Space, the final front ear?

OK, groan if you want to :P

But a visit here made me realise that I'd posted this on LiveJournal but not on here which is terribly remiss of me.

This is what I've been playing around with lately - trying to get the most out of one picture by playing around with skies. Here's the original, a rainy day sky as I was feeling rather down and I liked the raindrop effect on the water.

This one is where I just added a tiny touch of purple into the clouds and ambient light ...


... and here is where the purple takes over!


I then tried to head back towards reality a bit , a sunset or possibly a distant forest fire.

This last one is where I was wondering how close up I could get before the water started looking too unrealistic - I think maybe I overdid it.

I'll move onto another scene for the next few days, but it's good I've got back into it, it keeps me out of trouble! ;-)

Barnaby

This is Barnaby, the Express Mail stoat. He may just seem to be your average delivery vermin but he has a very important job - he makes sure the mail gets through whenever instant messaging fails and snail mail would just be far too slow!

For once I know exactly where I got the inspiration for this. It was a combination of a silly chat and this BBC video of a stoat playing in the snow. I drew it the day after that video.

Market

It's been a while since I've posted anything and I still haven't got round to scanning in anything recent so I thought I'd post another rat picture from some time ago. I know in the back of my mind I'd like to do a cartoon strip starting from this but the inspiration never quite sees the light of day - at least not yet.

Mugging

At lot has been happening recently and it has left me feeling rather unsettled. So I thought this was the opportunity to post a picture in which I was trying to instill a definite sense of menace. The inspiration for this actually came not from the situation but from the rocks. I was given a book called the Artist's Handbook and in there is a chapter on the technique of crosshatching. I tried it on a rock and then the whole picture poured out of that.

St Treacle's Day

Today is St Treacle's Day, so named in honour of the most wonderful cat that ever lived. She lived with us for 19 years and the 5th March was her birthday. This picture is the only one I ever drew of her so today is the right day to post it, even though it's a picture of me getting exasperated because she keeps walking off.

I've been rummaging again ...

As I'm not ready to post the drawings from the last few weeks and I've been woefully unorganised in preparing Bryce things to post, I went looking in my really old files to find some of the first rats I did. None of them were 'drawn', instead they were done using Flash as they were supposed to be animations. The animations are so utterly awful that nothing will convince me to post them, but the basic pictures are historical evidence I guess!

Tony Hart

Just seen this about a memorial to Tony Hart as I was about to go to sleep ... what a wonderful idea!

Sillyness

This is just a watercolour & ink thing I did ages ago - I love surreal humour in art, artists like Simon Drew and Kliban and I know it's influenced me a lot.

Also, I've decided to just put a rat in the page template for this blog and be done with it ... Buboe here needs his moment of glory.

Strange beacon

One of the things I really like about using Bryce is how economical it can be. Once I've set up a scene then changes in the lighting can make a massive difference to the whole picture. This one in daylight has me focusing on the texture of the pillar and the strange foamy waves
whereas the nighttime scene gives an entirely different feel, with far more attention on the sphere and the arcs of light.

Although I tend to prefer nighttime or twilight for my pictures, in this case I much prefer the daylight one. Both of them were nightmares to render though - because of the multiple light sources they took a very long time indeed.

The phone always rings when you're in the bath ...

It's about time I got back into posting more Bryce stuff, so here is one of my attempts at an interior scene. This was done a few years back, though I'm still tempted to redo the file & tweak with the water on the floor as I know it's still not right. The bit I'm really proud of is the lovely little chair which I think came out rather well - this was the first picture apart from landscapes where I made every object in the scene.

I'm busy working on too many pictures at once right now and none of them are finished so here's a little rat I found wandering about unaccompanied ... I think he's lost.

Finally

The last of my original band drawings ... and for those anally retentive people who feel the need to point out that the key layout is wrong - I did it deliberately, just to bug you. Honest. Or it could be incompetence. You'll never know. (It's not plugged in either).

He really did have hair like Sonic the Hedgehog though.

Guitarist

This started out being a guitarist, but nowadays it looks so much like a bassist I know, and the model for the bassist is now a guitarist - I think I need to photoshop both pics to make the instruments right!

Bassist

With the inevitability of turkey at Xmas, the band pictures move on to the bass player. Some people reading this blog may think they recognise this picture ... and they would be right.

Singist

It's not that I'm saying all vocalist's have large egos ... in fact many of them can be rather shy & retiring off stage, but so often the stage persona needs to be of someone completely self-obsessed. It might be that I'm just in some way jealous that I haven't got the guts to even sing in private myself.

Drummer

Another picture in my set of band members, posted for no better reasons than I have a friend who might like the purple t-shirt. This is a very early drawing and demonstrates that I can't draw 'proper' hands and have not spent sufficient time looking at drum kits. Actually, this could also be a suitable place for my 2 favourite drummer jokes ...

