T-Shirt Series: Breaking Bad (Heisenberg)

Hey guys, Many of you will probably know the Character 'Walter White' or Heisenberg fro the AMC T.V series 'Breaking bad'. If not then you may recognise the actor Bryan Cranston from his other Hit T.V series 'Malcom in The Middle or Movies such as 'Drive and 'Little Miss Sunshine'. The piece was intended to be entered into the 'Threadless' Tishirt design competition but May require some finishing touches before entry. I have given a little information on each stage of the process starting at the end of the post, so you'll have to scroll down to the bottom if you want to follow it step by step.

7) Finally I just had the task of layering the portrait with the background design. This just involved playing with The Levels, saturation, vibrance, hue as well a the layer type. In the end I decided to make the Flames layer invisible, by changing it to 'Multiply'. I then played with the colours for a long time before finally deciding on a colour and level of vibrance. Initially the aqua colour was really bold and I think it domineered the piece rather than aiding the overall design. By lowering the lightness, hue and saturation i was able to have Hiesenberg's face only partially obscured by flame, as was my original intention. 

6) I hadn't done any flames in Photoshop before so I did a quick tutorial to get the hang of it. The process was surprisingly simple (kind of) I picked three colours, white, very light blue and aqua blue the drew three thick straight vertical lines all next to each other. I Then used the smudge tool (at around %55 strength) to disperse the colours in a rough smoke/vapor-like form. This was the most time consuming part. I then chose -Filter-liquify and went over the flame ever so slightly with the liquify tool. This helped me get the thin, sharp, flame like edges.   

5) To get an Idea of what type of background would look good I grabbed a few samples of google images . I wanted to have blue flames or 'Meth' smoke/vapor as a background to the piece would look complete and people would easily be able to understand the reference.

4)After Adding the third layer of Tone. I finished the beard detail as well as the glasses, beard and shadow. Then I just cleaned up all the edges and any excess spray marks.

3) I upped the saturation and opacity to around 75% and dropped the paint flow down to %30. I mainly used the airbrush tool with a realistic 'spray' brush preset for all the tone work and a square brush preset to the beard detail and other line work. I used a soft colour pallet for this piece but altered the levels at the end of the process to get a darker overall look.

2) I prefer to layer my colours with the lightest first and put the darker ones on as I go through the layering process. After Laying down the soft tones I added some darker flesh-tone colours and softened the black lines on the face to more realistic flesh colour. 

1) I started by sketching out The outlines and adding some lines for wrinkles, and beard texture. Again I am using A wacom intuos 4 (small) graphic tablet with a combination of CS4. Using a few photo references I then drew the basic lines and added some soft base colours. I wanted to make this portrait more realistic than the previous (Nucky Thompson) one, as It will possibly be entered into a T-shirt design competition and the the Character will need to be easily recognisable.   

TV Portait Series: Boardwalk Empire.

Hey guys, a lot of the work I have been posting recently has been from my degree course, which doesn't always indicate the kind of work and subject matter I like to tackle. I'm therefor going to start posting one or two pieces of my personal art every week. At the moment i'm into portraits and some of my main influences, (besides fellow artists) are characters from film, T.V, musicians, and athletes. Expect to see some more digital portraits up over the next few months. Being a fan of both the 1920's prohibition era, the 'Gangster' genre and the actor Steve Buscemi I thought My first of this ongoing portrait series could be the character 'Nucky Thompson' from HBO's 'Boardwalk Empire'. In addition to these portraits I am also happy to do requests, so If theres an actor, T.V/Film character that you would like to see Illustrated, send me a message. Thanks and I hope you enjoy.  

Editorial Painting

Character Illustration

This is a character Illustration is one of many I did recently for an article entitled "paying the bill". You will probably notice the distinct Ralph Steadman-like style. Illustration drawn with paint brush, airbrush and pencil tools on a Wacom graphic tablet in Photoshop CS5.

rorschach

One of my first digital drawings using my new Wacom Intuos 4 graphic tablet. Will take me a while to learn all the in and outs but looking forward to spending a lot of time using it over the next year. Rorschach has to be my favourite of all the watchman characters and Jackie Earle Haley did a great job bring one of Alan Moores finest characters to the big screen. 

The Four British Seasons (digital painting and photo manipulation)

SPRING: Initial structural lines for the Cathedral outline.

After using the structural lines to help craft the right shapes to draw the cathedral,  I hand rendered all the detail and erased the structural lines after.

I drew the outline using a photograph foe reference, The pieces are all done using my Wacom Intuos 4 graphic tablet and Photoshop CS5.

After the lines were all done i decided to use a faded photo of old limestone brickwork for a texture layer under the Cathedral and then making the cathedral layer transparant by clicking on the 'multiply' option under layer type.

I did the same thing with a brick path image , using it to fabricate my path layer.

I then coloured the trees bushes and houses in the background.

