Speedpaint: Essie Davis

Here's a little warm-up speedpaint of Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, which is an enjoyable series (even though I had the murderer pegged five minutes in tonight =P) with fabulous design and costuming. They probably change a lot of things from the books, but as I haven't read many of them, this doesn't bother me. =P A bit of Friday-night indulgence with some good period costumes is a good thing, anyway. 

35 minutes, Adobe Photoshop CS4 with Wacom Intuos 4, textures from cgtextures.com and patterns.ming-ling.net. From a screenshot. 

Illustration: Piglets

Here's a quick little illustration I whipped up yesterday and today.

Originally this was a little character study for a minor character in a mini promotional picture book I'm trying to get done (a retelling of the Princess and the Pea, but I do keep being given other things to do =P) but I liked the sketch so much I decided to watercolour it.

And just for fun, here's a different colourway. I was explaining an illustrator's technique to my mother (who had just read a Captain Crabclaw's Crew by Frances Watts and David Legge to her class and was wondering how the pictures were done) and grabbed this, since the sketch was still on my desktop. Very quickly done, under five minutes. 

Painting in Winsor & Newton watercolours and PITT Artists Drawing System pens on random watercolour paper. Sketch 0.5 #B mechanical pencil in Moleskine Sketchbook, digital colouring in Adobe Photoshop CS4. 

Sketch: Ruby Keeler

Here's a digital portrait of 30s musicals actress Ruby Keeler. I'm actually doing a miniature from this photo, but felt like mucking about with it digitally as well. 

The final result was touched up in Photoshop, but I did most of it on the iPad in Sketchbook Pro, mainly while sitting outside at night, while we had people round for dinner (twice this weekend;  I approve of the iPad as a sketching tool while in semi-darkness! =P) Once I felt it was about as good as it was going to get on the iPad, I moved it into Photoshop and altered a few details to improve the likeness. 

Here's the original iPad version:

And here's a version I slapped a bit of colour on, just for fun: 

Sketchbook Pro on iPad 2 with a Wacom Bamboo Stylus, then Photoshop CS4 with a Wacom Intuos 3

Sketches: Misc

Here's a little sketchdump:

Part of my current portraiture commission – about 4 hours so far (but a lot of that was the initial linework, it's a full-body of two people, so it took a while)

 

An iPad sketch of my dog, to test out my new Wacom Bamboo Stylus. 

I had done a very detailed sketch to see what I could do with different brushes in Sketchbook Pro... but the app ate it. >.< I was not amused.

This one took me all of five minutes, if that, but I like it. 

An iPad sketch I did with my finger way back on Boxing Day. It's not perfect, but I did spend quite a while on it, so thought it should be posted. 

And I'm on a 30s musicals kick. Last night I watched 42nd Street, and became fascinated with the sleeves. They're huge, and often quite bizarre in that movie.

The above is an iPad sketch I did while watching the news – Sketchbook Pro and Bamboo Stylus again. I am liking the stylus, it makes iPad sketching easier on my hand, and I can be more painterly. Possibly the fact that I keep my fingernails long didn't help with the whole finger-painting thing, but I never really got the hang of it properly. 

And below is a silly little entry in my sketchbook. Ruby Keeler got enormous sleeves in 42nd Street, Bebe Daniels got killer shoulder-pads with ornamentation. =P

Cards: Dogs

My Great Aunt likes to send people cards. And very nicely of her, she likes to get me to make them for her. This can admittedly be a little tedious, as she often wants specific cards, and if I don't have a corresponding image in my files, I have to create one – and you can't charge Great Aunts for illustrations meant for her cards. =P

This batch was to be themed around dogs, and some of them had to be german shepherds. 

There were no german shepherds in my files, so here's a digital scratchboard illustration I threw together in about 20 minutes in Photoshop. I used a reference from dogbreedinfo.com for this.

And here's a bouncy terrier-like thing that I also put together for these cards. It took me a bit longer, maybe an hour, using a ref I'd snapped from a youtube video my father was watching a few months ago – very fuzzy and with bad motion blur, but enough to allow me to create my own leaping doggie. Again, this is Photoshop.

And here are the finished cards:

I gave her two colourways of the leaping dog, since it took me so long, and the doggy group is put together from some vectored dogs I'd done previously. You can't see it in the photo, but the leaping dogs are cut out and raised above the cards with double-sided foam.

As for the german shepherds, I've done one of the above illustration and one silhouette (also raised up with double-sided foam) and rounded out the set with a playful puppy that was part of the incidental linework in my honours project way back when. 

Portrait: Shirl

Here's a recently completed portrait for a lovely lady – it's her husband's mother, with a portrait of his father to follow, when they've decided on a photograph.

These portraits are to go with some she already had of her own parents, and had to fit in identical frames, so this is 28x35cm in size.

A detail of the brooch:

And an animated progress, from the horrible murky beginnings to the final product. I forgot to annotate this with times, and I really can't be bothered doing it all again, so if you want to know the sequence, it's 5 hours, 7.5 hours, 9 hours, 10 hours, 14 hours, 15.5 hours, 16.5 hours.

16.5 hours on Quill Drawing Cartridge. If you want to see a list of all the matericals I use for portraits like this, take a gander over here. 

Progress: Miniature

I live! I've been pretty busy, with a portrait that will be finished tomorrow, plus various other things, and have been neglecting my blog. But here's a half-completed sample miniature. I plan to offer miniature commissions (framed), and therefore need some proper samples:

This is 6.5cm (2.5") in diameter, Winsor & Newton watercolours on Bristol Board – and about five hours so far. I'm using a photo of me when I was about six.