Bloke walks into a shop and starts ranting about how he is fed up with being the butt of jokes and is going to take up the Guitar. "I want a Stratocaster, 500 Watt Amp, 4x12 cabinet........" "Hang on!" says the shopkeeper. "You're a drummer." The bloke is crestfallen. "How did you know that??" he whispered. The shopkeeper says "This is a fish shop".

and

What's the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.

Two Hopes

I always thought I couldn't even start drawing anything whilst feeling down, but I managed yesterday's snow picture and now this one ...




I'm so happy with this one that I'm even letting this link to the big version.

Snow

Snow is still falling: I trudge along in a silent bubble, wrapped and buffered against the world, isolated and wondering who shook the snowglobe.

Bryce Basics Part 1

Getting away from posting about drawing for a while ...

There's no way this should ever evolve into a tutorial - the web has plenty of these, by people much more talented than me. But I would like to show some of the structure underneath Bryce pics, for those that are interested in the basic 'how' without being more in-depth.

I shall start with a very very simple landscape thing and work up from there to built objects. There is software much better suited to built objects than Bryce is but I do this because it makes me happy so I have no problem staying in the comfort zone of my favourite programme.

This first picture has only two components - a flat plane which I have added a water texture to, plus Bryce's default sky.

To that I have added an island. This is not the massive amount of work that you may think - Bryce has certain basic objects as standard; cubes, planes, cones and such, but also terrains. So in this case I just clicked on a button and accepted the first one that appeared, sank it slightly under the water plane and there you have it.

To me that looks a little too far away .. perhaps if I bring the camera down & closer ...

However, now that things are closer, the water isn't quite right - it gives the impression that the island is a tiny little pebble of a thing. I need to change the scale on the water texture to suit the size of the island.
To me that seems much better now. The sky is just the basic default though, which I can't possibly leave like that. I've picked more of a summer afternoon feel for this one which subtly changes the feel of the scene.
I tend to prefer more dramatic scenes for my pictures though, so here's the same scene later in the day when the sun is lower and the clouds are sparser.It's still not right though, not even for a basic demo picture. I just have to tweak it a tiny bit more. You might think I've changed the sky settings but I haven't touched them. Instead I put in a 3d plane above the water, a rectangular section containing cloud type stuff. This makes the picture far more mysterious in two ways - the fog effect it creates and the way it darkens the sky. The sky changes because the sun is low on the horizon, so it has to get through the cloud layer before reaching the underside of the clouds above.

I'm battered, bruised, blistered, scratched and shattered.

And all I've done is spend the last hour trying to trim back the shrubs in my garden. It doesn't look any different and yet I know that I've worked really hard. It would have helped if I could find the secateurs I bought last year, or possibly if I borrowed a chainsaw, but as it is I've been doing this with scissors. I don't know how people I know manage days worth of this sort of thing without just collapsing.

*considers just drawing the garden she wants*

I'm always worried that if I trim something it will take offence and just die on me ...

Beginnings

I used to love art at school, but was always better at the abstract. I used to make weird sculptures out of bits of total junk and feel very proud of them, but was never good at drawing things to order. Sat in my 'O' level art exam, while drawing a twisted piece of wood, my art teacher came over. He said "If you were Picasso that would make you a million, but as it is you're going to fail."

It took me another 20 years to draw anything again. I feel a little bitter about that, but very grateful to the wonderful man who encouraged me to try again.

This was one of the first after that, inspired by all the musicians who were hanging about ...

It will become increasingly obvious that I have this obsession with rats ...

So while I work out the deep and meaningful things I want to say about my deep and meaningful Bryce artwork I'll continue posting some old sketches, like this one of Count Ratula which was originally drawn for a friend who wanted a vampire rat. I know that the pipe organ is wrong because the holes are meant to be at the bottom, but hey, it's done in pen, so tough. I guess its purpose should be to teach me that just because something's not perfect doesn't mean that it has no value. Or that some things just aren't fixable and that you have to deal with that. Or something.



Anyway, I'm busy trying to work out how (now) to draw a cow ...

The Plan ...

Where was I? Ah yes, The Plan. The Plan is to mostly write about how I produce my artwork, the creative process, what inspires me and motivates me. Maybe posting some of my pictures in various stages before completion.

I do 2 main types of artwork, either pen & ink cartoon type drawings as the one below or 3D landscape renders with Bryce.

Erm ...

I'm rather stumped what to put now; having spent ages making sure that the colours and layout are right, I sit down and think "what next?". Rather like life really ... I set out all organised and get utterly distracted by loads of little things, forgetting the big picture and ultimately find myself wondering what on earth happened to The Plan.