'Pan' Photo Real Creature Design

Over the last couple of years I have developed a process using Photoshop to create 'Photo Real' work based on initial 2D sketches and artwork. I used this approach while working on a pre-school animation project called 'Treasure Tree' that I created with Cat Little. Since that project is still in development I cannot show any of the artwork here which is very frustrating considering the amount of work completed since 2012. 

However, I recently found an artist named Aaron Blaise who has samples of artwork and tutorials that showed a similar process to mine. Using his process as inspiration I went about creating a test piece, Pan, seen above. The process involves roughly 16 steps from sketch through to painting, texturing and faux lighting.

I've created a progression video so that you can see the process step by step. I've not followed it exactly, going back and reworking certain sections or adjusting mistakes but the below list is the basic pipeline I used as a guide.

Photo Real Process

1. Sketch
2. Refined Sketch
3. Local Colour
4. Shadow
5. Main Light
6. Deep Shadows
7. Reflected Light
8. Secondary Light
9. Highlights
10. Texture
11. Eye
12. Background Layer
13. Blurring (Depth of Field)
14. Atmosphere
15. Burned Light
16. Overlay Texture

I'll continue to work and test this process with future pieces. My main criticism with the 'Pan' piece is the lack of contrast and strong modelling on the face early on that left the face feeling to flat by the end of the artwork.

From The Archives: Bird Food Concept Art

While having a root around an old hard drive, I came across some concept art I did when working for Brown Bag Films. Myself and Richard Keane had been bouncing ideas around for a short and Richard came up with the concept and story for a short film about a man who has to defend his lunch from a gang of pigeons. Richard went on write and direct the short film for Brown Bag films but these are some of my early sketches based on our conversations to get the ball rolling on developing the short.

You can see a teaser trailer for the short film here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeLv21oJULY

Sketch Club 10th March 2015

I completed these Caricature sketches of the students and staff in LIT Clonmel during a Sketch Club session in March. I run the session on Tuesday evenings and try to provide different things to draw like life drawing with costumes and props. In this session we used an application on the mac called Photo booth, which allows you to warp peoples faces and projected up on a big screen for everyone to draw. You can see all the sessions drawings on our Sketch Club Facebook page here -https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.843513169043812.1073741830.841008369294292&type=1

Sketch Club Military Poster

For this week's Sketch Club, I asked one of my students to bring in some of their extensive World War II memorabilia such as Gun Props, Gas Masks and Uniforms. To promote the session I decided to design an image using old WWII photographs for reference and then create a comic book style Illustration using a mish mash of styles from Darwyn Cooke, Joe Kubert and Frank Millar.

Sketch Club Poster Design

A couple of weeks back, I started to run a Tuesday night drawing session for students and staff. To help promote it, I decided to create a poster and logo for print and a Facebook presence. I toyed around with lots of ideas but settled on a simple illustration of costumed characters armed with drawing equipment. Most of the drawing sessions consist of a model in costume so this idea seemed like a simple fit. I gathered a bunch of reference for characters and the background and set to work.

After roughing out a bunch of characters in my sketch book, I had a basic line up and set about comping together the poster layout in Photoshop. I scanned in my rough characters, made some adjustments and changed some characters completely before printing them out at a larger scale and cleaning up the rough designs for each character. This is where I refined the designs and poster layout beyond the very rough stage. I also mocked up the background artwork on a separate page and scanned it into Photoshop. 

With the characters cleaned up and the layout scanned in, I set about comping the poster and experimenting with type and logo designs. The initial mock-up above has a Led Zeppelin inspired type face which I ended up abandoning for something simpler and suitable for the box frame limitations of the Face Book page layout.

With the layout working, traditionally inking the characters and background artwork was next. I used the Faber-Castell PITT artist pens which include some brush pens which I had wanted to try out for a while. The inking style was influenced by Skottie Young and Bill Watterson. 

For me, the traditional inking process is still faster than digital inking partially because of the scale I'm working at and the fact that you can't screw it up and that pressure leads to more focus and less meandering over lines and placement.

The logo design needed to change from the initial mock-up, so I set about coming up with an alternative. I settled on a mixture of hand written script and digital type faces.
I'd seen plenty of similar examples and had not set about to reinvent the wheel for a simple poster. I sat down for about an hour and wrote out the word 'Sketch' as many types in as many variations I could think of, then narrowed down the selection and settled on 10 that I was happy with. These where brought into Photoshop and comped together with digital type faces.

The inked artwork and new logo design were finally brought into Photoshop and painted digitally using some simple brushes to create a flat opaque design with graphic shadows and highlights. The last step was to colour the Logo design in a colour that sat kindly with the illustration.

From the Archives: Zombi

Zombi was a piece created a number of years ago when I was enrolled at Animation Mentor. When I was not working on my animation assignments, I tried to work to improve my illustration work. This illustration was produced off the back of the Goreball design work, which also included zombies but had a more contemporary/apocalyptic theme and aesthetic. He's even wearing Adidas runners!

The first step in the process was to complete a traditional pencil sketch. This was a large drawing on A3 cartridge paper that I scanned in and reworked in a couple of passes to get the pose working. Once I had a very rough working drawing, I brought the image into Photoshop and did a clean up pass while maintaining the scratchiness of the original sketch.  

