Process: seeing how other people work

Work In Progress: is a great place for processes. They are also quite large so you can get a good look at how they are done.

Slam Blogsma: this blog by Sam Bosma has loads of thumbnails and sketches and shows how he goes from these to digital colour and texturing in Photoshop.

The Unreachable Itch is a blog by illustrator Jonathan Burton. He also posts character sketches, sketches to line work and colour finals.

Wheel of Time - Lord of Chaos Painting by Greg Manchess

WE book illustration: Process

I had the basic idea for the composition in my head and then made some thumbnails in Photoshop to see what it could look like and chose the image on the left as it has better balance.



then I drew a large detailed sketch on paper with a blue col erase pencil and scanned it. It also got flipped along the way. I put the line art on the top layer set to Multiply, this allows you to preserve your line art and paint on a white layer underneath.


I often start off painting with the gradient tool set to Radial and use it to paint. This is a really fast way to get some colour down. For this piece I made selections of the cosmonaut, mountains, planet and sky and then made alphas or masks of each one on other layers for easier selecting and painting later on


Then I lay down the basics with a large round brush set at 75% opacity, when I'm more or less sure of my values I take the brush opacity down to 50% . I used to paint a lot with watercolors and use the same sort of technique here. I gradually use a smaller and smaller brush to do details


As a rule I'm not keen on using special brushes, here I just used a stippled brush shape for the stars and the airbrush for some texture on the planet. I also used various layers set to Screen and Overlay modes to get the halo around the planet.


For the visor on the helmet I made an alpha layer to use as a texture with the 'Lighting effects' filter to make the relection look more spherical as it was too flat. Then I flattened all the layers and noodled around a bit to get a more unified look.

Brushes and Colors: digital sketchbooks

There has been a bit of a buzz lately about Brushes, an app which turns your iPhone into a mini sketchpad. Apparently even David Hockney uses this! I have not tried Brushes but I do use Colors, another little app for the iPhone and Nintendo DS.
Colors is a great app, I use it on my DS lite with a chunky kid's stylus. One of the things that make it so great is that it takes advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS lite, just as if you were using a real Wacom or Cyntiq, but pocket sized. I'm not sure if Brushes has this feature but I don't think so.
To put Colors on your DS you have to buy a flash cart for homebrew apps. I use a R4 Revolution for DS. It is quite easy to set up, there is a good walkthrough on joystiq.

Brushes gallery

Colors gallery and my page

Nic Klein Takes Us Inside His Process

Nic Klein shows his process for painting Viking, a new series for Image comics in this interesting little article. He must work really fast to do two of these a month. I really like the mixture of an acrylic monotone base and digital colours.
I wrote about Nic a while ago on this blog.

Hobbit paintings by Justin Gerard

Justin Gerard is an illustrator I had not heard of before I came across his blog where he has some fantastic paintings illustrating the Hobbit. He works on paper with watercolours and then continues the pieces digitally. I think he manages to get the best of both techniques this way when you see the great results.
He has posted the process of the Battle of the Five armies and explains why this scene is so exciting to paint. If you are a Tolkien fan like me you must see these paintings and even if you're not they're still stunning.
There is also an interview on the excellent Tor Sf and fantasy site.

Work process by Alon

Alon's Art Work blog has a very interesting process of how he painted this fantastic Waterfall castle. He shows how he to use photocomposition, 3D models and matte painting to bring all it all together.

Conceptual Art tutorial in Photoshop

There is a good tutorial on painting an enviroment with Photoshop on the idrawgirls site. He shows you how to start with a large brush in b&w and and then refine your shapes and add colour and a bit of detail without losing sight of the whole picture as you go. This technique is very useful as it enables you to work really fast and I work like this a lot. Here are few of my sketches made this way:

2D Artist online magazine

2D Artist is a downloadable PDF Magazine on concept art, digital and matte-painting. It is full of articles on techniques, tutorials, interviews, galleries and a lot more. You can download a 'lite' version for free or pay for the full one which is $4.50 or €3.24. This is pretty good value. I wish there was a print version, although it would probably be very expensive, and I suppose you could always print out the bits you really like.

How to Use an Angle Finder to Correctly Draw Lines in Perspective

I saw this article by Dianne Mize on the Emptyeasel site. It is a trick for measuring the angles of perspective lines and training your eye to get them right. I find it best to first lay down your horizon line and vanishing points before you start sketching, but this is a useful way of finding the correct persective lines once you've done your grid.

Dan Blomberg

Dan Blomberg is a concept artist who lives in Spain. His sketchy style and vibrant colours remind me of Goro Fujita and Craig Mullins. There are some fantastic images on his website, and be sure to visit the sketches section.

Artzmania: Free e-zine n° 9

There was an issue of the free e zine Artzmania in July that passed me by, but happily you can still download all the back issues here. These zines are packed with interesting images, issue 9 has 478 pages.

Making fairy tales on Youtube

Pj Lynch is an Irish illustrator who has an interesting Youtube channel. I especially liked watching 'Making fairy tales part 2', in this video he shows us how he paints a very nice fire -breathing dragon, from the sketch to the final watercolor.

Kristin Elder : demo

Kristin Elder paints beautiful intricate watercolors. She has posted a work process on her site so you can see her progress from a doodle to this amazing finished painting.

Color vision and Art

Color vision and Art is a site about color theory and the way we see and respond to color. It is fun to read and concise without being simplistic. There are also interactive examples so you can experiment with certain effects for yourself. I wondered who wrote all this and then found a credits page with art historians and neuro biologists. It's well worth a visit.
This site led me to another interesting one called Causes of Color. this goes into detail about why things are a certain color. Some of this involves a lot of physics which gets a bit complicated (well for me, anyway) but it's still fascinating.

My Drawing day favorites on Flickr

June 7 was Drawing Day. These are my favorite entries from the Flickr site. My effort is the monkeystack at the bottom! Click on the images to go to the artist's Flickr galleries.

Moira Hahn

I love the paintings of Moira Hahn, particularly her series from 2006-2007 which seem to combine many of my favorite things. They are watercolors that resemble Japanse prints with fantastic animal characters, cats, tigers ,fish , owls and many others. The colors are glowing and very beautiful. This one is called 'Food Fight'.

Pentel brush pen

I came across this pen on the Cool tools blog. I've tried various brush pens in the past and wasn't very impressed, but this one looks really good. It seems to be more like a real brush than a pen pretending to be a brush! I would be interested to hear from anyone else who has tried it.

Kim Cogan

Kim Cogan paints beautiful cityscapes of his native San Francisco and New York City.
What I like about these images is the way some parts are sharp and others blurry which is often the way you really see a busy street or buildings. When you look at a scene with so much detail you can't take it all in so most of what you see is out of focus and only parts will be clearly detailed.
The various types of light are also very well done, the contrast of neons and bright windows against the glowing night skies of a city.
Kim also has some good photos on his blog. He also has a website.

2D painting from A to Z

This tutorial by David Revoy is really interesting. It sometimes gets a bit dense as the original was in french, but it's worth the effort. He talks about Painter, Photoshop, The Gimp, Daz studio and Artweaver. The last three are all freeware and can replace the others if you're willing to learn them.
The Gimp is open source and similar to Photoshop.It can be a bit tricky to learn,but some people love it.
Daz studio can be used intead of Poser. You can import Poser figures and models into Daz and also other freeware figures such as Apollo Maximus.
Artweaver is like a cross between Photoshop and a stripped down version of Painter.