Facts of Life Jo wallpaper

Finally! A Jo wallpaper! Based on a screencap from xxsaosinxx (Thanks!)



widescreen: 1920x1200 • 1680x1050 • 1440x900 • 1280x800
fullscreen: 1600x1200 • 1280x960 • 1152x864 • 1024x768

About This Wallpaper
Illustrator CS3, Intuos Wacom tablet, about 4 hours.
I'd had this idea for a Jo wallpaper for awhile, to theme it around her Blair-given "Mr Goodwrench" nickname-insult, in blues with mechanical stuffs happening. After the direction the previous Blair wall went in, I did this one in the same style (which, now that there IS a style, saved a LOT of time!). Stuck with the limited palette and masculine lines. Googled the Goodwrench logo and re-drew it in Illustrator (Live Trace did a lousy job) and found a nice motorcycle engine blueprint to Live Trace to vector and stick in the background. (I was originally going to use some of my Johnstone Supply catalogue illustrations instead since I feel like Live Trace is cheating but I really didn't feel like tracing my own engine. But they were more electrical oriented, not mechanical, so there you go).

I like this one a lot better than the Blair wall - I think it succeeds in its comparative simplicity - but then, as we know, Blair is superficially much more complex than Jo so I think it works. ;)

Brilliant Blair: Facts of Life wallpaper

widescreen: 1920x1200 • 1680x1050 • 1440x900 • 1280x800
fullscreen: 1600x1200 • 1280x960 • 1152x864 • 1024x768

About this wallpaper
This is the character Blair from the popular 1980s TV sitcom The Facts of Life", which I was very fond of as a kid.
Done in Adobe Illustrator CS3.
I lost count of the hours after the 50th time trying to work on it. Ugh. This is probably the 4th version of this wallpaper and I had started it the day after the last one I posted!

This thing was a pain in the butt. The theme was to be centered around Blair's quintessential "brilliant"; the original idea was to have a gigantic "BRILLIANT" in the background with Blair looking like she feels brilliant, with Jo glaring at her off to the side. ;) I did the whole thing with detailed shading and everything but Jo came out hiddeous. Also, I couldn't get the "BRILLIANT" worked in the way I wanted. I imported everything into Photoshop and tried stuff there to no avail. I ended up ditching everything and started from scratch in Illustrator, drawing it like you see now and then messing around with random shapes and fills, ditching Jo outright.

And yes, that's the VISA credit card logo, from the 80s. Whee. ;)

Here's what it used to look like:

No, I will not be working this into a wall any time soon so do not ask.
I swear I have a Jo one coming up next. Maybe I'll do it in the same style and they'll be a pair. :D

StarWars: Dark Leia

I don't generally do requests because I end up being really flaky about getting the piece done. But every once in awhile an idea really strikes my fancy and it not only jumps ahead in the "To Do" queue, it actually gets done!



widescreen: 1920x1200 • 1680x1050 • 1440x900 • 1280x800
fullscreen: 1600x1200 • 1280x960 • 1152x864 • 1024x768 • 800x600

About
It is based on an alternate universe for Star Wars, a "what if" deal: what if Leia led the Empire or something (I think this is based on Star Wars: Infinities - look at me, I don't know what I am drawing!). ;) I had the composition in mind well before I started. This is my first figure construction I have done from scratch in years - ugh, I should of hired my friend Ash or Hemisphere for it! Anyhoo, I made up my own costume based on the comic version and some other artist's version. Sketched in Photoshop CS3, drew everything/colored in Illustrator CS3, brought it all back into Photoshop to do shading and add textures. The stars and clouds are all my own textures. Took about 9 hours or so.

Cylon Centurion

At some point I had the idea to do a cylon centurion wallpaper, and then someone on Facebook requested a BSG wall as well so here I am, finally got to it. :D I would like to do one in a more WPA style which is what I had originally set out to do but got a bit carried away. Ah, well.



widescreen: 1920x1200 • 1680x1050 • 1440x900 • 1280x800
fullscreen: 1600x1200 • 1280x960 • 1152x864 • 1024x768 • 800x600

About…
Ah, pretty basic - I wanted to keep it simple. Drew the cylon and did the gradient background in Illustrator CS3, brought everything into Photoshop CS3 and added textures and the eye glow. One texture is a linen one by me, the other is rust by my friend Deborah Schildt. The eye glow is a brush I made. Took about 5 hours.

Tree for the Trees

4th challenge from the art_wac community. Not too sure how I feel about this one. I am really liking these art challenges because I am not pressuring myself to make a masterpiece each time so I think of these as digital sketches / Illustrator experiments. :)



Widescreen: 1920x1200 • 1680x1050 • 1440x800 • 1280x800
Fullscreen: 1600x1200 • 1280x960 • 1152x864 • 1024x768

Entire thing is vector, done in Illustrator CS3 with my Wacom tablet. Took about 3 and a half hours.

The concept was "trees or forest?". My concept started out with the two being one within the other within the other, etc. but it morphed into this singling out of the tree chart thingey in which I got to experiment with my sedimentary swatches I got from a government cartography website. :D The underground is a world without trees and I half-assedly stole the visual concept from Ben Schlitter, whose stuff I want to try re-creating for practice. The motherboard pattern is from an Apple II blueprint I found online.