Agent P sketch in Sketchbook Pro

I did a sketch for fun of Agent P (aka Perry the Platypus) in Sketchbook Pro. 

I was just playing around with the program, but it turned out looking cool so I added the color to finish it and make it pop! Then made a GIF file of the layers to show the basic process that you've seen a million times on my blog. 

 

Ferb sketch in ArtRage

Had a Ferb-tastic quiet lunch today with Ferb! He's a man of few words. 

Drawn in ArtRage and all freehand. Would have been a hell of a lot easier if I could remember how to use the program's rulers or stencils though to save some time in spots, but you can't have everything. Still came out looking fine though.

 

Courage The Cowardly Dog in Sketchbook Pro

 

I did another new sketch this evening and decided to use Sketchbook Pro this time.

Courage the Cowardly Dog was excited (as usual) as I used the pencil tool to sketch it and then decided to do a quick coloring job on it to make it pop more.

 

 

Doof Sketch in ArtRage

 Sometimes my drawings like to talk to me and share their opinions... 

 

POWERPUFF GIRLS - Adobe Illustrator vs Clip Paint Studio Pro

 

Here's my art I did of Bubbles using the sketch provided in the PPG style guide. I did it first in Adobe as that's where I'm most familiar, and its what they required you to do it in. Back in the early 2000s, there were no other programs available outside of Adobe, except for maybe Corel Draw. 

Instead of following the How-To exactly I deviated from it in spots as it was geared to doing a final color version. Doing the kind of work I've done I knew I would need to have a separate line art version as well. So I focused on doing that as a colored version is fairly quick and easy to create. 

First thing I noted as I was doing this is that this instructional How-To was made for designers who may not be artists who can actually draw. They originally gave you a CD with the pre-made files for the ellipses for the head, arms, mouths, and Bubble's ponytail (as you can see on one of the sheets below). It felt a bit like Colorforms and how you could mix and match parts to make a quick Powerpuff Girl. I'm assuming all the vector art in the style guide was all layered anyway so if you had to switch out an arm or mouth expression, you could do it fairly easy. 

I followed the steps and started working under the template (as they suggested) and not above it. That was a change for me as I always work over my roughs. But I tried it their way. I played with the opacity of the rough sketch to get it where I wanted it (around 30%).  

I made the two ellipses as they suggested for the head, though I wondered why they worked this way. 

The next thing that was weird was that they told you to keep the two ellipses exactly at their specs and to adjust and resize the pencil rough sketch to fit the ellipses. I then realized why they wanted it done that way because when you did the rest of the body, the thicknesses of the stroke lines would all match up to what they should be as per the guide. Basically, once you had that done you could enlarge the figure up and use some math to keep the stroke line thicknesses consistent when you did future stuff.

I laughed to myself as I was doing this as my first Powerpuff Girls work, in fact, my audition pieces were all done by hand with my green templates and French curves! Even artist Phil Moy, who did the Powerpuff Girls comic book for DC Comics at the time, did the original art all by hand as well. Mostly so he had the original art to sell later on. Great minds think alike! Mostly, I'd like to think there was a higher level of skill we applied to it.

I inked Bubbles in Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool and saved it as both an .ai file and as a .eps file, and the I opened it in Adobe Photoshop to color it. Yes, I could have colored it in Illustrator if I had to (as it's simple flat colors) but I prefer using Photoshop to drop some quick color in as this exercise was more to see if you could do a line art version and have it be on spec. It's from my working cross-platform on many projects. I love a simple color palette and the PPG characters certainly had that!

Once I was finished, I wondered if you could do it in the newer software that wasn't around originally. I decided to take the same rough sketch of Bubbles and do it all over again in Clip Paint Studio Pro as a lot of artists use that now. Clip Studio has come a long way from its Manga Studio origins and more artists have shifted to it over the years. I wondered if the quality and technical ease would be the same and so I loaded the sketch template into Clip Paint to give it a shot.

I created a new Bubbles using the figure rulers and figure tools (mostly the Continuous Curve with Cubic Bezier). Yes, I could have probably done it using the Bezier tool as well. Once it was finished, I then colored it in Clip Paint as well to keep it all together. One layer for the line art and one for the color.

Overall, I think they are really close. The only slight difference you can see is on her ponytail. It's a bit sharper in Illustrator and was easier to do (possibly because I know the program so well), so I would toss the edge to Adobe Illustrator in that respect.

