Dr. Maya Badry

FFG was kind enough to spoil some art I did for the upcoming "Ebla Restored" expansion of their Call of Cthulhu card game on their website. So here it is! I was directed to make the creature pretty ambiguous so it gave me a lot of room to just play with random creepy and gross textures without being too married to representing the form.

Fei and Elly Just Hanging Around

I received an email yesterday from a Xenogears fan who was kind enough to include a photo of two of my prints, framed and hanging above his computer. It's nice to see that they've found a happy home!

Also, I made a post on my DeviantArt page, but forgot to mention it out here: Fei Prints are almost completely sold out! I have 3 left and once they've sold, that's it. There will not be any second print runs, so if you've been waiting to get your hands on one of them, now is the time! You can get to my order page by clicking the picture link over on the sidebar to the right!

Hoping to have some new work to post soon.

Creating Digital Paint - Texture Part 1

Has it really been almost a month since I posted last?! Ridiculous...

Well today I thought I'd keep going with my series on digital paint and take a long-winded moment to talk about texture.

Now texture is one of those things that I had avoided for the longest time when I started painting digitally. I think it was because, at the time, I considered texture only in the sense of the surface qualities of objects within the painting (i.e. skin texture vs. grass texture vs. metallic texture). And because I have a compulsion to always do things the hard way, I decided that it would be best to try and learn how to render those surface qualities by hand. This was both a good and a bad thing because even though I was learning a lot by trying to render everything meticulously, I would still end up with paintings that ultimately have that smooth, Photoshoppy feel (see below). This was also at a time in my education before I really learned much in the way of actually painting (with paints).

One of my first digital paintings from highschool. Blech.

 Move ahead 4 or 5 years through art school and an idea finally clicks that I will share as my next tip:

Creating Digital Paint Tip #2

Texture in a digital painting should describe the application of paint.

Now this one gets a bit tricky and requires some knowledge of how to paint in the real world. There are three kinds of textures that occur on the surface of a real painting that all have to be considered in order to replicate them digitally. They are (as I refer to them):

1. Substrate Texture  - The texture of the paper or piece of material being painted on.



 

2. Paint Texture - The texture of the paint as applied to the substrate. This applies to both impasto textures and the shape quality of a dab or brushstroke.

3. Representational Texture - The perception of a painted object's particular surface qualities (i.e. a rock's "rockiness" versus a metallic surface's smoothness, etc.). Learn how to indicate representational texture by manipulating the previous two types, instead of just meticulously painting it out or using a sampled brush.



The way these three types interact in a painting varies a lot. Thin paint will have no texture of its own and will instead display the texture of the substrate. Thick paint that is dragged across the surface will have an impasto paint texture at the beginning of the stroke and will fizzle out drastically according to how the surface of the substrate catches the end of the stroke. It really is maddening, the variety of textures that can be achieved. The trick is to just study them, and play with effective ways of recreating them digitally.

At the risk of going on WAAAAY too long in one post, I'm going to finish this discussion in a later post where I'll get more into specific ways I use Corel Painter to create textures in a painting.

And as always, if anyone has anything to add so far, feel free to post it in the comments!

Cheerio!
 

  

Ack-Ack Macaque

Solaris Books recently gave me the okay to show off this cover I finished up for them last month. It's for a sci-fi novel called "Ack-Ack Macaque" by author Gareth L. Powell. The book will publish early next year I believe. Gotta say, it doesn't get much better than monkeys with big guns and super zeppelins!

20"x30" Oil on board.

Internet Zombieism....Again

I've been wanting to add a little more editorial work to my portfolio and thought that the subject of an earlier blog post would make a good topic to do a finished illustration. This piece went through SOOOO many changes and doesn't really look anything like my original sketch for it, but I'm really trying to get better at simplifying my images and leaving out things that really aren't essential to the idea. Happy surfing everyone.

Still Life and a Rockwell Study

Creating Digital Paint - Part 1

Lately, I've been experimenting and working towards creating a digital painting experience that I think mirrors more perfectly the way I work traditionally. Not only does this deal with creating custom brushes, but also with some “post production” techniques as well. During the course of my explorations, I've devised some rules that I'd like to share in a new series of posts called “Creating Digital Paint”. This will be for anyone interested in trying to bridge the gap between their traditional work and digital artwork. Of course, these are more or less just my opinions and this info may not be all that new to some people out there. But hopefully my findings and experiences will be at least a little helpful.

Creating Digital Paint Tip #1

Don't try to make your digital painting look like a traditional painting; Make your digital painting look like a PHOTO of a traditional painting.

WHY?

The fact is, any time you see a piece of traditionally created artwork on a computer screen, you're not looking at the artwork. You're looking at a photograph of the artwork. This matters in very small but very noticeable ways, such as:

-Photos of artwork are rarely ever quite as sharp as you think they are. Brushes that are extremely sharp and crisp should generally be avoided except when working on fine details. And even then, you'd be surprised at how much more convincing a softer brush can look.

-Photos will always have some amount of film grain to them. Don't be afraid to play with the “Add Noise” filter in Photoshop over your finished painting. You don't want to add a LOT of noise, but even just the slightest bit will help blur the line between a traditional look and digital one. Example below:

Finished painting brought from Painter X into Photoshop CS3. The brushwork looks fairly traditional, but I think we can make it even better...

Add a layer filled with 50% gray and an "Add Noise" filter on top.

Set the gray noise layer to Overlay mode and play with the opacity until it looks good. Now, not only do the brush marks look traditional, but the added noise gives the illusion that the entire image exists in some sort of physical space apart from our computer screen. Nifty!

Triglow-bite

Just a quick morning warm-up before work. Playing around with some Photoshop brushes and this little guy popped up.

The Week of 100 Hands

I don't know why, but I sometimes feel the need to punish myself artistically. With a bit of time between projects this week, I decided it would be a good chance to practice drawing hands - 100 of them to be precise. They say that you have to create 1000 bad drawings before you get to a good one, so I figure, why not just knock a tenth of those out of the way in one go? And I'll be damned if I don't know a bit more now about hands than when I started!

I think maybe next I'll do.....noses?

The Surrealist

This here feller was a private commission for the cover of "ReShoot Volume 2: The Art of Violence" by John Kolsun. The Surrealist is an artist-turned-psychotic villain in the series, and here he is doing what he apparently does best (or at least better than making art): holding a knife and looking creepy! I don't want to give too much away, so head on over to the comic's Kickstarter page to learn more and help support this self-published, action-packed, dystopian sci-fi thriller!

ReShoot is ©John Kolsun. Image shown with permission.