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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New Valentines Card!

Well I have been massively neglecting this blog as of late so I need to show it some love.
What better way than by telling you about my new Coggingtons Valentines Day card, "Clanking in Sync" - which I think would not be too amiss on an Anniversary either.

Available here! - £2.65 + p&p

(Use voucher code CRIPESBLOG for a 1% discount on all purchases until Valentines Day.

Inside it reads "Like perfectly paired cogs".

It's been a year since I produced my first greetings card - my first Coggingtons Valentines card so I'm very excited to bring you my newest one!

Please note that this item is a printed card design incorporating my original hand-drawn digital artwork, and original photographs I've taken, manipulated together.

If you want me to handwrite a message inside the card and post it directly to the recipient, write this in the notes when you checkout.

Dimensions: 105mm x 148mm (4.13" x 5.82")

The card is a thick 350gsm, FSC credited paper stock. With a light satin coating on the outside, the inside is left uncoated, making it easier for you to write your own message. Each card is individually scored, ensuring a clean fold.

Each card comes with a thick, crisp white envelope with a bright splash of pink hidden inside!

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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-

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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!

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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!

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Splat!!!

My first ever Stop-Motion film!

I've been wanting to do this for ages so I've been checking out guides and stuff online, and a book I have, and so on. Click here for a Pinterest board of some of them!

Today, I discovered there's a phone app to compose a series of photos into a basic film. My housemate did actually tell me about this app ages ago, but in my usual way I filed it somewhere until I was ready to discover it myself like some intrepid explorer uprooting all the signposts and flags pointing me at something, until I get there and stick my own flag in.


Having found this app, did I wait until I was home and could take my time over it? Did I script it? Did I plan it? Did I wait until I could control the lighting and environment? Did I wait until I had proper props and things to support my phone camera and puppet? Did I wait until I even had the tools or know-how to make a proper puppet?
Did I hell!
I did it excitedly with Blu-Tac at my desk at work in the 20 minutes I had left of my lunch break with my phone proped up on a weighted sellotape dispenser and getting odd looks from my colleagues as I made numerous squelchy noises and thumped the desk repeatedly until I had the right sounds for the audio track!

The very end, from where my fist comes in, was all animated in about a 2 minutes because that was literally all I had left of my lunch-break! 

(I knew all that time spent making Blu-Tac models in French lessons at school would come in handy for something, no matter how many of the Mr. Mason confiscated and squished!)

Seriously, though; I do plan on creating some proper articulated puppets, sculpting and/or moulding bodies for them, painting them and doing this properly soon.

Watch this space!

-Curt-

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What is art? And who owns it?

I'm never sure what I think of stories like this. I think photography can undeniably be an art form. I'm always hazy when the photographer hasn't arranged the elements themselves though. For example, landscape photography. Is is art if i wander into a field and take a pic with my phone of the landscape. What of a tree? What about of a dropped crisp packet on the floor? If so can I claim ownership of that photo? What if I hand my phone to a stranger and get them to take a photo of the crisp packet. Do I still own the rights to that picture? It's on my phone so I guess I do. Does that apply if I set a camera up aimed at a crisp packet and step back and throw stones at the camera until after knocking the camera to not point at the crisp packet, I finally knock the shutter release button. I've not actually specifically arranged the shot, instead setting it up so natural processes like physics actually dictate the composition and actually release the shutter. 

David Slater hoped this picture would earn him a fortune, presumably because it's a remarkable picture. But actually, this picture is only remarkable because David Slater didn't take it. The macaque did. 

"You're saying I can't have this picture and it's not mine because I didn't do it! 

But that's exactly why it's important and why I want it: Because *I'm* the one who made sure I *didn't* take it!"

What a position to have to try to defend!