I had toyed with the idea of trying it a third time using Krita. I started to play with the ellipses and stopped as there is a lot of Krita that I don't know how to use yet. How many of these programs can you know and keep in your head??? Seriously!

Hope you like my effort on these! I posted my scanned How-To pages here for you to try if you want! 

 

POWERPUFF GIRLS - Drawing Bubbles in Clip Paint Pro

 

 

Engaged in a creative endeavor this afternoon after finding the Powerpuff Girls "How-To" in my archive! 

I think it was part of the style guide from 2000 to help designers if they needed to do new art or make an adjustment to a piece of style guide art for some project. They wanted you to do it in Adobe Illustrator (which I did the other day) and they provided a step-by-step for how to do it, but I also wanted to see if you can do it in Clip Paint Pro. You can. 

I worked on top of the sketch they provided and used it as a guide. 

More on it tomorrow...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!

This is a cropped close up of a digital illustration I painstakingly did for Delaware County Magazine, which I was Editor-in-Chief and designer for. Unfortunately, the publisher had to shut the business down in fall of 2024 as printer fees, paper costs, ink, distribution fees, etc, etc, etc all played their part. We kept it running as long as we could, and it was sustainable if it wasn't for the constant price increases our printer kept making us pay (I'm looking at you, Gannett). It was a great job and I had fun as I got to do a lot of different and creative work with minimal oversight!

I drew the initial design on paper based on the cover specs we used. Then scanned it in and painted over it in Photoshop, using my tight pencil sketch as a guide. I used the computer mouse to paint with and a set of brushes I had created at the time. Probably could have been much easier if I used a drawing tablet with pen sensitivity (didn't have one at the time) but it came out pretty great in the end! I did a lot more to the illustration than I needed to and used a lot of layers to keep it easy to change (or swap out) some aspect of it. I have 2/3rds of Santa's body done but only used the top half. In the end, I used it twice on two covers we published. First time was in 2019, and then tweaked it to look different in 2023.

This was all done in a pre-AI world. I still have the pencil drawing and still use my Photoshop brushes I created on various work like Scooby and the like.

This particular size and crop was for a holiday card version I created for the magazine to send out to our advertisers. I also created a computer wallpaper and email "thank you" pics.

Hope you like! 

 

It's not so much the art as the stories that are behind them...

My audition piece for Strawberry Shortcake back in 2004 when they rebooted her with a new look. All done in Adobe Illustrator. My first real work in that software, and it was a bear.

I did this piece TWICE. One night, when I was adding the final touches to it... my computer died. I was horror struck and wasn't able to scrape the hard drive hoping it was still there. I took the drive to a couple local places but to no avail. I had to get a new computer system all set up and then I had to go back and redo the whole thing all over again from scratch!

Soon after — as we didn't have USB flash drives yet — I would buy spindles of CDs and EVERY night I would burn a new CD with that day's work on it. By the end of the month, I had a stack of CD's sitting by the computer. Once you have a horror story of losing data, you then do all you can to not have it happen again! I've been abiding to the "back up rule of three" since that time!

In hindsight, it was probably better that it happened when it did as it increased my skills and speed in Illustrator, and it was much easier doing it the second time. I'm still happy with it.

You may look at it and think it's a nice piece of art. I look at it and just think back to that dark, brooding night as I was laying in bed and looking up at the ceiling wondering what I was going to do...

It's not so much the art as the stories that are behind them...

 

Captain Blue Hen's Mascot - Bucky Blue!

Thought I'd post the original sketch I did of Bucky Blue who is the mascot for Captain Blue Hen. Captain Blue Hen is a comic store in Newark, Delaware and I was asked a couple years ago to come up with the character as a way for the store to promote comics. Above is the actual raw sketch I did on copy paper with ball point pen. Once I scanned it in I then wanted to do the final art as vector art in case they wanted to blow up the art for something big. Bucky is a little kid (and like most of us did) is dressed up in an Adam-Westy-kind-of-costume and using homemade props as weapons. I used a clothes hanger as a grappling hook once or twice myself as I scaled the picnic table growing up.

Below are the two main sayings that they wanted to incorporate with the character for a poster and t-shirt.

And here's one of Bucky swinging by for their Christmas Card...

So for process junkies, it was a pen and ink sketch and then the rest was done in Adobe Illustrator.

