From start to finish

I thought I'd document the creation of a finished piece that I blogged about previously. It wound up being an excellent example of how happy accidents can conspire to make art better. (WARNING: Photoshop jargon ahead)

So after the last post, I attempted to clean up the lineart for the robot and insert him into the drawing. But I was very unhappy with how it was turning out. I decided that the old design of the robot was just to simple to mesh well with the intricacy of the rest of the piece. So I went back to the drawing board, re-designed the robot, and then put him into the drawing. And lo! It worked! Adding the myself and the margarita glass was quite easy after that.

So, the finished lineart of the piece:

I knew that I wanted the piece to be colored, but that I wanted something that was deliberately non-realistic. I had a vague notion that I wanted to do flat colors with a washed out color palette, so I started coloring. Several hours later, I had this:

It was a good start, but the coloring didn't look quite finished. It looked too much like a coloring book, and didn't convey the dream-like quality that I was aiming for. I wanted to add some grungy textures underneath the color layer on a low opacity, to try to give it a foggy feel.

So I dug up some textures (parchment, rust, and daguerreotype) and set out to make a texture layer. My goal was to create the texture layer UNDER the color layer at a low opacity, then set the color layer over it to multiply so that the texture would be seen faintly through the color layer. But instead, I wound up moving the texture layer OVER the color layer and wound up with this:

This was awesome! I knew right away that this was closer to what I had been looking for. It captured very well the feeling of unreality that I wanted to convey. But I thought it might have been closer to black and white movie than to "dream-like". And I'll admit that after all that time spent painstakingly coloring in the color layer, I didn't want to just toss it out the window. So I set the color layer over the textures at 50% opacity with the blending set to overlay, which resulted in this:

Now I was stuck. Both the colored and non-colored versions were awesome! After a while, I came to the conclusion that the colored version was closer to what I had wanted. So I decided to make one last change and call it done; I had wanted the robot to be holding a light-pole, but it just looked like a metal bar of some sort. So I added a lamp, tweaked the blending a little bit to make sure there wasn't anything it was missing, and then saved this version:

This turned out to be so successful that I decided I definitely want to make a series of it. And since my dreams are so bizarre, if I start recording my dreams again I will have no shortage of material!

It's going to be tough deciding which of my dreams to illustrate next. I've had a list of dreams that I've wanted to do this for for a long time. We'll see what happens when I start doing sketches for the next one.

New art in progress

So I've been working seriously on the margarita robot image that I mentioned in a previous post. I just thought I'd post a few screens of work in progress.

Here's the finished lineart for the background:



I started to sketch in the robot here:


It took a few tries to get the positioning right, but I think it will look good once it's polished.

More later!

Brief updates

Website: Browser Beware and the Tasty Bacon Games site are both back up and running, thanks to assistance from Joshua A.C. Newman. (He rocks, go buy a copy of Shock:) There's a couple areas of Browser Beware that still need to be fixed, but it's 90% back up and running and will be fully restored in the next few days.

Thou Art But A Warrior: I'm about to do my third print run of Thou Art But A Warrior! Hooray! Unfortunately, because of how horrendous the service is with my old printer, I'll be switching to a new printer with slightly higher costs. This means I'll be raising the price a bit after I've sold out of copies from the current print run. More details on this once I've finalized the print run.

Wundergeek Writes: A bit of an analysis of my progress so far and future goals over on my other blog.

Recent work

My website is still down, I know. I'm waiting to get some help with it right now. So, still working on it.

I've been sketching daily at work to get back into practice. Here's one result that turned out rather well:

Something I'm finally starting to work on after wanting to for several years is a series of illustrations based on my dreams. Back in university, I was required to start a dream journal by a drawing teacher. This was when I discovered that my dreams are, apparently, far more peculiar than the average person's. Which, I suppose, bears out with me being far more peculiar than average in general.

Anyhow, I feel like I've finally achieved enough skill in my drawing to really do this series justice. So the other night I did a preliminary sketch based on one of the dreams that has long been a favorite of mine: I dreamed an evil robot was going to destroy the city unless I could make it a good margarita.

I like the face on the right-most robot the best, but the body on the middle robot is my favorite. So I'll probably switch heads on those two.

Where the hell have I been???

So I just wrapped up a one year volunteer gig as Chief Script Writer in charge of herding cats coordinating writers for a local amateur theater company known as FASS. It's a group affiliated with the University of Waterloo that writes and puts on a musical comedy each year. The show is in January, which meant that during November and December I was wrapping the script, and January I was busy rehearsing for the performance in February.

But Anna, you say. It's now most of the way through March. Well, my time since then has been spent on three trips to Ohio, battling the plague, and recovering from a cracked rib. (Tae kwon do sparring accident, nothing sinister, I promise.)

