Hindsight

I don’t like this one as much as the girl with the coat, but I’m still enjoying this technique for working with ArtRage.

I’ve got it into my head to do some kind of fashiony illustrations. Why?

1. It’s something completely different.

2. I’m messing around with techniques, some of which seemed to evoke this sort of subject matter.

3. It involves pretty girls, which (as a subject for drawing) is a weakness of mine in both senses of the phrase.

Here’s one. This was done with ArtRage.

The dramatic lighting went away while I was working, but the colors still came out okay, I think. This was done with ArtRage.

More sketchin’ with Adobe Illustrator, from David Cronenberg’s gory Russian Mafia flick Eastern Promises.

This is just a little piece I did to experiment with Illustrator’s brush and LivePaint tools for drawing and coloring.

This is an old piece I did for a character design challenge at ConceptArt.org – the topic was “Medusa the Queen”, and I envisioned Medusa as a kind of imperial/fascist/Nazi figure. Have I mentioned that ConceptArt.org is a pretty neat community for illustration and digital painting? The aesthetic that rules there tends to lean a bit toward the cheesy side of fantasy/sci-fi, but the technical mastery you can see on display, especially of digital tools, is astonishing, and there are a lot of people giving good advice to young artists about how to improve their work. Anyway, I realized I never posted this here, and it’s probably the most finished thing I ever did for CA. Click image to view larger.

Done in Photoshop, from memory after a brief walk around the neighborhood. Yay for nice weather!

In my quest to improve my horse drawings, I thought it might be a good idea to try a little animation. This is pretty rough, and it’s basically just a copy from Eadweard Muybridge‘s Animals in Motion, but it made me practice drawing the proportion and structure of the horse quickly, and it was also a chance to play with Photoshop’s animation capabilities. Did you know Photoshop has animation capabilities? I just discovered this a few weeks ago, and I really like the possibilities for animating with painterly tools (of the sort you won’t find in Flash).

The story is a bit unsatisfying (some might say very unsatisfying, but I’m okay with ambiguous endings) — but JCVD, the film about an aging Jean-Claude Van Damme (or Van Varenberg, his real name) getting mixed up in a desperate hostage situation in a “real life” post office, sort of does for Van Damme what The Wrestler did for Mickey Rourke, i.e. makes his aging face the star of a raw, honest performance that shows he can act in a grown-up film. It is beautifully directed, and the story is twisty and subtle and nonlinear. There is a scene near the end where Van Damme spills his guts about what his life is like, and it hits home.

I painted this from a still frame, using Sketchbook Pro and ArtRage. I love ArtRage for its oil-painty-ness, but still find it a bit hard to control. The likeness is only so-so. It never ceases to astonish me how hard it is to get a likeness (especially when not working from life).

I saw Mongol recently on DVD. This movie is absolutely gorgeous. I just wish the story was as good as the direction, cinematography, costumes, etc, etc. They whitewash Genghis Khan, and they completely skip over the most interesting part: how did this guy rise to be leader of the most feared army in the world? However, like I said, it’s gorgeous, and I had a great time drawing from it. These sketches are all digital.

Anyone want to recommend a good book on Genghis Khan?