Onegraydot

Jesus healed the man let down through the roof.

produced using corel painter, and a load of stuff in Photoshop.  If you would like to use this image then please do, and if you use it on your website use the url with the anchor text ‘colour cartoons’ please.

Many thanks

Transfiguration of Christ.  Appeared on Scripture Union Light live website 17 November 2010

King Saul started off as a young and funky king, ending up with a tortured old man. This painting had to be worked from scratch, combining the form of a young and vibrant young man with an old drunk tramp.  It was heart breaking to produce.

The torturing of King Saul

This is the illustration, again done for Scripture Union, for Shadrach Meshach and Abednego in the ‘firey furnace.’  Published today.

Daniel 3: illustration of the firey furnace

A brand new image up on the Scripture Union website today of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.  This image was completed in Zbrush and then worked up in photoshop

I used simple matcaps in Zbrush which had the same lighting, and then blended them together in photoshop.  The background is from a photograph and simply blurred.  Shadow added in photoshop.  Whisps of smoke are a simple smoke brush in Photoshop.

Stages of development

Permalink: http://onegraydot.com/zbrush-nebuchadnezzar-statue-in-dream

There are many ways to skin a cat, and many ways to produce an illustration.  I quite like the following method and I think that it’s a way that most people given a computer could make use of.  It’s a quick digital art method which gives me the final composition on which to do the painting, and combines a few techniques to product a final black and white illustration.

Please click the small image below to view the picture in all its glory.

Prelim stages

My youngest son playing the part of the evil creature.

Preliminary work:

I read the brief, which in this case is Revelation 18.11-21.  This is quite a complex text of the bible, so I have to decide which is going to be the most significant part.  I decide that it’s the portion with the capture of the beast.  No one really knows in this apocalyptic imagery what the beast looks like.  Possibly the horns are wrong, but I wanted something menacing.  I had been playing with ideas of the Balrog since the type of imagery is somewhat similar, if you know your Tolkien and your bible.

Not shown in these steps, I mocked up as  thumbnail dark shadows and the positions of the riders.  You can see some evidence of this on image 5 in the sheet as it still shows through.   I want to get my perspectives right, and I have a choice: into brush or some other 3D software…or for speed get my kids involved.  This is the real trick here: you want to set up a scene so that you can get someone to pose for you and then you take photos. And that’s it.  Now for this shot I put the toy soldiers on a table, and my sons for the shots were about 6 foot behind the table.  I put my Canon 400D onto manual, with a massive depth of field and slow shutter speed. I was then able to arrange toys and boys into the right kind of poses, though I knew it wouldn’t be perfect.

The closer position of the soldiers meant that they were larger proportionately to the kids, which once I had outlined the imagery would be ok.  Besides which, it is sometimes just a matter of getting things into the right place to help me research and sketch the right imagery.

Ok, so now we get to the main work

1.I import all the shots I have taken of the boys, and photoshop them, cutting bits of head out, and body and hands out and roughly pasting them into place.  I then get the lighting roughly right

2. I want almost a central spotlight.

3.-5.  I layer on blacks and each time reduce the opacity before moving to the next layer.  This quickly builds the forms for me to work on, and as I do the layer of the photo comp of the boys becomes more and more indistinct which starts to give my imagination space to play with various overlays and scribbles.  I spot a few more contours and darks.  I finally merge all bar the comp later and use the smudge brush to blend roughly the shapes into one another to create a form.

5. this form I now work over with a light blue tone, creating some very rough positions of a skeleton/mannequin.

6. Happy with this now, I put in a solid layer of white at about 75% in photoshop.  I then use a pencil styled brush in photoshop to properly draw in the beast, using the Balrog as a bit of a muse, and following the ideas I photo comped earlier.

7.  The toy soldiers weren’t good enough, they were too static to use as draw overs, and my eyes were getting tired.  So I decided to get some images from the web and draw them to photograph and comp with the slowly building image.

8-12 these are the images I drew, straight down with a 0.3 nibbed pen.  This is better than pencil because there is a much more relaxed feel which continues to give me an active line rather than a finished drawing.  This will hopefully give me a more natural feel for the finished piece.

I decided to photograph rather than scan the images: it was too far to go upstairs and I have a cold

I set the camera for manual, f16 flash.  This means I can manually focus the camera and have a wide margin for focussing error.  The speed is set to 1600.

13    All photographed in, I then do some photocomp work on the developing image, setting overlay layers and roughly cutting out the pictures and rubbing out parts of the line work that should obscure others.

Time to this point is about 3 hours.  The colouring should take another two hours.

Final sketch

Another update…

Zbrush: illustration WIP of ‘reaper’ 2

One of the bizarre programs I picked up a while ago was colors for the DS.  You have to buy a special cartridge which accepts micro sim cards.  I use  a cyclo DS.

Anyway, this robot illustratoin took quite  a while, and perhaps one day I will be able to upgrade to a large screen version of the DS.

To complete the image, I imported the small picture I produced into Corel Painter IX then used the clone brush.  At the end I dropped in the background.

Using the clone brush is a great way of upsizing your images without getting that whole pixelation problem you do if you just increase the image size in photoshop since you literally are redrawing the image, and the software reinterprets the data.

In all, about 5 hours.

As I mentioned before, the kind of work I do in Zbrush isn’t to create models for film industry, though that seems to be what it’s main function is now, but rather its original intention working with pixols (2.5d pixels) to produce illustrations.

I will post up some updates as I work on this particular image as I think it might be interesting.

I have already created some sort of a mannequin  for me to work on, and this is the first more detailed piece: the head.  It needs some hair, which I will do in a spare few minutes later today.  And some eyes of course!

I love drawing Manga, though I’m not much good at it.  I did some over the summer to demonstrate to some kids and it went really badly! That’s usually because i am working on a flipchart rather than anything more suitable.  Oh well.

What I often do these days is get the angles and proportions right in something like Daz3d first, because then I can work out what goes where better.  It’s no different from working from photos, and time is, afterall, money.

Manga Bible Style Enoch