Alice

Not quite done but pretty close. Oil painting commission. Don't remember the dimensions off the top of my head. 11 hours, I think.

Here it is blocked in (did this last spring)…


The rest of this I did last night. Went over the background to give it texture, impressionist-style but blended. Starting to fill in Alice now…



And here's where I ended up!


Sorry about the glare - it's the best I could do with the lighting I had in the basement. It's kind of got a yellow tint look in the pics. When I'm done and it is dry I'll scan it in and post the finished piece.

Stargate Resurrected

A lot of digital artists of my generation practice their skillz on making fan art. For me it's the ready-made inspiration so I can concentrate on practicing my software techniques.

Back when Stargate: SG-1 was on the air (and hadn't jumped the shark) I made a lot of wallpaper fanart, mostly in the grunge style. I wasn't particularly good at it (hey, it was practice) but I came up with some interesting compositions. A few months ago I was going down memory lane, looking at some of them and this one caught my eye. It was a lot cleaner than my older walls and I thought it would make a great vector piece. The old one had a foreground image of Carter laying on the floor and I thought it distracted from the cool background image that I wanted to concentrate on.

To translate for non-Stargate fans, this was from an episode called "Entity" where a digital-based lifeform from another world downloaded itself into Stargate Command's computer system and eventually ended up downloading itself into Carter's brain, taking over her mind and body. The image of Carter is when the entity left her body, creating arcs of electricity that lit everything in blue light. The syntax in the background was seen on all the monitors in the complex.

About 90% of this was built in Illustrator CS4 (Carter, the background color, all the text) and then I brought each element into Photoshop to add some blurring to the text. It was fun putting all the text into perspective. For the most part, the text is as-seen in the screen-shot I took from that episode, though in a few places it was too blurry to make out so I made stuff up.

All Widescreen, no fullscreen, sorry.
1920x1200
1680x1050
1440x900
1280x800

The Kitsune/Okami Division

Normally I only share visual art here but I thought I'd mix it up a bit and add a song.

I have been playing guitar for 17 years or so, albeit self-taught. I primarily play acoustic finger-style though I do have an electric (and am in the process of building another, which will make an appearance on this blog). I have made up quite a few songs, all instrumental.

This is a draft of a song I made up as part of a healing process. A few transitions have since been changed, other bits shortened, and some complexity has been added in the picking but its largely the same. I record things in GarageBand on my Mac with a cheap external mic, so the sound quality isn't top notch - ends up sounding more indie lo-fi but you get the idea. This song is 3-part guitar; I plan on building a baritone guitar after the one I'm building now and plan on re-recording the song with that later. ;)

I recorded this back in November but I've been offline for the past two months which is why I'm only now getting around to this.

Here's the direct download link:
https://files.me.com/howlsthunder/6jj05t.mp3 - 6:50min, 128kbps, 6.3MB

Eyak Lake display signs

My boss and I recently finished a job designing informational/educational outdoor display panels for the Copper River Watershed Project (CRWP). These six signs will be placed in locations around Eyak Lake in Cordova, Alaska. I hope to see them some day (you can only fly or boat to Cordova).







(The kick-ass salmon photography - like on the "Cycle of Life" sign - is courtesy Tom Kline.)

About: Each of these panels is about 36"x24 (91cm x 60cm ish) and were built with a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. My boss had the initial concept and then I make it happen. Often I work with the images we are given and different layout ideas come out of that. I pretty much built the majority of the layouts with constant edits from the boss and he does all the copy editing and body typography. If it isn't a photo (or one of the two paintings on the second "Spirits" sign) then I drew it :D. It's difficult to get a true appreciation for how these work as signs unless you print them out full-size - it was quite a learning curve for us to go from working on a comparatively tiny 24" screen to seeing them full-size - there is an entirely different psychology involved in laying out a display piece versus a hand-held piece.

I am particularly proud of the bathymetry (lake depth) map on the 5th sign. I had three shoddy - and non-matching - bathymetries of various parts of the lake and had to piece them together in Photoshop, print it out and hand-label it so I knew which colors were which depths on the mis-matched areas, then re-trace the entire thing in Illustrator. :) I also really enjoyed creating the simplistic yet fun illustrations for the backgrounds. Though I'm eager to some day do something really complex with Illustrator and really flex those muscles, its a personal challenge to "dumb down" my style and I think it worked on these signs.

As a bonus, here are the fish from the "Small Fry at Play" sign, bigger. They were one of the last things I illustrated so they ended up much more detailed and less cartoony than the main sign backgrounds that were illustrated - which I think worked because they are foreground subjects anyhow. We just needed fish examples and didn't have photos of them all so illustrating them made it more unified.

WPA Moose

This is actually only the size of a large postage stamp - it is a remake using a moose instead of an airplane, with modified colors. I drew the moose and everything else, of course, based on multiple moose. :) Did the vectors and base colors in Illustrator CS4, shading, texture, and text in Photoshop CS4.