I thought I’d give this process another shot because I like the results from the last one.  I’m still digging it.  I got some feedback from a friend of mine, JR Fleming, a fellow geek artist, that the last one lacked darks.  Which I agreed with.  So I tried to make more of a value range with this one.  I also layered in text to see what it looked like.

This was a test to see what happened when I scan a watercolor drawing and mess with it in Photoshop.  Basically I wanted to see what happened when I tried to draw a more science fictiony scene instead of the usual naked people.  I rather like watercolors.  The key for me seems to be not to try to control them at all.  Stay outside of the lines.  Make it sloppy and call it expressive.  This is a hell of a lot faster and feels more natural than trying to go all digital.  And the watercolor already has a nice texture to it.  I like the way my pencil lines look, not so much inks.  So what do you think, would you read something drawn like this?

Last Friday was Carnivalesque.  It was a burlesque performance put on by Smoke and Mirrors Cabaret.  The show was quite a bit different from most burlesque performances that I’ve seen.  We tried a few experimental ideas with the performance that are not normally seen in burlesque performances.  There was a narrative to the show instead of a disconnected series of performances.  We incorporated some live digital painting into the event.  I made some images that were projected as backgrounds in the performances.

I also did the event flier.  For some reason, when it came time to do the flier my main source of inspiration was the Drew Struzan Blade Runner movie poster.  Because nothing says burlesque like 80′s sci-fi and Rutger Hauer.  It was digitally painted in Photoshop and sized for print at 11×17.  I didn’t know if my computer could handle that many pixels, but it managed.  I based it on photos of the cast from prior events.

Originally the idea was to digitally paint the backgrounds as the show was happening.  But after playing with the computer and the projector a bit during a rehearsal we decided that having the painting happening during all of the routines would be too much of a distraction from the focal point of the performance.  That and the fact that most of the performances were only a few minutes long wouldn’t give me time for much more than scribbles on the screen.  So I ended up doing a lot of that art for the show before hand.  Since we waited until the weekend before the show to actually hookthe laptop up to a projector, I did the images in two very late nights.  I did have the chance to do a live painting before the show started as people were filtering in to the show.

These are the images that were projected behind the performers.  I had thought that since I wouldn’t be able to do paintings during the performances that I would instead do illustrations for each of the backgrounds.  After I spent and evening on a horrible attempt at painting a carnival ground I decided on photo-manipulations instead.  These I could finish quickly enough to have ready in time for the show.

The show went well.  People seemed to really enjoy it.  There’s a review of the show on launch787.com.  There’s a set of photos from the show on Flickr by photographer Menelaos Prokos.  They all look great.  I’m really impressed with all of the photos I’ve seen from the event.  There’s also a video of Miriam’s aerial dance routine.

It was a great event to be a part of.

I skipped the Faster than the Speed of Light fundraiser tonight because I got myself involved in a six hour portrait.  It’s been years since I spent this long on a painting, so I thought I’d see what happened.

I experimented a bit with the process.  I first did a tonal charcoal under-drawing, then painted over that with acrylic, then finished up with oil.  It’s a pretty good process, but I should have stopped after my initial glazing with the oil.  The features were much stronger in the acrylic under-painting.  Although you wouldn’t know it from my painting the model was actually very beautiful.

I also did a quick photoshoppery to it, to see if I could improve it.

I was messing around with Photoshop tonight, playing around with some brushes, and this is what I came up with. Why paint in Photoshop? Well, it’s very convenient for print work. If I had an illustration gig of some type I would almost certainly do it digitally. Production and delivery in one tidy package. The only thing lacking from doing work digitally is a physical end product. So to me if feels kinda cold.

There is a speed advantage as well. Where real paintings that I’ve done on this site take many hours, multiple sessions over days, this took about an hour.

The brushes I was playing with came from a downloaded brush set from Bittbox.  Grab them here.