Month: August 2012

Flameface: Process and Progress

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With the KoL calendar contest deadline extended by a week, I had just one weekend to put together a new painting. Here’s some pics from the working process and some explanations of choices I made along the way.

Thinking in 3D

Once I knew that my piece was going to be based on the fire-fighting world event, I knew I had to illustrate Lord Flameface’s castle. And I needed to do so from an awesome angle, showing off the foreboding, smouldering fortress. Lord Flameface’s abode was a delightfully simple assortment of blocks so I knew I’d be onto a good thing if I created a model of the fortress in Google SketchUp first. I’d then use the 3D model to experiment with perspective and composition.

Straight-on view of the fortress model.

The camera angle chosen for the painting.

The Draft

Using my lightbox drafting table, I traced the SketchUp lines onto a sheet of watercolour paper for a test-run. Since this was my first watercolour piece in many months I wanted to get to grips with the paints again, as well as identify any potential problem areas in the image.

I initially planned to place an adventurer at the base of the fortress all kitted out in firefighting gear.

I learned that anywhere I wanted to put the flames down I’d need to leave the white of the paper to shine through. I fiddled with basic portrayals of depth by shading surfaces differently but felt that I’d need something extra for the final thing to make the fortress look hot and fiery.

The draft taught me a bunch of valuable things and particularly helped in setting the pace for the final painting. I realised that I’d have to be patient with use of the blank ink and not hurry with getting the smoky greys in otherwise I wouldn’t be able to paint effective flames.

Additional Elements

I identified some of the areas in the draft that I felt were really lacking and areas I wanted to portray better. I then googled images of fire and hot coals as reference and practised these elements on another spare sheet of watercolour.

Onto the Real Deal!

With the title for my painting decided, I opted to swap out the adventurer for Lord Flameface himself. On a new sheet of watercolour paper I marked out my margins and bleed margins, then sketched in Lord Flameface. I also traced in the fortress. Then, it was onto painting!

Underpainting in yellow.

 

Introducing Reds.

I used Chinese calligraphy ink for the black, allowing me to drop in a lot of pigment at once and let it bleed about on the page.

I let the sky dry before working on the fortress, to reduce the chance of the paint bleeding from the fortress into the sky. You can see the sky has dried a bit lighter than it was when the paint was first dropped in.

 

Final pass to finish off Lord Flameface and make changes to produce a cohesive image.

Finally, I scan the image and balance the colours a bit in Photoshop. The final result can be seen in Tuesday’s post.

Duck Photos #2

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I spotted this huge group of wood duck adolescents one Friday afternoon. In the twenty or so ducks there, only one really stood out as doing parenting and watch-guard duties. Poor guy.

Ticket to Ride UK

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During Thursday-night board games at the house of Leaflocker we were introduced to the game Ticket to Ride. Very simple yet very fun, we were hooked immediately.

With John’s birthday come and gone I was torn about getting him a copy of the game. After all, which version should I get? The superior Märklin set with its wonderful train cards, or a new board? Or perhaps purchasing a copy of the game on Stream would do?

The Steam copy didn’t allow hotseat play, however, so to get any play time together we’d have to buy multiple copies. We resolved to make a copy of the game so we could play hotseat on one computer… though inspired by Thom’s home-made Settlers of Catan set I was equally tempted to build a bootleg board.

…Then, while browsing the Days of Wonder website I found links to a number of fan maps. Building a copy of a fan map felt like a great way to celebrate the game and try a map that isn’t the German map without making an investment. And I could absolve my guilt about bootlegging an official map.

Quickly disappointed by the Australia map, I settled on UK v 2.0 and built myself a copy…

It folds!

The folded board is nice and compact, a little under 26cm square.

We playtested on Wednesday night. Alex won on 139 points.

Jimmy would have been on 138 given one more turn, he also had the most trains left by far.

I ended the game with no trains left. I would have gotten 136 points instead of 107 had I placed my last train differently, but it didn’t make the difference between me winning so there will only be minor whining, not incessant whining.

Anyway we had good fun on this map, mispronouncing our way through the UK. My next step will be to make up some proper cards for trains and tickets.

Completed Kai

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Continuing the trend of art-from-ACSA-homework that I started with last Wednesday’s post, here’s the finished Freud work. (last seen here.) Well, maybe not quite finished, but it’s what I handed up.

Starface

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My computer crashed like three times when I was drawing the right side of the face. Shame, I think I had the skin tones and shading much nicer at one point. After losing it twice I kind of gave up.

Cannelloni

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Sunday is the day I chuck some recipes on the blog so that I don’t lose them.

Here’s the cannelloni recipe I currently use. It’s nice but not perfect, so within the next couple of weeks I’m hoping to find a new recipe to try out and post up here. Let me know if you’ve got a good one!

