostly done by applying a "noise" filter to a black background, then manipulating it in various ways. I didn't physically place any of those stars so is that ok?

I drew a circle for the planet, then used a bit of basic brush and erase, applied a texture and Photoshop's spherising effects, embossing, glow effects and various other things to create the planet. Is that ok?

I've not really experimented with different brushes and custom brushes much, but I know you can get great effects form them. Is that cheating?

What do you think?

Please do leave me a comment with your thoughts on whether this is cheating.

Creating my Steampunk birthday card, with Geoffrey Coggington.

So, I decided to create a birthday card.

The decisions in this card were all very simple and, to be honest, it was quite a simple card to do.
I had couple of ideas about this. I knew I wanted to use the idea of a hot air balloon being a birthday balloon but didn't know whether I wanted to have a Coggington in the balloon, or interacting with it some way else.
When Izzy suggested having him holding onto the balloon, it sounded perfect and I liked the idea of it yanking him off his feet which went on to lend itself to the caption inside of "Don't Get Carried Away!"

I began with my now standard process of starting up a Pinterest board for the card and collected ideas and references and so on.
I took a few photos outside work of the sky, and downloaded a sheet of typewriter keys:

I'm a little disappointed I used a downloadable pack for the keys. I would rather have photographed them myself but I had a time restriction because I wanted one of these ready for someone's birthday, and I didn't have time to find and photograph a typewriter. Maybe one day...

I isolated the keys I wanted and digitally cut them out from their background and arranged them, set up  my drawing space with my regular Coggington grungey frame, then laid down my photograph of tea-stained paper with a blue colour layer over the top of it for a placeholder for the sky.

Then I pencilled in the design and lay down flat colours, just to see that it worked as a concept.

It seemed good, so I refiined the pencils to 'inks', digitally.

The photo I took of the sky was good, but a little too clearly defined so I blurred it up, then to give it some interest, I added some fake bokeh effect as described in this tutorial.
I considered cutting the trees out as they were a distraction, but decided against this as they give the pic a vague point of reference and suggest it isn't happening in a vacuum.

The original photo

With some blur added

With some bokeh

 "Bokeh" is the way a camera lens renders out of focus points of light and is often considered to be aesthetically pleasing so I wanted a little here in the trees.

Then I filled in the flat colours, and the shadows which was quite fiddly around the balloon's rigging, but nothing too complicated.

I had no idea how to create the flames and the glow of them in the balloon  so I had a close look at photo references to see how the flames appear in hot air balloons and then hand drew the flames and the glow effects.



Once I'd done that, it was mostly a case of adding textures to the drawing:
There is a crinkled paper texture (that I often use from a photograph I took after screwing up, then straightening out a sheet of new A4 paper) all over but carefully masked to reduce its intensity over the key areas of the drawing.
Likewise with a tea-stained paper texture I created and often use.
There's also a rusted metal to Geoffrey Coggington in separate sections such as torso, left leg, head, foot-bottom etc. I applied the texture and warped it to vaguely fit the contours of his body. For this purpose, I didn't need to map the texture to every contour of his body.
I also applied a flat rusty metal texture over all of Geoffrey, masked it to just the 'ink' outline, and brought up it's intensity while getting rid of the actual inks. This means his outline isn't entirely solid but made just of a rusty metal image.

I popped some shadows behind the typewriter keys and fiddled with their colour levels to make them fit in with the rest of the picture and added some lens flare across Geoffrey and this card was pretty much done!

The finished card! Click to buy!

I couldn't decide whether I liked it darker or lighter so I produced both and put it to a Facebook poll.
The darker one won by quite a large margin, but I have sold a few of the lighter ones too so it would seem there's a place for both!

The card is available now in my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

-Curt-

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I'm such a Photoshop n00b!

I still feel pretty new to Photoshop and Digital drawing and painting.

I have always drawn since I was old enough to hold a pencil. I had a fixation with drawing things "broke" when I was little. From "draw car broke" to the slightly more worrying "draw man broke", I always wanted things opened up. I think I just had the same curiosity I still do for the inner workings of things.
It progressed to copying pictures of Superman out of the comics my mum used to buy me, to developing my own stories for Superman to be involved with.
I did some oil paintings are a pre-teen and moved on to watercolours as a teenager.
I doodled through boring lessons at school and had exercise books and exams returned with scores of red pen telling me that these were not the appropriate places for my drawings.
At uni, I doodled some more, and did drawings for some of my friends as they asked for them.
When I left uni, and got a job in Theatre in Education, I produced more drawings for my friends while I was sat backstage waiting to go on.
While in Thailand in 2006, I picked up a copy of Photoshop CS3 because I thought it would be useful and it was cheaper over there. My laptop was in no way up to running it though so it lay dormant until 2008 when I coloured an old drawing I'd done about 4 years prior.

Click here to see it full-sized

At this point, I didn't have a drawing tablet so was colouring entirely using a mouse which wasn't ideal. Doing the hair in the above picture was a pain. A couple of colouring jobs done with a mouse led to me getting a Wacom drawing tablet and working with this since.
Since then, everything I've learnt to do has been self-taught. I've read bits of books on using Photoshop, and when I know there's something specific I want to do, I turn to the internet and helpful tutorials. I have a Pinterest board of tutorials that I want to started incorporating bits of into my future work.
I do, however, still work in quite a traditional way. I hand draw my drawings, either with pencils on paper and scanning them to Photoshop, or drawing them directly into Photoshop. Then I physically or digitally ink it as appropriate, apply colours, usually as flat washes then building up details to a finished piece.

I'm getting better at this and I've recently started using more and more photomanipulation to drop objects into pieces, and to create textures from photos. With the new steampunk Christmas card I've just completed, I decided to take the photo elements from being small items in the background or used as an ethereal overlay, to very much an essential part of the main picture.

Click here to see it full-sized

I still often struggle to get my pieces to look the way I want them to. I think I'm still a little locked into using traditional media and not thinking Photoshop enough. I also think I need to be more imaginative and more abstract with my concepts. I don't think I'm thinking of interesting enough concepts to need half the stuff Photoshop can do for me.

Firstly, I still haven't quite figured out Brushes. While I know the basics of how to create and use them, I haven't quite figured out the why. I tried using a brush I'd created from a photo of a fir branch little bit on the new Coggingtons card, to turn areas of black shadow on the Christmas tree into areas of textured green fir branches. You'll have to tell me how successful I was. Again though, this is very much using the brush as a peripheral feature whereas I know they can be used very much to create essential parts of a piece.

I keep seeing mention of using custom brushes, and I spoke briefly to my friend Adam Ford who extolled their virtues.

So, the next time I get time to do a bit of experimenting on a project, that's what I shall be doing.

-Curt-

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