ArtCtrl

I’m back in Hamilton so back into digital painting. During my trip away I wrote code and drew in a notebook. It’s been great to get back into the digital painting. I’ve created two words so far:

This girl wanted turned into an Elf. I drew the giant ear she is wearing into her face. In the background, a landscape. No clouds in the sky, instead just a sun with messy spikes. Water is below.

Grayscale tonal layer. Light skintones. Light water and sun. Medium background with dark landmass. The rightside landmass is textured nicely.

I had done a colour layer for this but saved over it with the grayscale. It’s at home and I don’t have access to it now. I’ll see how I go updating this post later. Other option is to not worry about it.

The Nightmare Before Christmas. Jack Skellington is in the middle. Two people huddled around him. Horizon line down the bottom third. Similar block shapes being built up to the previous painting. These are larger and more square like than the usual spiky landmass.

Grayscale. Keeping it simple and not worrying about detail - just capturing those lights and darks. Her face in partical is simple - the nose and mouth has been left out. Only two eyes stare out. Light for the skintones and dark for the clothing and hair. Light for the water and medium for the sky. Instead of going with small clouds, the sky is split with areas of zig zags.

Colour. Yellow for skin, red for hair and dark areas of clothing. Much of the clothing areas have been left alone. Blue for the sky, with a dark blue for darker areas of the sky. Green for the water.

Drawing/taking notes on paper at the Ministry of Education. One work is a from Fairfield.

Goku. This was drawn at by a boy at Fairfield Community Centre

Using my good red pen to fill up the page. Lots of spikes.

Portrait from GetsDrawn.

Back in the library today to write a blog post. I’ll see how I feel after and hopefully get some code done also.

Here are two more digital paintings I completed before I left Hamilton:

Raniff line layer. In the reference the girl is holding a piece of paper that has a drawing of her on it.  Instead of a drawing of her on the line layer I added the GetsDrawn title and a landscape.

Grayscale tonal layer. Since the reference was a blonde I used light on the hair and medium on the skin. Landmass in the distance is dark, with a medium sky and light water.

Grayscale tonal Uroborus74 layer. Sorry I didn’t include the line layer. It’s sitting on my desktop computer in Hamilton.

For this the request was to be drawn like a character from the television show Adventure Time.

Colour layer. Yellow is used for the skin and red for the hair. Blue for the shirt and sky. The landmass - a dark yellow and red. Aqua for the water.

Currently sitting in the library in Levin. I took a bus down last night. Before leaving I spend majority my time digital painting. Working from reference on GetsDrawn.

I’ve been finishing all three layers in the paintings, and getting several paintings complete a day.

TheBeachWhale line layer. Girl on the left, guy on the right. In the background is a landscape. Land mass emurge from the horizon. Below is water flowing the foreground. Clouds are spotted around the sky.

Grayscale tonal layer. Light for the skin, dark clothes. The horizon line upwards is medium dark with the water below light.

Colour tonal layer. Keeping with the usual colours. Yellow for skin, red for hair, blue for horizon line upwards.

Line layer. This is a rare one and I did no background landscape. The drap was interesting enough to drawn. I don’t get to draw feet often either but for the I did. They are on the same level as the head.

Grayscale tonal. Light for the skin, dark for hair. I treated the cloth the same as landmass and made them dark.

Line layer. Guy on the left wearing a NASA tshirt. Girl on the right wearing glasses. Horizon line in the distance seprates the landmass above with the water below. 

Tonal Grayscale. Toned back the background with less clutter than the line layer. Dark for hair and clouds. Light skin with medium shirt. Dark landmass and light water.

Colour layer. Simple with red for the hair, yellow skin, and blue sky. Didn’t bother with colour on shirt and water.

I have started digital painting from getsdrawn. I have yet to submit any of these to the people in the photos, but it’s a great start for me to draw and paint them.

Producing these works gets me thinking of how I can 7make the process of creating the works better. One thought was to get the Python script to generate username-line/bw/colour.png and also a gimp file. These three layers would be called the proper name inside the gimp file. It’s an idea and may work in archieving each username submission on redditgetsdrawn. The next step would be to send these files to each username. It’s totally doable with the Python praw module but I will need to logon to twitter with the script. It could them message them the link to their finished artwork.

Here are the paintings I have been working on:

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Guy with his cat. I normally don’t draw animals from rgd, especially when there is no human in the photo. This was an exception and I drew both the guy and cat. Only a line layer was created.

Line layer. Guy on left, girl on right. In the photo they were sitting in a cinema but for this I added a landscape to the background. Horizon line with landmass above that. Below is water. In the sky - clouds.

Combo of colour and grayscale tonal layers. I started with the grayscale then added the blue on the background. I started covering the face with a yellow but stopped - realizing that I was still working on the grayscale layer. Many areas are incomplete, such as their body and arms.

