Signature

 Art as Inspiration for Fictional Worlds     A hobby of mine is making dreamscapes on photoshop. Surreal environments that are interesting and unique. Many of these end up in my writing. I want my story to be consistently creative and witty right down to the setting. Of course this can be a difficult thing to accomplish with the written word. It's much easier to describe a setting that already exists, a beach etc, than to create fictional alien worlds. As such I try to used examples people can relate to.      Here's one such example that will appear in my second book: the Consumed Etropolis. A silicon city consumed by electric plants. When writing about it I'll relate it to real world things like a city, flowers and a jungle but then expand into floating building and lightning coursing through plants. Expect many such settings in my books.

  Reworking Old Photoshop Projects     I have a plethora of creative ideas yet realizing them is not always easy. Many are the times I've make an interesting dreamscape in concept but it ends up a mess in execution. This is very much like sketching original monsters where it needs a rough draft made first. Only then can the final version be properly planned and designed.      The Weeping Clogway is a good example of this. I had the idea of willows weeping a great labyrinth of rivers held aloft by wooden pipes. This was inspired by a dream and will be featured as a location in my book Signature Ghate. You can see here how it turned out:     I'm quite pleased with this; it was a lot of work to cutout wooden pipes and layer willow leaves over them. It is a "clogway" after all. Here's the original version I mentioned:     Great idea but poorly executed. The pieces were all there but fell into a jumble. Fortunately I was a...

 Bismuth     I went on vacation and visited a rock and fossil shop. There I purchased a piece of bismuth.  Bismuth has a beautiful crystal formation caused by it's low melting point. Working with bismuth and other crystals on photoshop is extremely fun. I was inspired to make my next dreamscape a city but composed of bismuth. I'll post it sometime in the future.

 Painting a Bouquet on Photoshop     My project is finally complete. Here is the finished version: First I found an image of a bouquet. Then I sketched a mushroom shape to guide the dimensions of the bouquet. I sketched in the flower shapes. Next I filled in the details. In photoshop, using a tablet, I painted each flower layer by layer. Finally I filled in the details and added a background. Thank you for your patience. This has been my longest project so far. If you like creative projects stick around for more in the future and share this blog so it can grow.

 Lengthy Art Projects      I'm still figuring out how to format this blog. My aim is to produce content at a steady rate but certain art projects, like painting the bouquet I sketched, are proving to be very time consuming. Rather than put full projects into one daily post, I'm considering making several update posts followed by one final overview of the project.      For now I'm continuing to paint over my bouquet sketch with a tablet on phototshop. Photoshop uses layers and this makes painting very convenient because I needn't worry about paints running together and can simply paint one flower at a time. First I painted the green leaves for a background and proceeded to create layers over that. With many flowers I would paint the shadowy back petals first than the illuminated ones on top of them. Please be patient as I hope to have results soon although there is still much to be done.

 Sorry for the Delay      My mom's in the hospital. She had to get a biopsy but it went fine and she just needs to recover now. She has cancer and I help take care of her.     Have you ever had art that just didn't work out? Of course you have; everyone has. I have a ton of great ideas where the execution in photoshop doesn't pan out as I hoped. I've gone through several of my artworks and made updated versions of them to remedy this.     Here is an example of a great idea but sloppily executed. I might go back and rework it later.

 Fan Art and Monsters     Most of my work is entirely original content but on occasion I'll sketch some fan art. It's fun to draw monsters; you'll see many more in the future. I always enjoyed looking at illustrations of monsters and learning about prehistoric creatures.     Here's some fan art from the game series Monster Hunter. It's a Lagiacrus fighting a Rathalos. Monster Hunter is a fun series and I really enjoyed Monster Hunter World. Hammer was my main weapon but I was proficient in all of them. It takes a long time to color these in, especially since I use photoshop, so most of my sketches aren't colored.   

 Art in the Age of Computers      My last post was a bit critical of relying too heavily on computers for art so today I'm going to talk about how incredible they are at aiding it. Computers allow us to generate much more complex works with seemingly endless resources and entirely new mediums in 3D art and animation.      In the past, when my grandfather was an artist, he kept a stash of magazines and photos to use as references and inspiration. Now all that is easily organized digitally and we have internet access to find whatever we want instantly. Not only that but guides, forums and education about any given topic are ever at our fingertips.      By delegating tasks to programs like photoshop and illustrator, we are able to take art further and with more efficiency than ever before as well as experiment without consequences as we can simply undo mistakes. Want to adjust the contrast? Go to levels. Distort an image to e...

 M.C.Escher and Photoshop     M.C.Escher is, by far, my favorite artist and did his work well before the age of computers. I strongly recommend you look at his art at mcescher.com. Why he was amazing is he would mathematically plan out things like tessellations or distortions to make impossible landscapes. I've seen this type of planning simplified by using a grid but with the lines distorted like a sphere is pushing them out. As an artist I can tell you this sort of thing is extremely difficult to do and make it look natural.     The reason I mentioned computers is that programs can easily replicate his methods. I've seen tools that create tessellations and personally use a legal copy of photoshop. Photoshop has filters like "spherize" that automatically produce the distortions the name suggests. It's an amazing program.     The issues that arise revolve around artistic integrity. Are you creating art or is the computer doing the work f...