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.
Recently I spend a lot more time sketching than I used to, and I do a lot of it on my tablet. I have always preferred sketching in ink, but quite frankly don’t want to waste the paper these days. Something about the smoothness of the wacom pen really brings out lines that I don’t think I could do otherwise. Because of this I usually take “finished” sketches and print them out to transfer them onto decent paper, to be penciled and inked.
