Burst of Inspiration

Following up yesterdays creative work, here's a pop-artish, rather psychedelic piece. It conveys a distinct sense of disapproval, as portrayed by quite a stern-looking creature. This piece took, again, way more time than it should have. I originally intended to do something quick and fun, but I ended up fiddling with all the neat features of Photoshop Elements 6, mainly how to simulate color-range selection. Sadly I failed in my mission on how to figure out how to delete white-to-gray shades around the edges of the creature. I ended up simply blurring the creature a bit, then adjusting its colors to a more darker shade. Since Elements doesn't have nearly as much features as the "regular" version of PS, this was an experiment in ad-hoc, much as the very idea of this blog. Fun fact: the creature was originally doodled on notepad in roughly five seconds. Such was its charm that I had to scan and immortalize it to a digital medium.

Abstract 1

Holiday artistry

This is the first piece that I took my time making, taking a total of three days to make. Each day I worked on the image for about two to three hours, making the total workload 6 - 9 hrs. It's a spaceship cannon of sorts, with a revolverish barrel, power cells and a few exhaust vents. The background art was definitely the most fun part, especially coming up with humdrum descriptions and a graph related to the weapon. The fonts used in the piece are DS-Digital and Pixeldust Expanded. I initially drew a pipe-ring contraption attached to the midsection, but didn't turn out so well so I scrapped it from the finished piece rather mercilessly. I mainly learned that similar colors don't pop up quite that well with transparency. This resulted in some of the detail flourishes disappearing from the blueprint-style wiring at the back.

Weaponry 1

Barely there

Another 30 minutes or so and I'd have missed my blog-updating-schedule... *Phew* That said, it's not as easy to have a weekly update routine going, lax as though it might seem. This week's picture is an attempt at a baby seal, chilling on an iceberg (pun intended). I wanted to finally do something futuristic or weaponish, but maybe I can do that next week. I set out to do a comic-styled seal, as I can exaggerate the cuteness-factor more than I could if I'd have tried a more realistic approach. It would have also taken a lot more time, and I want to keep these attempts relatively short at the beginning (e.g. 1-3 hours or so per piece).

Animals 1

Distraught week

Somehow a lot of negative things managed to pile up on this week. I concentrated too much energy on things that actually required very little, such as this week's art piece. Had some trouble with my drawing tablet. The thing seemed to have lost all my carefully laid-out appliaction-spesific hotkeys, that I spent an hour or two setting up. I made a backup file this time, which will hopefully prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future. Anyway, about the picture. I had this vision of drawing the wooden plank acting as the "front gate" into the mine in much more detail than I actually managed. I drew this landscape with my usual blurry style, and exaggerated the effect by adding light wind filters here and there.

Scenery 2

Also, here's a special bonus picture a certain visitor drew. 

Guest 1

Humble beginnings

So I watched a tutorial at Youtube on how to draw a basic portrait. The result of today's effort is this... mutant thing. Yes, she is female (I think). The eyes were pretty fun to play with. I had the most trouble with the mouth, though. I almost cheated by cutting and pasting the mouth area to different locations, but felt somehow dirty afterward for doing so. Thus the mouth stayed where it was. I also touched up the background for the first "Tools" picture, because I felt it was rather plain. On another note entirely, I've decided to abandon the use of Corel Painter Sketchpad for the foreseeable future... Far too plain in it's functionality for my tastes.

Faces 1

Home away from Home

I was not at home this weekend, but I happened across a drawing tablet (Bamboo Fun) at the residence of my Significant Other. This, combined with PhotoShop Elements 6, allowed the creation of the following piece of blurry scenery. This work is done mainly with all sorts of brush types combined with different brush modes / blending options (whatever they're called...). I learned that you can also attach a blending method to an entire layer! How cool is that?

Scenery 1