Friday, December 17, 2010

In the Works!

Hi All!
         I've been keeping busy since my last post with work and personal projects. I'm trying to keep my skills as an illustrator sharp while pursuing digital techniques. As a result, I've got some pencil illustrations to show you. The first one is a take on a photo that I came across while at work. The original photo shows a couple embracing in a moment of happiness. I thought, "Hmmmm....that looks pleasant. What happens when I put a mask on the guy? Does that change the composition? You be the judge." I'm pleased with the drawing- definitely my smoothest pencils to date. I used Canson Illustration paper (11"x17") and an F lead pencil.


The second illustration is something that I started last night, after work, and I stayed up until 1am working on it. It's a pin-up for the comic Skullkickers by writer Jim Zubkavich artist Edwin Huang. They're going to be in Woburn for a comic show and I want to stop by their booth and show them some love. Apparently, Skullkickers is the biggest thing in comics. It's sold out everywhere, and I haven't even gotten a chance to read it, aside from this preview! Check it out- I think that you'll enjoy it.

That's it for me. I'm looking forward to finishing up these illustrations. I'm just having a hell of a time getting them up on screen since I don't have a large format scanner. :(

Thursday, December 9, 2010

It's All in the Face- Digital Painting Session: 2

Hi All,
    This week is my second experiment in the realm of digital painting. It's been exciting to really dive into different methods of painting in Photoshop. It's so easy to let the computer restrict you because it's not as intuitive as holding a brush. Because of this I always felt that there was a wall separating me from getting at what I was really trying to do. A few tutorials later and the wall is beginning to crumble, and I'm finding my own process starting to emerge. It's really about being comfortable.
    For this recent painting I felt that it was time to try my best to mimic oils. I've always been more of a portrait artist so naturally I wanted my first subject to be a portrait. The human face is a familiar subject, yet it is one of the greatest challenges for an artist. One has to worry about being accurate and to create a relaxed, natural composition at the same time. For this challenge I chose Howling Bells front-woman, Juanita Stein, as my subject. I love the Howling Bells and the way in which Juanita embodies the soul of the band. Plus, she's Australian, and she's...well....cute!

Here's the entire process, documented one snapshot at a time.



Starting out with barebones lines on a white background.

See that I've now gone under Image/Adjustments/Levels
and bumped up the gray. It's still an RGB file- I just prefer to work in
grayscale since I trained myself to work this way from a young age.

A little bit of dodging and burning and we start to see the
beginnings of a face take shape. Still a long way to go...

I've sorta come as close as I can at this point with a light gray. 
Time to bump up the darks a bit more.

Remember to make copies of layers and to save different versions of the file.
I ended up with 4-5 versions of this file at different stages of the process.

Bumped up the black a bit more. This helps to carve out the light more.
There were parts of the face that didn't look right to me, according to the photo (nose is too long, face too slender) so I moved things around a bit in the next step.

Here I am in the Liquify filter, moving around facial features without any problems (I love that about digital painting!). She's starting to look more like Juanita. 

So, as you can see, the form is really there and I've gone pretty far with the grayscale.
For my purposes this was enough, since I wasn't doing a grayscale piece. If I were then I would have had to get more finicky with the smudge tool. Let's make some selections and add some color!

Close up before color.

I used the QuickMask (command + Q) feature to make my selections. I lowered 
the red opacity so that I could see underneath what I was selecting. Make sure to use 
a hard edge brush with opacity set at 100% when you do this or you'll get weird gradients
in your selections that will show when you fill them with color. 

In QuickMask Mode- the red represents the selected area

Always save your selections. I've never found a reason not to hold 
onto even the smallest selection. Why do the work twice? Oh, and give them names that
 make sense- otherwise-you may not know what some of them are.

Got her face and neck selected- time to add some color by adjusting the Hue/Saturation.
I try not to screen or overlay colors- that just gets complicated. 

