Monday, December 11, 2006

Der Übergang

As some of you may or may not know i have been a huge WWII buff since i was a little kid. I have never really understood why, i guess it kind of goes along the same lines as my obsessions with natural disasters and graverobbing. Its part of the reason I started learning German, and even lived in Southern Germany for a summer. Combine this, with how many movies Rachel and watch, on top of Rachel's growing obsession with Judaism....and you get two kids sitting on a couch watching ALOT of Nazi movies. And that brings me to this:

- I was pretty unhappy with the inks, and was hoping that colors would really pull it out of the slumps.

- Normal cell shading, done in my "ink on the back of the paper" technique described here. I still wasn't liking it too much and felt a little weird about drawing a Nazi ordering Jews around....my history of dressing like an Aryan youth / skinhead was catching up with me quick.

- I then went in a filled in gradients to mesh the colors together, keeping an eye on still having sharp edges to not totally destroy the original cell shading.

- I then went in and added a "shadow" layer (ie: parts drawing in dark blue/brown and then multiplied at a low opacity to give a little more depth). This seems to be a pretty easy solution to problems i have had in the past. i gotta remember to do this more often.

- I then added gradients washes over everything, sticking with brown and red to darken the whole thing up a bit. I don't know how well the red worked here...and when changed into RGB it got kind of a purple tint later on.

- And then, a new step i have never done before! i wanted to show a lot of depth in this, pushing the figures in the background way back and giving it a kind of dusty feel. I split the image into 6 "zones" of depth. Each one of these is a different layer of grey/brown set to a different opacity and then laid onto the original image in a screen layer.

- So in the end, not my most successful piece but i did solve a lot of problem i have been having, and figured out a few things. The purple-red is still driving me nuts, but hopefully i can fix that before i go uploading a final image. I am looking forward to doing more editorial work in the future, so this was kind of just a practice run for me.

In looking through stills of WWII movies like The Pianist, i came across a pretty remarkable collection of Adrien Brody movie stills, and a ton being from The Jacket one of my favorite movies. I have an overwhelming desire to do The Jacket fanart...We'll see what happens though.

I have a feeling things are going to start getting busy really soon. Having the prints available now is a definite plus. There is also a design i did for Threadless being printed right now, one of these says my Art Dept portfolio will be up, and finishing up the first chunk of "Dog's Day End" with Brian Wood. All of this on top of trying to figure out how to redo my website. I spent so long complaining about being bored, and now that everything is coming together i am a bit overwhelmed.

And all i really want is to be able how to fucking register friends on my wii. Hopedfully Corey will get to the bottom of it eventually.

5 Comments:

Anonymous stefan said...

hey, i just started reading your blog.

to register friends on the wii, find your wii friend code and both you and your friend need to exchange/add each other.

-choose the messages icon on the bottom rigth of the main screen.

-choose the new message icon [2nd on the left]

-choose address book

-your own number will be on the very first page, and you can add people by choosing the link at the bottom right. you have to add people and people have to add you before their names will turn black and you can communicate with them through mii and the message board things.

3:33 PM  
Anonymous Sam said...

weee, i'm planning on getting a wii soon. when i do, i'll send you my code.

The WWII piece was successful in the end, I think. I definately like the image.

Going to purchase one of your prints for myself for christmas but i can't decide which....

11:17 AM  
Anonymous Nik said...

You've got some really amazing work here. It's interesting to see your process. I can remember being blown away when you showed me some ink drawings in a 3d class at saic. Your work just keeps getting better. I used to run into you in the oddest places. Take care of yourself, I wish you the best of luck.

8:47 AM  
Anonymous Kev Mears said...

Thanks for sharing all your process. Fascinating and great work too.

2:07 AM  
Blogger Wetterschneider said...

Excellent work. I was just wondering what would have happened if you inverted the grey layer you used for generating depth... making the closest characters darker and the further characters lighter.

8:31 AM  

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