Using the airbrush tool, I set up s large brush size and low opacity and flow to get a clear sky blue. After that I added a colour for the grass and combined it with the grass texture layer. 

I Then painted in the clouds and put in a dude riding his bmx across the path. i really like these pieces and might develop them further, adding people ect.

Oh I almost forgot, I also added some show on the brickwork of the side of the cathedral, as well as some light source on the front of the cathedral, it's the little things.

SUMMER: for summer,  went for a slightly brighter colour pallet . I added some bright green shrubbery and a bright ray of yellow sun light on the face of the cathedral.

Again paths with a texture layer beneath.

Grass and skylight.

little more fiddling with the layers.

then I finally used a gradient for the sky.

AUTUMN: As I already had the linework done for the initial season of spring I could now use it for every season adn just build the other elements like colour, textures, light, tone and shadow.

I wanted to represent Autumn on one of those moody, wet and stormy days. Maybe just before a heavy dose of lightening or rain. after the grass and paths were painted in I put some light beams in that would later accompany some dark clouds.

Later down the road I changes the sky and darkness levels of the layers so they would be less bright, After that I added a photo of a storm that I had taken a while back, and cut out the clouds and placed them on top of the sky layer. I also changed the sky colour to a darker grey.

At the very end I made some finishing touches, Namely the light coming through the clouds onto the grass and the leaves blowing in the wind, I can't decide which one of these seasons is my favourite but I is between the Autumn season and the winter season, because the elemental factors are bold and more evident.

WINTER: For winter The tricky part would be the snow the other layers were just variations of previous ones.

I used a sample of a photograph of a sky after it had snowed for this season.

After the sky was in, I hand painted in the snow on a transparant surface layer, using the airbrush tool.

I used a another snow photo as the ground layer, this give the season a nice realistic look, whilst not being too superficial.

Finally I added a noise layer and played with the motion blur and gausian blur options to make some variations of falling snow.

I am very pleased with the final piece but I intend to develop them further by adding some people in each one and will probably produce some more urban landscape work in the near future.

Animal collective nouns. A workshop for a Uni Module.

Hi Guys, Sorry about the absence of recent posts over the summer, but I now have quite a back log of work to go up. These first collection of Images come from an animal related workshop from my 3rd year Illustration BA course. The Idea was that we chose a collective animal noun, In this case 'A congregation of Alligators' and produce some initial images, eventually progressing on to illustrate the animal in a form which represented them as a group (like the noun). I initially wanted to draw a cartoon of a group of alligators as a church congregation but the brief stipulated that it should be in more of a pattern type layout.

 (Above) Digital sketch using brush, airbrush and pencil tools. I chose not to render the entire image as I think it looks better incomplete.

These are a series of Alligator illustrations, also all digital, drawn, coloured and rendered using a Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet. I tried to render the styles a little as well as the colour pallet, though as is often the case most of them are drawn to a rather realistic standard. Before developing any of the images any further I thought I might make a couple of mock-up pattern designs using some of the abouve imagery.

I made a few patterns fro the earlier digital drawings but this one was the best of them. I also played with the background colour and tone, levels, ect, but It looks best when kept simple. I think this pattern would be popular as present wrapping paper, wall paper or sketch/writing pad cover paper for any young boy or girl. Really simple and equally easy to produce.

 This Design was one of the less successful ones, although If cleaned up and developed further could potentially be another good design for wrapping paper. I decided to focus on developing a similar image but in more detail.

This Digital painting was the result of nearly 10 hours work in Photoshop. I have only had my graphics tablet for a few months now so I am, and will be focusing heavily on the digital side of my work over the final 7 months of my degree. This way I can make the improvement imperative to bring my graphics skills up to higher level. I have a lot of layers and screen shots for this one but don't want to clog my blog up with dozens of repetitive images. In all honesty there were time when this piece wasn't coming together and I had regrets even starting it, but I went back a few times, persevered and In the end the result is something that I am really stoked with. There is always room for improvement but that's what the journey is for right? The basic steps for this painting went like this: I made outlines for eyeball, iris, eyelid, skin cracks and shadow. Then added a base color and darken/erased line work where necessary. After that I added another layer of over colour, darkening areas of shadow and low light (creases crack ect). after colour was complete I added all the detail/rendering in the eyeball, the brown spots on the lower eye lid   and finally final tone, shadow and played with the hue, saturation, levels, colour until I was happy with the final result. Although slightly painstaking I really enjoyed using this piece to get to grips with some of the more simple photoshop tools such as airbrush, customised brushes and just the ordering and grouping of layers. The next step after this was to make some sort of patter from the image.

 This was one of the final pattern designs I maje from the reptile eye image. The above version seemed too big and loses something from the original I think. This smaller version works better but I still think The original digital painting works better as a single image. This design seems to generated and not customised. I think If I were to cut of the eye itself (like the earlier collage) then It might work much better as a whole pattern.