LANESCAN Tri-Fold Brochure Design

Here is a tri-fold brochure I did for ARCM Corp. back in September of 2003. There was a lot of information to tell and only so much space to do it in as the client wanted the mailing card added to it as well at the bottom. I think it's one of my best design jobs and one where the art and text all worked together. It's like a puzzle most of the time trying to get the pieces to fit. Art was all done in Adobe Illustrator and then assembled and laid out in Photoshop. The art of the cars, trucks and roads were done as vector art since the client needed the art also blown up to trade show banner size as well. The backside of the brochure is a little bland since it's a mailer but I'm still happy with how it all came out. I did a bunch of stuff for the company that year before it was sold to another company who then took it over.

A Piece Of Digital Notebook Paper... Who'da Thunk It?!

Here's an interesting thing I found on my hard drive that I created back in 2003...a blank piece of notebook paper. Seems weird that you'd have to create something like that but I was doing a cover and art spread for Family Values Magazine for an article about safe schools for the August issue and I needed to create some props for the cover and for the main story interior spread where text would lay on top of it to give it a school time feeling. So I created a digital composition book cover since I didn't have one to scan and then I scanned some actual pens, pencils, erasers, and a ruler I had lying here so that I could use them in my design. I could have created those digitally but it would have taken time that I just didn't have. I remember scanning a piece of actual notebook paper and finding that it just didn't 'hold up' for actual use as the blue lines were so light and washed out. Even trying to save time and play with the levels in Photoshop was a waste of time so I created a sheet of digital notebook paper using the scanned page a guide. I kept the holes black for this look but I can pop those out and you'd be able to see through them if this page was laying on a table as you can see below from the final printed art.

This was some of my best design work at the time and somehow it really came together during the rush of the deadline to get it done. This is the two-page spread as I just wanted to give you an idea of how it was actually used. Even the wood table was digitally created as well. I haven't had a chance to use the notebook paper for anything else since though but I have the file so I have it in case I do. It might look good as a backdrop for some sketches as well to create a sketchbook feel. Anyway, I hope you all like this mini 'behind the scenes' process post!

HELL PLANET!

Hello all! I haven't been slacking here in the studio, just slacking on posting stuff. I've been doing quite a few backgrounds of late and making some new brushes in Photoshop to paint with. I would post some of the new backgrounds I've done but I'm afraid after I post it and then possibly use it a few months later, some would call me a hack or something. Haha. With most of them I can tweak to make them work for other stuff or situations but it's nice to have the work already built and up and running.

Here's a painting I did in an hour yesterday playing around. I call it Hell Planet. The main work was doing the planet as a star field and cosmos took about 2 minutes to create (literally if you know how to do it) in Photoshop and from there I decided to make it a planet that was on fire and possibly burning itself out from the inside. Came out pretty cool as a concept piece. Hope you all like!

Creepy Cave Of Mystery!

Here's a new background I painted this week for fun where I tried to play with the environmental elements a bit more to create a sense of mystery while having a touch of realism to ground it. I like doing caves (and other outdoor scenes) as they're organic and easier to paint than doing a city which is built with exact lines and perspective. These have perspective as well, it's just looser in terms of depth as I like to work with foreground, middle ground and background. The cave hole in the center is a separate piece so I could pop it out and put another background there if I wanted it to have more depth. Like if I added a city scene in the hole to show we were nearing the cave entrance. I do like the color theory for it and it has a nice warm feeling to it. Kind of like autumn fall season in mid October as the leaves are falling off the trees.

One Door/ Two Views - Background Art

Here's two angles of a door to a storage closet. Once again the characters covered most of them so it's kind of nice to see them unfettered by other elements. Both took about a little over an hour and a half each and most of that was figuring out a color theory that worked for it since it was nightime and an interior that basically had no lighting. I also changed the inside of the closet's main lighting to reflect a story element hence why one is green and the other is a tannish brown. I also kept it clean and crisp as opposed to the underground scenes which are murky, misty and spooky which I kept a little looser. I love the slight bird's eye view of the bottom door though.

Another Background - Exterior Shot

As with all my backgrounds they usually start in Illustrator and are drawn with the pen tool. Once it's all built to a certain degree and I have everything that I will need, I send it to Photoshop where I then paint the rest using my build layers as a guide and to help me select certain areas. The hard part is matching the look of the show, so I had to create a bunch of brushes that would give me different effects to get it as close as I could. The show had a sponge brush effect all over it and it was hard since each sponge effect had a different texture to it. I now have a certain way to paint and a workflow where I can create this kind of shot from start to finish in about 2-3 hours or so. Also, I painted this originally in day time colors and saved it that way as well. If I take a few overlays off of this piece it would be a daytime scene and hence could be used again! There also isn't a lot of overall detail to the store front as character art mostly covered the lower part of the piece. As with all backgrounds, they're just meant to ground and give placement to your characters, since in the end it's all about the characters!

