Portrait: Cally

Here's my schoolfriend Cally, who's photo I shamelessly snaffled from her tumblr. I hope she doesn't mind! 

I've been playing around with a new way of colouring in Photoshop on breaks between work jobs, just for fun, and the picture I was working on was not turning out the way I wanted (i.e. it had ceased to be fun =P) and then Cally posted a picture of herself dressed up in 1940s style. I've drawn Cally a number of times, and decided that she would be a good easy subject for my fun-colouring-practice, because her face was unlikely to give me any trouble.

Also, this gives me a good excuse to point everyone in the direction of her beautiful art. She had a solo exhibition lately, and her art is absolutely gorgeous.

Calliope Bridge's Tumblr

I should warn you that her art often contains nudity, in case you get upset by that. =) She explores animals and mythological themes in very delicate watercolours. So, go take a look-see!

Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3. I did a black line drawing first, and then coloured beneath it by lassooing shapes and shading them with a very large soft-edged brush. A bit like using gradients in Illustrator, but easier to control without having to fiddle withe the gradient tool. Once I had the shading in, I locked the pixels on the line layer and coloured the lines to match the shading. It probably took about 2 – 2.5 hours. 

Invitations: Engagement

Here's a monogram I designed recently for some Engagement Party invitations.

I always give out a questionnaire when I do invitations, so that I can tailor my design to the commissioner. This couple didn't really have anything in mind, no theme or suchlike, but they did tell me their favourite colours. So, since they also wanted something simple, I took those colours and turned to the good old language of flowers to design a monogram. 

So, here we have red roses, symbolising true love, blue violets for faithfulness, forget-me-nots, again for true love, arbutus, for 'you're the only one I love' and lilac, for the first emotions of love. Probably rather more romantic than the couple themselves, but I like to choose flowers that suit the situation. 

If you're interested in the fonts, the letters are in Recherche and and the scrolls are from Melany Lane Ornaments. 

I constructed all of the invitations yesterday, and here's a snap:

The bride-to-be had given me a sample of a DL invitation printed on shiny paper, and wanted something similar. I chose some Quill Metallique paper in Lavender, and opted to stick on the information rather than print straight onto the paper, as it gives a cleaner look, I find. To tie it all together I went over the letters of the monogram with a silver gel-pen to add a bit of sparkle. 

The mood choices that had been ticked on my questionnaire were 'romantic', 'simple', 'cheerful' and 'fun' so to keep everything a bit less formal I chose to typeset the invitation in Americana BT, rather than a more classic swirly or sans-serif font. That was also the reason for the + rather than an & in the monogram itself. 

The text of the monogram was created in Adobe Illustrator CS6, the flowers in Photoshop CS6 and the typesetting in inDesign CS6.  

Illustration: Common Tree Shrew

I have lots of work to do (and I spent some time today doing it) but it's Saturday, and that calls for a sketch-for-me. Also, I upgraded to CS6 last week, and hadn't had so much as a chance to look at all those interesting 'natural' brushes. 8 days is a long time to spend actually working in the programmes and not being able to play around with new features at all! =P 

So here is a common tree shrew, not entirely accurately. They're native to Malaysia and surrounding areas, and I saw one in the Adelaide Zoo. It was the most hyperactive thing I have ever seen, impossible to focus on (eyes or camera), so I just pointed my camera and clicked, hoping for the best. I didn't get any shots that count as 'good' but I did catch a few poses, in focus, but blurred because there was very low light and my shutter speed was thus slow. But, good enough for vague references. 

This was done entirely playing around with the aforementioned 'natural brushes', to see what I could do with them. The vague leafy textures are my own, and there are a few from cgtextures.com slapped on there as well. By rights this shrew should be a streak of nothing, but it's very fat, so maybe it's too full to look fast. 

Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3, somewhere between 1 and 2 hours. 

Photos: Adelaide Zoo

Next in my holiday photos instalment. 

We spent a day in Adelaide Zoo, and I actually had a zoom lens, which was extremely fun. On previous zoo trips I've always had to make do with a standard 18-50mm lens, but I now possess a 40-150mm, which makes zoo photos much easier. For those interested in such things, I was using an Olympus PEN EP-3.

I love taking photos in zoos, I get lots of reference material, so I'll happily snap away at the animals just moving around and in different positions (I never know what I may suddenly be called upon to draw), but I also like to work at some shots so that I get some good photos as well. I took several hundred photos that day, and these are my favourites. 

Crested pigeons are always fun

Pygmy marmoset

Hippopotamus

Miraculously clear two-toed sloth (I literally couldn't see anything in that nocturnal house, it makes it extremely hard to focus!)