I then created a Greyscale value pass or painting on a multiply layer working out the lighting and atmosphere before even touching any colour. I struggled a lot with understanding colour for many years and have found the process of separating value from colour (Hue and Saturation) a helpful process.

I kept working the values, pushing the contrast to push the character out from the background. The style is contemporary comicbook blending line art and painting but never moving into pure illustrative painting. The line art was re-introduced at this stage and highlights and details painted in. Without adding any Hue (colour) I knew that the values would work with any colour wash.

With the colour wash, I wanted something vivid and dynamic. Red is not a colour I commonly use in my work. I tend to favour blues, neutral values like browns or oranges and occasionally purples or greens. The colour wash was applied on a blend mode layer on top of the value pass in Photoshop, either set as a Multiply or Overlay layer.

The next step in the process was an eye opener for me. I typically would paint the main character palette on a layer under the main wash so that any colour I applied would blend with the main scene colour ( in this case, red). The problem with this is that the colour is washed out or over powered by the main scene colour but it does give a good starting point anything as an underlay or under painting.

I could then colour pick values from the under painting and paint these on a new layer over the existing colour knowing that the palette will work. I would also use pictures and textures on multiply or overlay layers over the opaque painting and mask them out to fit the different shapes like skin or cloth. 

Fox Run in Colour

I created this colour version of my Fox Run cycle in Adobe Photoshop by importing the original GIF animation and painting multiple layers using Photoshop's Timeline and Video Layers. While the final look is very like the original sketches seen in the previous post, the approach is incredibly time consuming taking roughly 4 hours to paint about 18 frames. It might be a unique look for a commercial or short film and I'm sure with some more experimentation with brushes I could achieve a more realistic water colour look.

I also ran into some trouble trying to make this a GIF as the frame rate came in as 30FPS to Photoshop but the original animation was created at 24FPS so things got super fast on the export. I managed to get it to export properly in Adobe Premiere.

Fox Run

I animated this run cycle based on a set of water colour sketches of a fox character I did a few years ago. I animated the cycle in Adobe Flash CC on my Wacom Companion which is a really great piece of tech. My plan for this cycle is to try and paint it up in Photoshop to see if I can achieve the same water colour style as the original sketches below.

Space Pirate

I've been brushing up on my Photoshop skills and in particular, colouring art work. This Space Pirate design (not sure its really a Space Pirate?) was created in Sketchbook Pro and then brought into Photoshop. I used a method found on Cubebrush.com as an approach for colouring which allows easy changes to be made to the colour design. I also completed some alternate colouring too (See Below). I'll post up a full workflow for this design asap.

From The Archives: Gore Ball

Another blast from the past here with Gore Ball!!! I designed these Icons/Posters for an indy iPhone game called Gore Ball. It was one of my first freelance design jobs after leaving one the major animation studios in Ireland and I had just begun to study full time on Animation Mentor. I was chuffed to be doing some design work as I felt I didn't get to do enough when working in the industry. 

Anyway I think these are interesting little pieces to show. I have a bunch of other Gore Ball material like Logos and a proper poster design that I need to dig out from some old laptop or hard drive. Not sure what became of Gore Ball the game in the end but I like the style of these icons.

       

Barbarian Kid

More pulpy nonsense with this Barbarian Kid character sketch. I'm trying to find a fast workflow for inking and colouring while maintaining the energy of a rough sketch. Sketchbook Pro is my software of choice at the moment, but will be trying some other approaches in the near future...

Dinosaurs and Lovecraft Monsters in Colour

So, I've completed the colour pass on this Dinosaur and Lovecraft Sea Monster scene. I've very much drawn from another heavily Lovecraftian influenced work in Mike Mignola's Hell Boy and the colour work of Dave Stewart. As simple as his colours are, they capture the tone of the strange, weird and pulp influences on that work. It's fairly simple (after trying about 10 different colour combinations) Pinks, Purles and Greens work well for Horror images!!!

Dinosaurs and Lovecraftian Monsters

Here is an inked drawing I did of some of my favourite 'pulp' iconography - Dinosaurs and ancient Lovecraftian Monsters. I was very much inspired by the illustration work of W. Francis Phillipps. These illustrations where far from anatomically accurate but had a great sense of drama, atmosphere and strangeness. Some of the images were terrifying to look at.

I was also looking the work of James Harren and Ryan Ottley, two excellent contemporary comic book artists. I love one of the images by Ottley from their blog 'The Bog', which depicts a cross section of a monster sea scene. I love cross section illustrations, were the viewer is shown more of the story than the victim!! I also love the sense of scale.

I plan on doing a colour pass on this image, exploring some lovecraftian colour palettes that will hopefully enhance the strangeness of the subject matter. 

Professor Abronsius

A concept sketch of the character Professor Abronsius played by Jack MacGowran in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers. Like all the best films I discovered in my teens, I first saw The Fearless Vampire Killers on late night TV, either on Channel 4 or BBC 2. It joins a list of secret gems found on late Friday or Saturday night viewing like Blue Velvet or even Akira back in the early 90's. Anyway, I was always taken by the rich set design, cinematography and cartoonish nature of Vampire Killers and have been meaning to do some character designs based on the film for a long time.