And now I've got a lot of catching up to do. So first thing's first.

Yes I know my website is down.

My webhost went out of business in December and I somehow didn't get notified. I didn't really find out until we were about to go into production on the play, and I'm only getting to rectifying the situation now. I know, I know, bad me. But I hope to have something up no later than Easter - I'm making inquiries about new hosting right now.

Secondly, I'm getting back in the swing of being creative. For the past year, I pretty much haven't done anything creative that wasn't script-writing; I just didn't have the creative energy to work on FASS and my own projects as well. Unfortunately, my drawing and writing skills are horribly horribly rusty. I have two different plans for this.

Getting back into writing form

So I started another blog. It's rather embarassing as of yet, but it's a blog in which I will attempt to force myself to do writing daily. It hasn't happened yet - getting back in the groove is hard. But I'm hoping by mentioning it here that will make me feel a bit more accountable to the five of you weirdos who have actually followed this blog and to the ten or so of you who check in every several months or so.

Anyway, here it is: Wundergeek Writes. Fair warning that I fully expect the things I post to suck for at least the next six months. I've had to do this before and I'm pretty familiar with how it goes. But the only way to get good again is to actually write, so I suppose I'd better get the pain of sucking over with now.

Getting back into drawing

Drawing is a bit of a harder faucet to turn back on, since it's not so much a thing that you do as a way of thinking. I've found that when I sit down with my sketchbook, I have trouble of thinking of things to draw. So I've been visiting the Daily Sketch Group over on the ConceptArt.org forums to mine old DSG topics for ideas of things to draw.

It's been working out well, so far. I'm starting to get back into the groove. I even did an original sketch the other day. So I thought I'd at least post some of those here so there would be something concrete to show:

Dude, the topic was "freaky looking creature that has the qualities of owl and grub". I kinda freaked myself out drawing it, which is why I draw an owlcat to make sure that owlgrub wouldn't get too uppity. Brr.

The Valkyrie is one of my favorite roleplaying characters ever. When I was playing her, I would draw her with a silver-age style costume - very skimpy and superhero-y. But I thought I'd try my hand at a more heroic and less scantily clad Valkyrie. I like how it turned out.

Zombie Santa! I had a lot of fun with zombie Santa here. I hope you can read my hastily scrawled notes.

Fog excursion

Last night, I went to go take out the trash and I stumbled into a wonderland of fog. It was so amazing I went inside, grabbed my camera, and told my husband that we were going for a walk, despite that it was after 1am on a Saturday evening.

Now, fog is very challenging to shoot in - especially at night. You can't see very much detail through the viewfinder, so you have to use your knowledge of what is there to mentally compose shots in the viewfinder with the elements you can see. You also have no idea if your camera is interpreting the light levels correctly. And there's always the risk that the camera isn't going to pick up all the detail that you can see so clearly. Plus I was pretty tired, so I didn't want to mess with the tripod.

I got lucky last night, though. A lot of shots turned out, even though many others didn't. I'd definitely like to do something with some of these, but I'll have to de-grain them first.

All in all, I got some great stuff. Take a look:

I love the sweep of the headlights here.

I totally expected zombies to attack us at any time. Totally.

You can't see it, but we were very near the highway, so there were these monstrous tall lights to light the highway. Kit and I kept joking about lights in the sky, since you couldn't even see the poles. So I got him to pose for a silly shot of him being "abducted".

Again, the tall lights are the lights next to the highway.

We kept joking that the rendering servers had crashed.

My photography instructors always said that the key to good night photography is to capture different kinds of light sources to get different color shifts. It's funny how lights that look white or yellow at night shift so radically "on film".

Spooky!

This picture took so long to take I had totally dismissed it as lost. I was delighted that it came out.

On Facebook, a friend left the comment that this photo made him feel like he was playing Left4Dead. I found that amusing.

Willows + fog = awesome.

Kit liked posing in the fog.

Coming back, the street outside our house.

The oft-talked about novel about my old job

From the day I turned in notice at my old job, I swore that I was going to write a novel based on my time at [Dysfunctional Company], a 'names changed to protect the guilty' kind of affair. It will make a metric asston of money, because everyone will think it's fiction because it will be just too absurd to be based in truth. I've kept a lot of things that I wrote about my time there, and I've made notes about how such a novel would be structured, and from time to time I consider dusting off the project and making a serious go at it.

The only thing is that every time I start to go through my notes from that time, every time I start to remember all the stuff that made me crazy and angry and miserable about that job, I find myself shying away from the project again. It's been more than half a year, and I still don't know if I have enough space yet to be able to work on this project and actually make it funny.

Huh.