Trying to match her skin tone roughly. Not gonna get it quite right at this junction.
Best to just get the general color in there and adjust it later. The important thing is to
keep moving with the piece. Digital painting gives the artist the ability to work as much
as they want to without the fear of overworking the surface. You're basically 
encouraged to play as long as you'd like!

Sometimes you just have to add color in the background to get the piece
moving. I got to a point after smudging around tones for hours, where things just
plateaued. Don't forget about the background- it's integral to the composition. It
can make or break a piece. I started to make textures and dump them in there.

More experiments with the background- trying to overlay textures.

This background was really nice- but it didn't fit with the subject. Also,
I wanted to elevate it a bit by using the Art History brush.


And after some major tweaks this is the final piece. 
I really do hope that you enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed making 
this portrait. If you think that this post was helpful, or that you'd want to talk
shop a bit- please do drop me a line. Farewell, for now, and listen to
the Howling Bells. THEY'RE REALLY REALLY GOOD.


Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Digital Painting- I told you that there'd be masks!

Hi All,
          First of all, I hope that you are doing well this week. Secondly, I would like to thank all of you for helping me to get this blog to almost 300 views in fewer than two months! I couldn't be more pleased with the positive energy that I'm getting. Keep it coming and I promise to update every week.
          Lately, I've been doing a lot of drawings and not taking them up to the next level. The following is a tutorial of how I took a drawing from Thanksgiving and brought it through to a finished digital painting over the past 2 days. This is just a taste of what I've got in store now that I've recovered from being sick and I've had time to watch Brian Harberlin's tutorials. I hope that you enjoy it!
Step 1
So, by now you know that I'm obsessed with Venetian masks at the moment. That's the main reason for why I chose this as my subject. The first stage is a simple pencil drawing done on Strathmore drawing paper. Here we see that I've added some background effects into the piece in photoshop.

This is a snapshot of another window that I had open where I experimented with making smoky effects by varying brush styles.

I recommend playing around with 'Scattering' & trying out 'Texture' to
 see what works for you.


Step 2

Okay, so at this point I'm trying to add in highlights and position everything for when I start to paint. I wanted this to have a cool glow effect as well, so I found out how to take a brush and convert it into glowing energy.

This is a weird shape that I made and later cut out and used for the glowing energy that you see below.

I took the shape and threw a Gaussian blur (Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur) on it and warped it under Edit/Transform/Warp. I then highlighted it with an airbrush and did Hue/Saturation adjustments to it. After that I flattened the image and started working on top of it.

Step 3
Next, it comes time to add colors. I didn't have a color scheme in mind so I started with any ol' colors really. The point here is to just carve out the clothes and face. The colors can change instantly. Keep in mind that I have a selection of the actual figure and I can make adjustments to the color by selecting it and using Hue/Saturation.

With the selection on. Darn marching ants! Quick tip: command + H will hide them.

Step 4
Here is what I came up with after adjusting the colors. I use pink and purple to often in my work so I wanted to break out of that. Yellow is also a challenging color to use because it is so harsh on the eyes if not used properly.

This is what it looks like with the line art layer turned off in PS. Kinda crappy, huh?

With some tweaking you can see that the figure is getting more volume with the addition of some backlight. This is really my first time successfully using backlighting- it can make or break a piece. In this case, I think that it works nicely.

Step 5


Here is the final product, after about an hour of smudging it up with the 'smudge tool'. I like to work with the strength at about 50-60, because 100 is just too strong.




I hope that you found this enjoyable. It really was a fun piece to work on. If you'd like to see more work like this in the future please leave a comment and let me know. Right now I'm working on an 11"x17" painting from last week's post. I'll have my progress from that up soon. Thanks for checking out my blog! Until next week....farewell!