Unlike the previous works I was sensible and recorded down the name of the poster for this - IsWhaat. I spent awhile on this and produces three complete layers. In this line layer the guy is on the left and girl on the right. I added a landscape to the background with a horizon line, landmass emurges from this with clouds in the sky. Below is waves of water.

In the sky I also drew the username, gave it a border and added spikes to the border.

Grayscale tonal layer. Mostly complete. Areas that are missing is the chest area and sky. Dark clouds and landmass with mid tonal on characters. Water is rather dark.

For the colour layer I used yellow for skin tones. A dark redish brown for the hair (and username). Blue for the background in the sky (helps make the image feel more complete). Started to use green for the water but gave up and moved on.

Writing this post on my new chromebook. It’s running Ubuntu KDE, a minimal install. Maybe I should run Debian KDE but whatever - I’m just using this as a development machine and to type blog posts. I’ve tried to install my wacom tablet on it but no luck. I may have better luck if I install Fedora but from what I’ve looked at Ubuntu/Debian are the only supported systems on Chromebooks.

I’m still using my desktop to paint and here are the results.

First up, GetsDrawn logo take two:

Line layer. GetsDrawn drawn in all caps with spiky clouds surrounding the text.

GetsDrawn grayscale layer. The text is dark with background light. Outer layer is dark also.

GetsDrawn colour layer. Moving away from the retro colours and back into some that I usually use. Yellow and darker yellow for text. Blue background, and new blue around outer edge. I tried a darker of the blue but wasn’t happy with it so picked a new blue.

RetroDino line layer. Fun creating this dino from imagination. In the background there is a landscape with a sun similar to what I created in Mr Sunshin game. Clouds, trees, water.

Grayscale tonal layer. Certainly cutting back on the detail and information in this. Tonal layers take time and are tiring

Colour. Retro colours as inspired from the point and click game jam.

Line layer. Lots of doodling of dinos and landscapes.

Grayscale. Spend awhile on this, and though I didn’t get it completely finished, I am happy with it.

I have spend just under a month at my Mothers  home looking after the place and celebraiting my brothers birthday.

I launched G etsDrawn.

GetsDrawn line layer. Drew the letters GetsDrawn and land/ocean below. Robot below that with landscape behind. Horozin line.

Painting over the line layer with grayscale tone. GetsDrawn is dark. The background is light. Mid landscape and ocean below. Robot was coloured in with light colours. The background is dark. Trees and bush rise in the distance.

Two recent digital line works. Still keeping with the red that was recommended to me by pointclickjam. I’ve got pen drawings to upload also - from Hamilton 150th birthday and sitting at my desk.

Enjoy these work works -

Continued with the Ramparts theme in this piece with drawing of the walls, windows, and ocean. I added some land in the horozin line. A merge of humanold dino and monsters were drawn. I added a spiky dragon like tail. Insect type features are also present.

One really neat trick with using KDE desktop environment is that I can make windows fully transparent. I normally keep window transparency to 80%. This makes it easy to see whats under my current window. My gimp is set to 80% opacity and in the background window is a google search for dinosaur skeletons.

I’m not tracing but doing what I normally do and observe with reference. I worked quickly, getting down the shape for each dino. I wasn’t really fussed with how good the line looked, and just focused on the shape.

Some of the line doesn’t look too bad.

Continued with more Dino related painting. I’ve used reference from an old playstation game - Dino Crisis.

Here are the works:

The claw from the cover of the game. Landscape in the background. Using the red that I have to use for pointclickjam.

Giving the dinos insect like dots. Working on turning the dino idea into a game.

Greyscale. Taking elements from two line drawings.

Colour. Using the colours recommended to me by pointclickjam.

Continued with the painting and created this. Technically I’m creating this art to my usual digital paintings with a few changes. First - colour palette. I’m still using red line, blue for background, and red/yellow for characters. The EGA 16 colours is the colour palette which is a change from the usual tones I use for painting. I am also using 100% opacity - normally I’m on 80%. This is because I’m not allowed to use more than the 16 colors and the opacity 80% would count as colours.

Here’s the piece:

Started with the Spike InfoSec logo and character name. Drew the full figure character. Made it the usual robotic look, with spikes. I then redrew the character on the left in order to create a slightly different version (and larger!). This second character had spikes on it’s arm and an eye ball. The next one to draw was the claw (third on the left). Finally the dino/monster creation on the far right. Clouds were added and a little water.

Colour layer added. I am happy with the red and brown, they mi together well and remind me of my usual colours. The magenta is new for me, it’s certainly much lighter and bright then the usual colours I would use. Cyan for the cloud. Blue for background (but it’s too dark, I miss my light blue!)