Yellow-footed rock wallaby

Barbary sheep

Freshwater turtle, possibly a snake-necked turtle, or a mata mata

Gipsland water dragon (I think)

Wang Wang, the zoo's male panda

Chestnut-breasted finch 

Greater flamingo, which arrived at the zoo in 1933

Star finch

Bush thick-knee

These two were in an enclosure labeled 'Siamang' but I'm told they're more likely to be Nomascus gibbons

Baby tree kangaroo

I love otters

Is any zoo post complete without a smug meerkat?

Kookaburra

Red panda – I had to wait ages for a good shot of this, they're so elusive.  And I got trodden on by a kid for my pains =P

 Most of these have had standard post-processing in Adobe Photoshop CS6 – curves, sharpening, colour adjustments where necessary, and the occasional crop – but the panda had more intensive work; they were behind hideously reflective glass, so I edited out the distracting reflections. I also made the sloth black and white, because it was distressingly blue, due to the nocturnal house lights. 

Photos: Street

I'm really busy with various projects at the moment, which is bad for the life of the blog. So I'm taking a leaf out of Joumana Medlej's book and doing some photo posts from our recent holiday. 

First up, street photography:

Ice skaters in Rundle Mall, Adelaide

Buskers in Melbourne

We kept bumping into wedding parties,  Melbourne

Hep cat dog in Sydney

In Sydney

Opposing sides, Sydney

Hotdogs and limousines, Sydney

And Greek dancing, Sydney

Wall of thongs (or flipflops, if you prefer), Manly, Sydney

Flautist in Rundle Mall, Adelaide

Lunchtime, Glenelg, Adelaide

Big and small, Glenelg, Adelaide

8 year old busker, Rundle Mall, Adelaide

Illustration: Merida

A bit of gratuitous fanart. =) I've been on holiday for three weeks, and while much of my 'free' time was spent uploading photos and a travel diary for friends and family to see, I did spend quite a bit of time on trains; too bumpy to sketch traditionally, so I decided to see what I could really do with an iPad. Since it was a holiday, I thought some Disney/Pixar fanart would be a good way to unwind, as I don't usually do full-blown illustrations of that subject. 

Just before we left I went to see Brave with a friend. It was perhaps a little predictable, but good fun, and very beautiful. So I chose Merida as my subject. I had absolutely no references, being offline for the entire time I was drawing, and I'm not sure how long it took, but it was over 10 hours. I find working without pressure sensitivity for brush size and opacity considerably slows my working time. So it's not the most accurate of illustrations, but I think it's not too bad. 

This was done entirely in Sketchbook Pro on an iPad 2, with a Wacom Bamboo stylus.

 Here's the original sketch that I did in my Moleskine Sketchbook, before I started. I took a  photo of that with the iPad camera, and worked on top of it for a while. 

Here's an animated gif of the screenshots I took while I was working. I've had Sketchbook Pro eat a couple of sketches, so I'm a bit paranoid and wanted a record.

Here I've chucked together a look at the different images I used while putting the whole thing together. Since iPad illustration is still fairly new, I thought it might be of interest. I was using a high resolution file, which gives you a limit of four layers, so I had to keep various things in separate files until I was finished with them, and could export them as a photograph and import them back into my main image. 

• Merida was the first thing I did. I lie a bit up there – I didn't import her into a new file, that would have meant erasing around all that hair to remove the white background. I actually saved a copy of that file, flattened it, and used that as the main file. 
• The dog I did have a reference for. I wanted that particular dog, and couldn't for the life of me remember what it looked like – so I played the youtube trailer and photographed the computer screen to use as a reference. I then saved that as a photo, imported it into my main file, erased around it, stuck it behind Merida and merged those two layers. 
• The tapestry was intentionally naive, and once I'd done the base of the tapestry as part of the background layer I imported it into the main image and overlayed it using a multiply mode. 
• Finally I saved a copy, flattened everything, and added some lighting to tie it all together a bit more. I used multiply and screen modes for that. 

Card: Mad Men Birthday

My cousin was having a Mad Men theme for her 30th Birthday Party. 30's an important birthday, and I always try to design something a bit fancier for special occasions, so here's the design I did (It was even more important to be fancy as we're unfortunately missing the party – she moved it forward so that she and her husband can go on holiday.... and now it clashes with our own holiday. =P 

In keeping with the theme I designed a Mad Men inspired card:

I chose to do a portrait of my cousin in a dress inspired by the 'blue 50s dress with lace' that I was told she's bought for the party. I haven't seen the dress, so it's probably nothing like it, but I made the effort. =P 

I'm especially pleased with those lights. My mother walked in when I was just starting them, and clearly didn't believe that they'd ever look like lamps instead of just blobs. The beginning stages of artwork can be so confusing! =P

Illustrator CS4, texture (from cgtextures.com) added in Photoshop.