Creepy Caves...

Here's some more of my creepy cave backgrounds. The top one was wider in the final version and I had to paint more to it to extend it but this was the original paint job which I kept. I keep it all. What's a little less hard drive space...

For the bottom one, each of the foreground rocks on the bottom one were on separate layers so I can make them visable or not, or even move them around if I want, by clicking on their layers. I made it a full painting without the rocks just in case I needed another generic cave setting. I also added the green night fog on it's own layer as well in case I didn't want it. That's the beauty to have all these layers for each painting. I can change things easily without much muss or fuss. This background took the worst hit as for all that work that no one will ever see. Maybe 10% of it was left to see once all the characters were added, but like I said, I can change the color of the cave to blue or something and it could be the Batcave!

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Backgrounds...

Thought I'd post some background paints I did and how I try to plan in the initial sketches of a background to create it in layers so that by clicking off some layers I have a different background that I can use for something else at some other point in time. I try, if I can, to design it and work it so that I can get multiple uses out of it be it a week later of three years later. It's kind of like being a set decorator on a TV show and having to make do with a small budget. With a couple simple changes you can save a lot of time and money. I bring this up as I've been watching the first season of Starsky & Hutch this past week at night and if you watch 3-4 a night as opposed to once a week, you can notice the set redresses and some of the same background props like a painting pop up in different scenes a lot more. All shows and movies do it to save money. Most Star Trek fans never noticed that the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek II (Khan!) was redressed and relit to become the Reliant! It was so well done that even hardcore Trek fans never noticed. The only reason I know it is because Shatner mentioned it in his book Star Trek Movie Memories. It's an interesting study and to see how with just a few simple changes, a set becomes completely different. Hanna-Barbera would do the same thing as well in their cartoons and create a long panaramic background and use it for many scenes to save money animating. They would do all their planning in the storyboarding stage so they could figure out how mnay backgrounds they would actually have to commission to be done.

Below is a big painting of mine that is around 11 x 17 in full size when I did it and was the original base painting that could be used for something for sure... BUT it had to be tweaked a lot for what I actually needed it for so I then saved a copy of the file as it was and then resaved it with a new file name and repainted it part of it. Character art will kill a lot of the work actually so no one will ever see the full background hence why I'll be posting some of them here. Some of these were really a lot of work and there's a lot of detail that got lost in the final image from being covered up. But they did what they need to do and that was to create a sense of tone and mystery to the story.

And above is the final after I did some 'digging' and made a hole that was used as an entrance and as an escape. I can also take out the blue room above and put whatever else I would want there as well. Possibly the hole leads to a desert landscape... or a spaceship! Just so long as it's in persepective to the rest of it, I can redress it anyway I want. The object is to keep it all separated in layers so that changes can be slipped in and out. It can also be changed color wise as well if I wanted it by moving the levels in Photoshop to lighten or darken it, or the saturation/hue to change the overall color tone! It was also cropped a bit as well to suit what I needed it for but as I mentioned, I have the original file to go back to if I needed it. One painting = Two uses... or More!

A Night With The King Of Rock And Roll!

As I was gathering images off one of my external hard drives to put on my new website, I came across this pic of Elvis that I digitally repainted over back in 2003. I wanted to test my Photoshop skills and the best way to do that is to do something harder than normal and so I scanned the cover of this LIFE magazine special featuring ELVIS at 450dpi and then digitally painted over all the text parts to make it look (hopefully) like the original unfettered picture of Elvis. There were some liberties taken with his shirt under where the ELVIS was written but I tried to get it as close as I could to what it looked like under the type. I didn't have a copy of the actual photo without all the text to see how accurate mine was, but I think I got it close. Some of the folds were hard to figure out how they went and it took some time to get it right, but I think this is one of my best digital repaints that I've ever done! Looking back I'm quite happy with the results. I remember it took me most of the night and it must have been around 4-5 hours total to get it as flawless as I could while keeping the pixel texture intact that was picked up in the scan.

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If anyone else would like the original cover to try their hand at repainting over it, I'll load it up and post a link for any brave souls or Photoshop Jedi who want to give it a try.