Painting Mal

Hey Gang,

Keeping in line with my recent Brown Coat Propaganda Poster image, I thought that I'd post up a
"How I Painted Mal" process article.

Malcolm Reynolds AKA Nathan Fillion is a pain in the butt to paint. The reason being is his features are very unique yet subtle. His nose and chin/jaw are very prominent yet difficult to get right. Needless to say, I've wasted many pages in my sketch book just trying to get it right and so far, this painting, I think, is my best attempt to date. You be the judge.

The process that I am outlining below is not neccesarily typical for me but in this instance I think it worked out. The intent was to give the image a poster feeling and how could a guy NOT be influenced by the great Drew Struzan? So ,I decided to emulate his technique some what and here is how I did it.

First off, I started with an under drawing. Some guys just launch straight into paint but I'm just not built that way. I like to think of the drawing stage as building the skeleton of the finished work. The more accurate that I can get this stage, the less guess work that I have to do later.

 Next, I completed a monochromatic under painting over top of the drawing. This helps me to work out the basic values and forms as well as establishing a uniform tone to the whole piece. The Browncoats are always depicted as dirty and sandy so I chose to use a tan color for this stage.

 On top of the under painting, I now go in with my digital airbrush and block in my colors. This is what I borrow from Mr Struzan as he is a master at this part of the process. He is a lot more subtle with the airbrush and chooses to rely more heavily on his drawing skills to refine the forms in his work. For me, I just wanted to quickly establish the overall color scheme.

 Now we get into the fun and laborious part that some people call rendering. For this stage, I pretty much kept to my chalk brush and blocked in the forms being conscious of establishing the planes and over all tonal management.  I'm particularly inspired by the Premier Coup method as championed by the great portraitist John Howard Sanden and I can't help but gravitate to using his methods at this stage. I confess that I initially intended to go " Full Struzan" on this piece and get down and dirty with pencil like mark making but this just felt more natural to me and more importantly, more consistent with the period poster look that I was going for.

 This is the final stage. To achieve this, I spent a lot of time noodling around pushing pixels and further refining the image until I was satisfied with the final rendering. After that, I played around with some adjustment layers in photo shop and voila!

I hope that you found this article somewhat useful and please let me know if you have any comments or questions as I'm always happy to hear from you.

Cheers!

Evolution of a Trolllkin

Hey all,

I thought that for this post, I'd share some insight into the development process I went through with the good folks over at Kobold Press while working on their new character race the Trollkin.

I'm a longtime D&D gamer and in fact I cut my teeth on 2nd Edition and Dragon Lance modules and I'm always "game" to work on fantasy ip's.  So when the team at Kobold quarterly approached me to help them develop this new race for their setting, I was pretty stoked at the opportunity to create something relatively "New" to the fantasy world.  No Pressure right?..

So, the initial brief was for a playable race that is half human, half bad guy called a Trollkin. Trollkin are the product of interbreeding between a monster race like a Troll / Ogre and a human. Genetically, they are very diverse and it was very difficult to nail down a "look" for these guys. Well, it's pretty tough to nail these things on the first pass so I whipped up some really rough sketches to show my Art Director a couple of options for the Trollkin's look to help us hone in something that works. This first image is simply a series of heads to indicate some character and a sketch of a humanoid creature with a spear.

After this stage, the AD was able to have some visuals and was able to identify what he didn't like and provide me some direction moving forward. Next we have another image which is again pretty rough but it contained enough information for the AD to see that we were on the same page.

Ok, so now we are getting somewhere. Next I moved on to a tight drawing that incorporates all of the accumulated information thus far.

 

 Once again, I sent off another email to my AD to show him this image and get some final feedback and approval to move onto the finished image.

 

Finally, we arrived at the completed image that everybody is happy with. You'll notice the differences in this last image are rather subtle but do give the image just enough extra " Umph". Some things we changed were the addition of a shield, more pronounced claws, bigger spines on his back, more and "bushier" hair etc.

All of these images were completed digitally in Photoshop and that is the primary software that I use for illustration. I hope that you found this article informative and please drop me a line if you have any questions.

Cheers!

Paul Lasaine and Brush Creation Tutorial

This year I am going to post more. At least this is what I keep telling myself. Now, I have a ton of links and info bookmarked all over my computer but how often do I share them? Almost never. I just horde them and cackle to myself with triumph at their discovery. Cheesy, I know, but I am an art geek and proud of it. But, with the spirit of the new year, I will share.

Today, we have the art blog of Paul Lasaine. This guy is awesome! Go to one of his blogs and enjoy. He is an amazing concept artist / painter and most of you should recognize his work from the Lord of the Rings.

In particular, he put up a useful tutorial on how to make a custom brush in Photoshop. I like this tutorial because he both goes into depth on the technical end as well as in the practical application. This is very useful and inspiring and I thought that I would share. http://paullasaine.blogspot.com/2008/01/photoshop-brush-tutorial.html

In the future, I'll put up a section in this blog with links to excellent resources and tutorials that you all may find useful.

Cheers!

Now go out and be inspired...

And you thought that I don't use my sketchbook anymore!

Although it is true that I have been working mostly digital these days I do still draw in the old sketchbook albeit not as often as before. I went through a 3 month phase where I thought that I should only work digital period. Blah Blah Blah. Needless to say, I'm back on the wagon and here is a sampling of images for your viewing pleasure.

Cheers!

Here is my latest installment of Riley Method Pen drawings inspired by Chris Legaspi's posts up on his blog Freshdesigner. I really enjoy doing these quick 5-10 minute portraits and I find it to be excellent warm up exercises . According to Stat Counter, people out there seem to be searching the term Riley Method and are taking a look at my images so I decided to put together another page for anyone out there who is interested.


These Images are simply more Ball Point Pen sketches from my Sketchbook. We have some figures and some portraits. The Portraits took me about 20 min or so each.



Pencil Studies from my sketchbook. Every once in a while I pick up a pencil to prove that I can still use one but for now my favorite drawing tool is the humble ball point pen. Call Me Crazy!


Lastly we have a scan of a page out of my sketchbook. This i'd say would be what a typical page looks like ( at least one that I'd be willing to share ).

The Boss completed

Hey Gang I finally wrapped up this following image "Rejection". It's a scene from, you guessed it, MGS 3 where The Boss tells Snake to "Go Home". A challenge if ever there was. So, at long last, you can see the final image here and now. In addition, I put together a .pdf to demonstrate my process to share with all my viewers how I go about doing what I do.
Enjoy!