My biggest problem with the recipe is probably not the recipe’s fault. I’m just super slow at preparing it. The real challenge will be to find a recipe I can prepare faster.

Anyhoo, courtesy of Women’s Weekly:

Ingredients

Cannelloni

  • 1kg Spinach, trimmed and coarsely chopped
  • 500g ricotta cheese
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups (120g) grated parmesan
  • 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint (I usually skip this)
  • 2 teaspoons fresh thyme
  • 2 teaspoons fresh rosemary
  • 250g cannelloni tubes

Creamy Tomato Sauce

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 medium brown onion, chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1.6kg canned, diced tomatoes
  • 1/2 cup (125ml) pouring cream
  • 1 teaspoon white sugar

Method

The sauce

  1. Heat oil in large saucepan; cook onion, stirring until softened. Add garlic.
  2. Add tomatoes (I frequently blend the tomatoes first for John’s benefit and to skip out on the blending later when the sauce is hot) and bring to the boil.
  3. Simmer for about 20 minutes or until sauce thickens slightly.
  4. Cool for 10 minutes, blend or process sauce with cream and sugar until smooth. (Since I’ve blended the tomatoes earlier already, I just add the cream and sugar)

The Cannelloni

  1. Preheat oven to 180°C
  2. Cook washed, drained spinach in heated large saucepan, stirring until wilted. Drain; when cool enough to handle, squeeze out excess moisture
  3. Combine spinach in bowl with ricotta, eggs, 1/2 cup of parmesan and the herbs. Fill cannelloni with this mixture.
  4. Spread a third of the sauce into a 24cm x 35cm-ish dish, top with pasta tubes then top with remaining sauce. Because instant pasta tubes are usually tiny, you can usually get a couple of layers of the pasta tubes in.
  5. Cook, covered, for 20 minutes. Uncover, sprinkle pasta with remaining parmesan; cook for an additional 15 minutes or until pasta is tender and cheese is browned lightly.

The supposed stats:

Prep + cook time: 1 hour (yeah right…)

Serves: 6

Photos to come ‘cos I’ve left my phone somewhere and need to fetch it.

[edit] Photos!

Tune in next week to find out what to do with the cream you’d have left over out of a 300ml container.

Doubt – Concepts and Experiments

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Saturday is concepts/walkthroughs day!

Here are the sketches and scribbles that went on to become the painting I posted on Wednesday.

The original concept was all about the raaaage in the foreground character and didn’t focus so much on the background pair.

A first play with the ink.

Building on the composition and the characters.

Final thumbnail.

Some different style experiments.

Duck Photos #1

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I take a lot of photos of ducks! Today I was hoping to dig up the first ducks-in-trees photos I ever took but I couldn’t find them 🙁

Anyhow, here’s a pair of wood duck parents and their well-sheltered young. Taken in August 2010.

The Disco Banjo

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The first of a couple of builds for which I collaborated with my father (ie, palmed off the hard work to).

The Concept

The concept for this comes, of course, from KoL. The epic weapon of the disco bandit is a banjo crafted out of a disco ball. Serendipitously, just as the idea to create the thing came to me, a fellow student at life-drawing classes showed me some photos of instruments made out of food tins. I started googling around and found that banjos made of cookie tins are actually quite widely made by artists and traveling musicians (the can itself is a great storage device) and there are many guides to making them around the place.

Eventually, my internet travels led me to a site explaining how to create a banjo out of a gourd, and this became the basis of the disco banjo.

The Making

I bought a disco ball from Cheap-as-Chips and peeled off mirror sections until I found the seam along which the hemispheres of the ball were connected. Lots of photos from this stage, cos I had a lot of fun with it! Except when the thing first split open and noxious plasticy fumes filled my lungs.

Lifting off the first piece.

A stanley knife was sufficient to break into the plastic.

Leaving a bisected disco ball on a career-disco bandit’s keyboard is like leaving a severed horse head on someone’s pillow.

Testing the resonance of the ball using some fishing wire, a spare violin bridge and some newspaper.

Once the disco ball was dealt with, I purchased a drum head, banjo strings and guitar pegs and drafted some timber guides for my father to do the woodwork.

Disco bongo. An 8″ drum head fits perfectly over the half-disco ball.

The neck.

A piece to go inside the banjo body in order to support the shape of the disco ball and provide a mounting point for the neck.

Preparing a hole for the timber to go through. I used a piece of paper of the same size/shape as the cross-section of the wood as my guide.

Sadly there are no more progress shots from here on as I passed everything over to my dad and he assembled the whole thing with expert craftsmanship.

Suddenly, it’s done!

I used the many left over mirror sections to decorate the drum head.

Extra notes

The tailpiece is a separate piece of timber, screwed from the outside of the ball to the bracer piece on the inside. It also sits over the rim of the drum to hold things in place.

The banjo is fretless and tuned in fifths as I played ‘cello way back when.