Balance

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I painted this picture as a Christmas present for John back in 2010. When I uploaded it to deviantArt, I promised, “I’ll upload concept and progress sketches to my blog after Christmas.”

Wel’p Christmas came and went and another one too, and it’s finally time for me to fulfil that promise.

The Idea

I wanted to paint a picture that could be quite personal but would also be quite ‘accessible’ to the casual viewer as just a pretty illustration. Based on this I discarded the possibilities of doing portraits and looked instead to find suitable avatars of myself and John. The answer was quite simple – Zodiac animals. What fortune that I had such a great pair of animals to work with, too!

Rawr!

Conflict

Do a google search for ‘dragon tiger’ and you’ll immediately find images of the two locked in combat. Frequently poised over a Yin-Yang symbol, the two animals represent balance.

My first concept sketches attempt to riff on this idea.

Finding my feet with drawing tigers…

<3

Finding nice flowing lines is easy when working in ink.

 

Purpose

The hearts felt hackneyed and the composition uncomfortable. I decided that I wanted to portray the dragon and tiger as an exuberant and harmonised pair. For this I decided to move them in the same direction, as though they were running toward a common goal.

A very tiny thumbnail with the new composition scribbled out. I think I’d intended originally to have the animals in some kind of setting, possibly clouds or a mix of cliffs and flames to go with the elemental years we were born in.

Scribbles to work out the tiger’s pose.

I wanted to present a quite stylised tiger. I had been inspired by a piece of art that had recently been printed on the back cover of ImagineFX.

More experimenting with the style and pose of the tiger.

Unfortunately my laptop was stolen around March 2011 so I’m missing all the Photoshop sketches and any progress scans I took. But for a quick run-down of my process I think it went something like this…

  • Sketches were scanned into Photoshop and composed into a rough arrangement.
  • The sketch was worked on in Photoshop, correcting awkward anatomy and finalising details.
  • The final lines were traced to the watercolour paper (probably straight from my computer screen, as I can’t find a paper-trail (hur hur) to indicate I printed the lines).
  • I laid down washes and underpainting, sprinkling in rubbing alcohol to create texture (it’s most effective in the little bubbles at the top left). I don’t think I used any salt for this painting, and if I did it wasn’t very effective!
  • Lastly I worked up the Dragon and Tiger in a series of layers. The dragon’s scales and the tiger’s stripes were probably added last. I also used a white gel pen to add texture (along the dragon’s hair and in the tiger’s mane).

Like many of my paintings, this one doesn’t have a lot of tonal depth as I was timid about laying down too much paint and being unable to correct mistakes. When choosing a frame and mounting board for the painting I kept this in mind and went for a light mount and a dark, rich frame to bring the viewer’s eye to the painting and complement the tiger’s stripes.

The framed painting now hangs above our bed.

 

Invader Stamps

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Invader pyramid.

The prototype for these stamps was created at the AVCon Ball in June. We needed a way for people leaving the venue to be identified on their return and the German House also wanted to have a way of verifying people eligible for the discount schnitzel offer.

As the idea of making an invader stamp was something that had been bouncing about in my head for a while, I figured I’d give it a shot. I borrowed a Stanley knife from the Streetgeek folks and rustled up a regular ol’ eraser and knocked up the stamp in five minutes or so.

Without a stamp pad this first stamp didn’t get us very far (we were using a Sharpie to ink it which eventually dried enough that the transfer stopped working) but it did prove that the idea could work.

For the Indie Games Room component of the Ultimate Gamer qualifiers we had to provide the developers with a way of verifying that attendees had passed the challenges associated with their game. It was time to make some stamps en masse…

Theme and Variations

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As a homework exercise for life drawing last year we were tasked with drawing a particular image in as many media and styles as we could (aiming for about 20 total). Here’s what I came up with…

Top left: Lead pencil.
Top Right: Felt-tip pen outlines.
Bottom Left: Brush pen.
Bottom Right: Highlighters.

 

Top left: Grey markers.
Top Right: Fine-liner pen, taking inspiration from Freud.
Bottom Left: Biro, trying to define the image using a continuous line across the contours of the face.
Bottom Right: An attempt to draw a net across the contours of the face.

 

Top left: Warm and cool planes of the face.
Top Right: Extended lines – every line enters and exits the image at the edges and the line width is modified where needed.
Bottom Left: Newspaper collage.
You can also see the grid I was using to reproduce the image in the blank bottom right area.

 

Left: Conté and charcoal.
Right: Pastel, using only horizontal strokes.

 

Top left: Watercolour.
Top Right: Charcoal and white gauche.
Bottom Left: Wet-in-wet ink.
Bottom Right: Charcoal – the entire area was covered in black and then erased back to produce the image.

 

Some experiments with using a black background.
Top left: White conté.
Top Right: White acrylic, using only horizontal strokes.
Bottom Left: White acrylic, I tried to paint out ‘pixels’ of colour however the black base I used kept bleeding into the paint I was laying down.

 

Black ink over wax scribblings.

 

Table Trifles

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Last month our friend Mark celebrated his birthday at the Grand Cru estate winery . This had also been the venue for his wedding in March, but unlike at the wedding, this time the restaurant had the tables set up with crayons and paper. The only logical course of action was to draw.

Ayvee sketches

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A bunch of sketches and scribbles of AVCon mascot Ayvee.

From t-shirt design brainstorming:

From trying to define some kind of style for the booklet comic:

(kinda terrifying!)

The one on the right was the first drawn up, and was copied from a panel from this comic. Once I’d gotten a feel for the style I was aiming for, I drew the others.

And some fun scribbling:

This picture kinda reminds me of Laura…

Butterfly Cupcakes

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Not quite as speccy as these butterfly cupcakes, but delicious nonetheless!

I found this recipe here and although it feels redundant, I’m transcribing the recipe in case that site disappears or something. I was pretty sad when the original blog post with my bacon and choc-chip cookies recipe disappeared…!

Ingredients

Cupcakes

115g butter or margarine
112g (1/2 cup) caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (1 teaspoon natural vanilla essence)
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
225g (1 1/2 cups) self-raising flour, sifted (I never bother with sifting)
145ml (1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon) milk

Filling

188ml (3/4 cup) thickened cream
1 teaspoon icing sugar
About 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons jam (about 60g)
Extra icing sugar, for dusting

Method

  1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius (180 degrees Celsius fan forced).
  2. Beat butter, sugar and vanilla in an electric mixer until light and creamy.
  3. Gradually beat in eggs.
  4. Add half the flour and stir in by hand. Stir in half the milk. Repeat with remaining flour and milk. Beat with an electric mixer for just a few seconds, to thoroughly combine the ingredients.
  5. Spoon the mixture into patty pans.
  6. Bake for about 13-15 minutes. The cupcakes are ready when a knife or skewer inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean. Also, the cakes will bounce back when lightly pressed in the middle.
  7. Allow cakes to cool completely before cutting and filling.
  8. Hold a sharp, pointed knife at a downward angle and cut a shallow cone from the top of each cupcake.
  9. Cut the cone in half to create the ‘wings’.
  10. Whip cream with icing sugar until thick.
  11. Place about 1/2 teaspoon of jam in each cake.
  12. Top with a heaped teaspoon of whipped cream. Position the ‘wings’ in the cream. Place a small dollop of jam between the wings and dust with icing sugar.

Makes 15 cupcakes.

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.