A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 3.

Written on 2/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy from my Etsy store), and follows on  from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

This is how I left this pic before the weekend. Since then, I have finished it!

After writing the last blog post, I decided that his cuff fur trim was way too narrow so I widened that up and decided I wanted to texture it a bit more. I was at the house of Jicsi's Jewellery and her littl'un has some teddy bears, so I spent 5 minutes photographing bear bums to use as a fur texture. When I got home, I whipped out an old belt for his belt texture too.

The whole pic was well on the way then. A bit of light and shade in the eyes and bits of shading in other things here and there, and adding Geoffrey's other fingers to the tree left me ready to add the frame and lettering.

My stamping is not really up to scratch so I stamped out the message, but knew I'd need to tidy it up in Photoshop. Then it occurred to me that while I'm at it, I might as well do the whole alphabet so that next time I need some lettering, I can just nick it from the master sheet.

I learnt I can't keep my stamping in a straight line.

I borrowed a frame from Jicsi to photograph, and then put it in the illustration and resized and reshaped it. It is a round frame, which I liked because it was reminiscent of a snowflake, but I was aware that to fit the writing into it the frame would need to be widened so that was an unfortunate sacrifice. To simply make it bigger whilst contraining the proportions would have led to the frame dominating the image which I didn't want.

Then I dropped a photograph of some textured paper I took ages ago over the top with an off-white layer set to 'colour' over the top to take the glare off it. Then I masked it to the right shape and size and used the burn tool around the edges for a bit of shade, then dropped my newly neatened up stamping over the top. I had to make the lettering quite narrow to fit it in which isn't ideal.  I had to play around with masks and his top hat for a bit to get them right but it worked.

That left me here. I'd spent a bit deciding whether I wanted his coat a nice bright red, or a little darker. I'd gone with darker at this point but I still wasn't convinced.

I had some pictures of some cog-esque paper snowflakes I'd made years ago so I did experiment with having them as fairly prominent hazy overlays but decided they were better behind the frame, and as small ornaments in the tree

All of my previous Coggington cards have always been done using just flat colours (apart from the glowing eyes) and textures and for this reason, I'd been reluctant to to add more subtle light and shade from the tree lights. This had been a conscious decision and I liked the way my Valentine's Coggington card could look a bit like it had been done with woodblock prints. Although I'd lost a bit of that with my more recent cards, I'd still always just used flat colours for them.
 However, I just couldn't be happy with the shade of his coat so I decided to very simply lighten Geoffrey on the side nearest the tree (50% opacity white layer set to 'overlay'), and darken him on the other side (35% opacity near-black layer set to 'vivid light'). It looked a lot better than I'd thought it would so then I applied an orange-to-transparent gradient to Geoffrey from right to left. I liked these effects so much, I made the light and dark layers more opaque (the dark one is set to 100% 'vivid light') and applied another similar gradient to him.

He looks warm, don'tcha think?

Right at the end, I remembered I wanted goggles on his top hat. I was excited that I could justify these goggles rather than just having them there because steampunk. (Yeah - I know he's a robot who doesn't need eye-protection when flying a steam-powered sleigh! Shh!)
Off I went to the living room to photograph my goggles whilst trying to stop the kitten from savaging them. I transformed the strap to the right place and applied a 'cutout' effect to them, then put a yellow low-opacity colour layer over the top to help blend them and shaded them and tweaked the levels a little.

I'm very happy with the results you see here.

The card is available to buy from this link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/204426247/steampunk-christmas-card-with-the 

The finished card!

Cheers for reading this far!

-Curt-

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator

And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

Written on 17/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy form my Etsy shop), and follows on from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

I now have a little more work done on this.

My main point of focus today was getting the Christmas tree to look like a tree. I want the lights on it to pop but also for the rest of the tree, which is mainly black in my photo, to not just blend into the background and become a black smoosh of nothingness.

Erasing the bit of curtains etc that was in the background of this picture of the tree was first.

Then I applied a couple of hue/saturation modification layers to the tree and adjusted the levels to highlight the lights, bump up the saturation, and alter the hue slightly.

Then I created a mask of the tree, and put a layer of gold over the top, set to colour blending mode to make it warm and suggest the yellows of the background.

Then I created a custom brush from a photo of a fir tree branch, colour selected the dark areas, and used the brush at low opacity and with varying shades of green to bring some of the shadows to a nice Christmas tree-esque green.

I lens blurred the background a bit and took the brightness down.

I've started shading Geoffrey's coat and applied the same rusted metal texture I usually use on Coggingtons to him.

Lastly, I've applied the old photograph border I created for my Coggingtons card to this, and darkened selected bits of the background.

I've decided I need to photograph a pair of my goggles for his hat (legitimate reason though: He's been flying a sleigh! I'm not just sticking goggles in because steampunk!) and I think I will forgo the Christmas hat, but may make his top hat festively red!

