Misc Dragon Heads - IN COLOR

Bunch o' miscellaneous dragon heads. I have a notion to resurrect an idea that I came up with a few years back and these guys are the first step in working out a rough draft of the thing. I would say more but for now it needs to remain a SECRET PROJECT on a need-to-know basis. Over.

Nesting Instinct

Here's one that was MOSTLY fun until I switched over from the Cintiq to my calibrated monitor and saw the color-clash train wreck that was waiting for me. I've griped about it elsewhere so I'll sum it up with a simple complaint that the colors on my 12w Cintiq are far off calibration and contrast and this is at factory settings. A big disappointment for such an expensive gadget.

At any rate, the cartoon itself doesn't warrant a lot of blah-blah... I had a simple castle cartoon and decided that as a piece of scenery it was a bit empty. The obvious solution was to plunk a purple dragon into the picture. Sadly, the purple was more magenta when I switched views and although I suppose that I could do a little bit of color correction to "fix" things, I'm not really up for it at the moment.

Doodle Page 29

Nothing to show this weekend but a couple of hours spent on an aborted castle scene so I'm just going to post this page of sketchbook doodles instead. At some point I really should work out a cast of characters with this pile of dino-doodles that are starting to accumulate. Yeah, maybe...

That Rumor About Princesses

This one was relatively fun until I learned an ugly lesson about drawing foreground and background on different sheets of paper without planning any relation between the two pieces of work. My fun background is lost behind the pose of the princess and the goofy curves and swells of the hills (not to mention a bunch of trees) are hidden from the viewer. Rats.

Semi-Rendered Goblin

Although my main interest is in developing a better cartooning style, I am still dabbling in various digital painting methods just for the sake of feeling a little more well-rounded and gaining some confidence when it comes to putting color behind my squiggly pencil lines. With that, I wanted to do something a *tiny* bit more developed than a cartoon and decided to do a quick "paint-up" of a monster sketch.

This whole work-up was about two hours of diddling around in Photoshop--stopping at about the point where I was starting to get bored with rendering. I'm not used to art that takes more than an hour to do. Some bits on this turned out nice and others were fairly disappointing but it was a good exercise in general and I have some ideas that I plan on applying to cartoons in the future.

Meanwhile, for those interested, the basic stages are thumbnailed below. They include the pencil sketch, the flat colors and the rough shading. The final isn't really that far from the rough shade stage.

Paint Practice - Random Insects

Needed MUCH more brush practice so I grabbed a quickie doodle/sketch that I had done as a bug concept piece for work today and threw some color behind the scribbly lines. Pleasant coloring book-level digital painting.

Misc. Dinos in Paint

Still struggling with a method of digital painting that really works for me so this was an experiment with a slightly different process. Rather than starting with mid-tones and painting in shadows/highlights, I started with the darkest tones and just built up from there. I found that a soft brush made all the gradient transitions TOO smooth and airbrushed-looking whereas a straight hard brush looked a bit clunkier than desired. A workable middle-ground seemed to be in using one or the other and then going over the mid-range area with a textured brush to hide the "smooth" transitions and give a little more character to the shading.

The next step in the process was to paint over the lines completely and work in nothing but shapes but I chickened out and decided to put that off out of a combination of infatuation over my own messy lines and a concern that the whole effect would explode in my face. Maybe I'll re-open this one in a day or two and give it a shot.

The FINAL xGerms Boss

You can't talk about germ cultures without discussing the germ who literally oozes culture--the inimitable J.P. Vandergoop III. From his humble one-celled origins to his rise to riches playing the slime-market and investing in goop futures, his is a story of inspiration for all microorganisms.

© 2010 K12.

Cleopetri - Queen of the Division Germs

This regal germ is the head honcho of the xGerms division set.

© 2010 K12.

xGerms Division - the Last Brigade

It's the short set.

© 2010 K12.

xGerms Division - More

My God... They KEEP multiplying! (or dividing, in this case)

© 2010 K12.

xGerms Division - another batch

Send in the next contestants.

© 2010 K12.

xGerms Division - group 13

Here's batch number one of the fabulous germs for K12's xGerms Division math game. Behold.

© 2010 K12.

A Halloween Costume That Didn't Make It

Here's one that I cranked out for Art Jumble. This week's theme is "Halloween costumes that didn't make it" and I guess that's all the explanation that this thing needs. Bam.