Wednesday, November 24, 2010

After Super Mega Fest Blues

Hi All,
         Jake and I spent the weekend over in Framingham, alongside our good buddy Art O'Callaghan (amazing Star Wars painter), for the Super Mega Fest. It was our first time being there and we had a great time selling prints and doing the occasional fan sketch. I barely ate anything on Saturday and didn't sleep very well either (partying with Trekkies and Star Wars fans isn't easy!) and as a result I've come down with a cold. I wanted to post something up yesterday but this will have to do. (My Mondays are devoted to watching Sunday night's episode of the Walking Dead!) Among the people who we met at the show was the local artist, who referes to himself as Devil's Cheesecake, Amos Medruga. Please do like his Facebook page and check out his myspace account. It's great to know that there are people of his skill level hanging around the ol' North Sho'ah.
        At the moment I've got a piece lying around on my lightbox and I may as well show it to you already! I'm not sure if I'll paint on this one with gouache or just go into it digitally. Maybe I'll do a combination of the two. There is a technique that I've been dying to try that includes using an Acrylic painter's medium that will seal the paper so that I can paint on it with anything, even oils! I'll keep you posted on the progress of this one. Also, I'd like to take this time to properly share with you all my brother Jacob's Tumblr. He's got a whole bunch of things in progress at the moment (including a collaboration with yours truly!). The guy is only getting better and better. Please show him some love.

Well, I think that about wraps it up for now. I will be posting up another entry this week to show you that I do appreciate your attention and interest.
One hint: masks!

Thursday, November 11, 2010

What's in a Mask?

Hi All,

Let me see—it's been a long week! I am completely drained due to the shift in the solstice. I need some sun. So, as a result I don't have much this week except for some interesting things that I've been reading about. Not often talked about in our culture is the Carnevale di Venezia (Carnival of Venice). This festival goes way back over 600 years in Italy. It started out as a normal part of Venetian culture, in which the rich and poor would take part in random masquerades. Back in the 1200s it was perfectly fine to go out at night with a mask on, as to not disclose your identity while perusing the city. In fact, many aristocrats would wear masks while partaking in immoral activities. Below is a painting showing a popular spot called the "ridotto" or foyer, where people would mingle wearing masks.
 
The "ridotto" was found mostly in theatres. This was a place where people would gamble among other things. It later became banned for a while in Venice (but we all know that nothing stays banned for very long).
         Sometime later, "masquerading" became outlawed in Venice only to be brought back in the form of a carnival. The carnival would be held two weeks before Ash Wednesday and end on what we know as Fat Tuesday. I do believe that it fluctuates though and it might start much earlier than that. From what I've been told, the carnival is just as mysterious as it appears to be. An Italian friend of mine has told me that Venice becomes a giant social scene around the popular squares. So, I have been very intrigued by this phenomenon and have been studying the attire that people wear during this time of year. Here is an example of some masks.

As you can see they are very elaborate! Just last week I checked out the movie "Eyes Wide Shut" and saw that one mask in particular was very popular back in old Venice. And you might notice that it's what the noblemen are wearing in the painting above.
And finally, here is a drawing that I've done recently, based on these amazing masks.
I hope that you've found this as interesting as I have. This is all going to make sense eventually, once I start to put together the pages for this project. As always, thanks for checking out my blog! See you next week!
-Josh



Saturday, November 6, 2010

99 Dreams

Hello- this is the second week of this blog and as you can see it's been changing with every post. I do apologize for the confusion about what this blog is actually about. After years of hesitating to start one of these I just jumped right in and started throwing ideas around. If you are a creator of any kind you may know that the initial energy that one brings to a new project never lasts. After all, it really is a lot of work. Of course, it is fun and rewarding in the end (that's why I do it!). So, if you've been with me for the past 3 Fridays then you may be asking yourself, "What the heck is going on here?". I assure you that I have finally settled down my brain (it finally stopped churning out a million ideas a minute) and am working diligently on a project that I mentioned last week- 99 Dreams.
What you seen here is a promo poster that I made in the past two days. Of course, it tells you absolutely nothing about the story, but you must admit that you are a bit intrigued. Aren't you? WELL I HOPE SO!!! So, over the past week I have been writing down the synopsis for the entire story and have plans to start the script immediately afterwards. In the meantime, I documented almost the entire process of how I made this image that you see up above. Okay, here we go!

