A Distant Soil Digital Portraits
on July 25th, 2009I know some of you must be wondering if I work on A Distant Soil at all these days.
Yes. I combine my work on ADS with my efforts to expand my digital painting chops.
My first digital work (outside of basic scanning and the use of the paint bucket feature) was on Tori Amos: Comic Book Tattoo, which was a little over a year ago. However, like my Star Wars trading card work, I did the drawings by hand and then colored the work in Photoshop.
For this series of A Distant Soil portraits, which I will be uploading to the site gallery over the coming months, all the work is digital. This painting of Rieken is unfinished (obviously).
I am also working on a series of environmental concept paintings of scenes from the book, and I am very happy with how they are coming along. I’m now devoting a full day’s work a week to A Distant Soil, a good half of which is computer lessons. I used to put in a few hours once a week, but could not retain the info. So now, I work at it a little each day.
Once you get the hang of this technology thingy, it is surprisingly easy to use, much easier than painting by hand. For years, some people tried to convince me computer graphics was akin to rocket science. Now I wonder that I was ever intimidated by the whole thing.
I am only just learning to use the computer for background work, and I have learned so much over the last few weeks, I wonder if I will ever draw another cityscape by hand. The perspective features are gold. I would not weep to never draw another orthogonal line.
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PS: I want lots more Torchwood.
PS: I want lots more Torchwood.
“Children of Earth” was definitely a high point for the series but the emotional intensity of the resolution was almost more than I could take.
Perspective features? Whatwhatwhat?
C’mon, magic money fairy… mama needs that new laptop…
I’ve got some perspective grids in my system which are custom shapes or brushes, and I can move them about and manipulate them. Send me a note, and I can email a file.
I’m not particularly adept at using a lot of the tools yet, so mostly just transform my grids and then print them out. And then I drop them on a lightbox and draw everything on top by hand.
I can do some work on buildings and all in Photoshop, but I need work on those skills.
In future, I will construct my backgrounds on computer and just drop figures on top. I intend to finish ADS by hand, but I don’t know if I will do other work by hand in future.
I’ll do private work by hand, but there’s just no way to beat the speed and finish of the computer for published work.
I’m a convert.