Daniel asked me to draw a monster for him so I sketched this quick Trolloc boy…I sketched a bit more…Daniel went to bed, I sketched a little more and my once lonely little Trolloc found himself in a pet store full of odd creatures and the gloop that would soon become his closest friend.
Back in October Daniel would go around the house saying “I love owls, and owls love me.” I thought it was really cute and decided to paint an owl for him. I got this far:
Then made the mistake of asking Daniel if he liked it. He said, “No. It’s too scary.” So I never finished it. Still, I thought it was kind of fun so I decided to post it anyway. My poor little unfinished owl with no feet 🙂
Here’s a sneak peek of a new project I’m working on that Daniel DOES like (although he has recently decided the dragon ought to be blue):
The photo of Daniel is just a placeholder, I’ll use it as reference to paint him in later, once everything else is right.
I had fun experimenting with a new Photoshop technique as I worked on these card characters.
I scanned my pen drawing and after adjusting the levels to get rid of background noise from the scan I set the pen layer’s blending mode to “multiply.”
Then I painted each object a solid color on it’s own layer. This allowed m to use the hue/saturation slider to easily play around with color schemes.
After I had the right colors I created a layer for the shadows by painting the shadow areas with a single dark color and setting the layer’s blending mode to “color burn.” If your image has a white background this blending mode works extra well because the shadow color will disappear on white, which means you don’t even have to stay in the lines!
I created the highlight layer by painting the light areas with a single light (almost white) color, and setting the blending mode to “soft light.”
Add a few little details here and there and viola! it’s finished! This is SUCH an easy method for quick digital art. I should have tried it out ages ago.
It’s been far too long since I’ve touched this blog. So just to prove I have been doing artwork I thought I’d post a few sketches from the last few months. I’ve also started a couple of paintings, but I’ve found it difficult to finish anything between moving to a new house that needs a lot of work, pregnancy, and having a two year old who’s decided he no longer needs a nap time…
These guys are characters from stories I like to pretend I’ll write some day…
The rhino is for a children’s alphabet app Eric and I are thinking of creating for Windows 8.
And this is a stump. I like it.