I want to bring elements of the background out a bit more, such as the stockings.

When Geoffrey's a little more fully coloured, I will need to start blending him into the background a little more.

That's been enough for today though. My housemate is back and has wine!

-Curt-

Part 3 is here!

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator

And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

Written on 14/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

I have started my Steampunk Coggingtons Christmas card tonight. I won't post this blog post until after I have published the card. (Edit: The finished card is now available here)
I don't know if anyone's interested to know how or why I made the decisions I did about this card, but here comes the reasoning.
Concentrate.

I've had a few ideas about the basic idea. On the one hand, I would like to show Geoffrey Coggington as a Santa-type figure. I have ideas about epic steam powered sleighs and I've got a couple of photos of outdoors in Brum from Christmas from years back to use as backdrops for this.
But also, I want to show Geoffrey as a dad figure with his family. But I have yet to cement the idea of who his family is in my own head, let alone anyone else's. I also have some photos of my own living room from last Christmas that I would quite like to get in there with that concept.

I've decided to kind of combine the Geoffrey as Santa idea with the home idea. I hope to produce different Christmas cards that explore all of these ideas at some point - maybe for this Chritsmas, maybe next.

Here's the design as it stands:

It's my living room in the background with the tones tweaked in it to make it warmer than the photo suggested. There's also a separate picture of the Christmas tree which shows it a little better and I have brought that out of the background and enlarged it to the foreground. It's still got a fair bit of its own background surrounding it.
Obviously, I drew Geoffrey in there.
I didn't know what sort of coat I wanted for him. A traditional done up Santa coat like so was my first thought:

This , though,covers up so much of his chest that only his head really shows, and I don't want him to just look like a Santa with an orange head. For the same reason, I don't want him to wear trousers. I need enough of him showing that people unfamiliar with previous Coggington cards understand what he is. However, with a short coat and no trousers and with his waist/hip area exposed, he could just look indecent. (That said, it worked for Donald Duck. I still don't get why he covers his nether regions whenever he loses his top, though. They're ALWAYS exposed!).

So then I thought about a coat more like this one: 

The problem here though, was that with the pose I'd given him, an open long coat like this just draped awkwardly and looked little like a Santa coat.

Having caught a bit of Star Trek: Generations on telly when I'd gotten in earlier today, this popped into my head as I pondered this problem:

After a bit of Googling for historical military jackets, which fitted in with my idea of G. Coggington as the captain and pilot of his sleigh, I found this which justified that style of jacket with my idea in my eyes:

After toying with the idea of him in a top hat, versus him in a Santa hat, versus him in a top hat with a Santa hat on top, I've decided, for now, to forgo the Santa hat and hope the whole scenario conveys his Santa-ness.

That decided, I've laid down the flat colours on Geoff. 

That's enough for tonight.

Bed beckons and work is peering at me from under the cover of tomorrow morning.

Part 2 is here!

Check out my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/curtisallenillustrator
And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

Etsy

It's harder work than I realised running an Etsy shop, and I only have 6 items in mine at the moment: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred .
At the moment, it's only Coggingtons stuff, but more is planned.

Things like SEO can be befuddling - knowing just how to write tags in a way to minimize redundancy but maximise exposure. Then the various ways of trying to get the shop noticed such as plugging it on Facebook (but without becoming an insufferable bore).
Then there's trying to figure out how Twitter works to plug it there, and the same with Instagram and Tumblr which I only really use because I wanted a good picture sharing social media site to plug my cards on.
Pinterest, which I had been using for myself now feels like there might be a way to use it creatively to sell some cards but I'm darned if I know what way that is!

There's Etsy's own forums, which can be fun and have a wealth of information on them. Simply being active there gets me some notice and is useful for getting views and some favourites, but doesn't seem to be translating into sales yet.

Then there's good old word of mouth, and now I'm selling at craft fairs too! So I need to get some more business cards printed up, that actually include my Etsy shop address.

Then I need to optimise my shop itself, making sure my banner and logos are good, making sure my prices are right, making sure my shop's policies are fair and legal, making sure my descriptions are accurate, yet enticing, and yet optimised for SEO, making sure my photos are attractive both as standalones, and displayed together on my page, or taken out of context and displayed in an Etsy treasury or frontpage.

This is not to mention the actual process of creating new items.

All of this is perpetual. It is never finished, because it is never right. Stats pages tell me what's being looked at and by how many people and how they found my shop or products and there is always something to tweak for my old products, and then more monitoring as I give figurative birth to a new product and try to mould it's development in the market. There is always something more that can be done and attending to it is addictive. I often find myself up late at night tweaking.

I've learnt masses about marketing and promotion for a small business and I find the actual learning and processes fun, but I need to make sure I don't disappear down the rabbit hole completely.

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-

Check out my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/curtisallenillustrator