Step 1
This is the step in which I select my surface to work on (in this case an old 6"x8" piece of matte board). Note that I used a grid pattern for this. I decided to use it just to give myself a sense of the area as I began to draw out the initial sketch (I didn't use any transfer method).
Initial sketch drawn with an F lead pencil. I typically use the brand Kimberly.

Step 2
Okay, so after doing the initial sketch I then bring in some tones. Since this is a painting I start with a non-obtrusive color for my underpainting. Following the traditions that have been in place for over 500 years by the Renaissance I always choose an earth tone like yellow ochre.
Here's the piece after I have laid in some tones. I really like this part of the process when everything is monochromatic. Sometimes I wish that I could just stop here and be done. It really has a pleasant look.
I then grab a burnt umber and lay in some dark tones. I do all of this because it acts as a guide for when I lay in some thicker paint. Painting is not too natural for me so I have to work at it a bit more than others. You'll notice that everything has a low opacity. You want this layer to be covered easily by subsequent layers. Don't use too much pigment in this stage.

Step 3
By this point I have a good idea of how the light is playing off of the mask. Most of the gradients have been put in place any last minute adjustments have been made. This sorta looks like a David Mack painting so far, not to compare myself to such a great artist. I've had the pleasure of meeting him once in NYC. He's a really nice guy. Okay, enough sidetracking- let's get on with this!

Above you see that I have brought out some Gouache paints. I really love Gouache- it's got a nice consistency and it goes very well with watercolor. I like to feel like I'm actually painting when I used water-based media so Gouache works well for me. Since it's a much thicker paint than watercolor it requires a bit more water. Also, when it dries it has a matte finish (sometimes I like to draw on top of it, once it's dried, with a heavy pastel). If you've never used it, I highly recommend experimenting with it.

For the purposes of this painting here are some of the colors that I'll be using.

I usually grab a number 2 or three round brush and a flat shader when I paint with Gouache. As you can see it's getting much more opaque. The burnt Sienna (in the dark areas) has a very rich and earthy tone to it. The orange is just the right tone for what I'm looking for. I chose these colors because they have a nice harmony to them. This painting was done with a digital finish in mind.

Step 4
After the darker Gouache has been laid in I think it's about time to tighten up the edges and add some highlights. This is the tricky part because you have to remember that you're making a painting and not a drawing. I try not to outline too much in this part of the process. 

Because this is going to a digital step I really don't get to finicky here. It's just important to delineate the form like I said before. You'll notice that not much changes in this step.

Step 6
Now for the digital process I use Photoshop. The main goal is to just get an oil painting look without actually doing one. Over the past month, when I was at the NYC Comic Con, Jake and I had the pleasure of meeting Brian Haberlin. This guy pretty much revealed to me a whole side of digital coloring that I just never understood. He sees the never-ending possibilities of digital media and embraces them while others choose to do the status quo (mostly due to tight deadlines). A trick that he showed me was how to use the Art History Brush. This brush will literally destroy your image only to rebuild it using any style brush that you want, giving you an endless array of effects. I will not go into the entire process here. Just check out the link that I provided and you'll know the general idea behind it.


Take a look at the tones here that I am able to get with this tool. You'll notice how it now has a painterly feel to the soft edges. I want to let you know that this process, although it is automated, still requires a good deal of attention and detail. Some people believe that the computer is supposed to render everything perfectly with the click of a button. For this approach I recommend using a tablet and stylus (I use a Wacom bamboo and it's fine for my purposes). I have made multiple copies of layers and overlaid them with various layer effects. Also, I'd like to note that I used a Sony 12 mega pixels camera to get the painting on screen.

And so, you've already seen the finished product, but here it is again. This has been a very in depth post. I hope to have something else for you all next week. Take care for now!