Creature Design Workshop Results

Back from the creature design workshop!  My classmates and I learned about designing realistic fictional creatures from Terryl Whitlatch; she has done many illustrations for biology and paleontology purposes, for books and fiction, and also for movies (such as Star Wars Episode I, where I first learned about her work).  She was an excellent teacher, very helpful and dignified.  It was good to meet her, and great to learn from her.

Terryl's theme through the workshop was designing fictional creatures that could theoretically evolve, live, and reproduce in a manner as close to reality as possible.  She made a distinction between "chimeric" creatures–beings put together from the parts of various creatures, such as classically mythological creatures like centaurs, griffons, the Sphinx–and "discrete" creatures–beings that could theoretically exist and be molded by time, their environment, genetics, and so on.  If they had elements inspired by different creatures, they would be worked into the design as if the creature naturally had those traits.  Our mission in this particular workshop was to design flying winged carnivore/predator creatures.

 

During the workshop, I made two creatures.  Since I had sea creatures on the brain, I sketched ideas out for combining various existing animals, and ended up combining a krill and a flying fish to create a flying krill.  I envisioned it as a small creature, one that would frequent the very top layers of the ocean, hunting smaller organisms and flying away from danger when threatened.  I shortened and smoothed out the krill's body, and gave it angled wings, large enough that it could dart away from danger, but not so large they would interfere with swimming.  (Rather, they would assist in helping the krill swim.)  It had frilled legs to give it traction against the water and swim properly.  And it had the eyespot on its tail to direct its predators away from its vital parts.  The feathery antennae should've realistically be more like the actual krill's antennae, but I was feeling fancy and made them frilled like a moth's antennae.

The second creature was a combination of vulture and nighthawk.  This one was a large bird, living on a planet with one-sixth the gravity of earth.  It could fly much higher and spend more time in the air than a bird from Earth.  With lighter gravity, its prey would also fly higher and be easier to hunt for.  Inspired by the vulture's capability to cruise for hours, and the nighthawk's lifelong sustenance on insects, I combined those attributes and came up with a cruiser hawk, a four-winged creature that would spend almost all of its life on its wings, moving up and down through the atmosphere and living on the giant insects that it shared the planet's atmosphere with.

Terryl brought samples of Copic markers and pens, which we used to make our illustrations.  I liked how they worked, I will likely buy a set of them.  The workshop was excellent in all aspects.  If you like drawing creatures and get a chance to attend an event with Terryl, do it.  You'll enjoy it.

Sketches 9/19/16 - Animal Practice 2

Less than a week till the creature design workshop!  More practice sketches for you all.

Sketches 9/5/16 - Animal Practice

Marine iguana.

Drawings from my sketchbook, as I practice for the upcoming creature design workshop.

Hummingbirds.

An axolotl.

One dungeness crab, one seven-eleven crab...

...and the awesome monstrosity that is the coconut crab.

Port Jackson Pup

I like the Port Jackson shark.  It's a goofy little shark that lives around the coasts of Australia.  They grow to 30-36 inches in length and use their broad, flat teeth to crush and eat mollusks and echinoderms.  You can read more about them on their page at the Australian Museum's website.

I drew the outline in HB and laid down the lightest layers in 2H and HB.  I reinforced the darker areas (the harness patterns and overshadowed tail section) with another layer of HB.  Then I put down the darkest areas with a 4B pencil.  The final steps were shading in a minimal background in 2H, and using the 2H pencil to burnish the dark areas to make them less grainy and smoother.

This was another step in my practice for my upcoming creature design class.  Tune in next time for another animal drawing.

Wolf Time

I have an art workshop about designing fictional creatures coming up in a couple months, so for the next few weeks you get to see me sharpen my animal-drawing skills.  This week, I drew a wolf running.

Why a wolf?  I like wolves, and I haven't drawn them much, because I'm scared to try and draw all that fur.  Yes, I'm scared of drawing dogs, wolves, and other canids because of fur.  All the more reason to sit my butt down and draw them.

Anyway.  I got my photo reference, I got my 2H, HB, 2B, and 4B pencils, and worked this up over several session.  I outlined the wolf and lightly shaded it and the background with the HB.  The fur I built up with 2H, then HB, and then 4B.  2B I used to emphasize some of the darker areas.  I used the flat side of the pencils most of the time, and hatched my strokes in a single direction.  I would do the hatching in patches, angled along the body of the wolf.

This was one of my looser drawings, I did not tightly define much of the wolf at all.  The one detailed area was the head, which I am very pleased with.

Here are some warm-up sketches I did in preparation for the final drawing.

 

Making a Book Cover, Part 2

Part 2 of my process and progress of making the cover image for my friend Alena's poetry book, soon to be published through CreateSpace.

To make the custom title for the cover, I experimented with letters and shapes until Alena was happy with them.  Then I drew the title in ink, scanned it into my computer, and used Adobe Illustrator to make a vector version of the title and author text.

I took the vector image into Photoshop and painted gold beveling over the title.  This was the second-most time-consuming part of making the cover, the first-most being making the cover image itself.

Working out the lighting on the title.

Getting there, still defining the letters and polishing them.

Finished!

The digital paint-over took place on two layer groups, one for the top part of the title, one for the bottom part.  To achieve the glowing-gold look I wanted, I added a faded gold Color Overlay in Overlay mode at 75%, and a brown-to-brassy-yellow Gradient Overlay in Overlay mode at about 50% opacity.  This way the golden hue of the title and the bright yellow on the cover were roughly equal in value, so that neither overrode the other visually.  (I also put a transparent dark gradient on the top third and bottom quarter of the image, to make the title and author lettering more visible.)

And that's that!  I cleared the cover with Alena and sent her the final files.  Edit Sept. 2016: The book is now up here on CreateSpace!

Below are close-ups of the finished cover image.

Making a Book Cover, Part 1

This is a little more fantastical than what I usually post here, but I want to give you guys a closer look under the hood of how I make my art.

My friend Alena is publishing a book of fantasy and imaginative poetry, Songs of My Imagination, through the CreateSpace system, and she asked me to do the cover.  I said yes, and we worked out a contract (taken from the free resources for artists provided by PACT–Professional Artist Client Toolkit) and I got to drawing.

Since this is a book about poetry and imagination, Alena wanted the cover image to evoke feelings and thoughts of wonder, curiosity, and of course fantastical creatures.  I drew up sketches incorporating kids reading stories, a phoenix, and a couple dragons.

Alena chose the one with the dragon reading in his "library lair".  She liked the concept of the dragon relaxing in an old library, reading through every book he had, learning about the mysteries and wonders of the world.  She wanted a visible spirit or fairy of inspiration as well, so I added a cheerful little fey creature leaping out of the book.

I would eventually execute the final image in ink and watercolor, but first I went to Photoshop to draw the color rough.

Early version of the digital rough.

Since the dragon was supposed to be learning about the world in peace and comfort, I painted the library warm colors, like someone's well-lit living room.  The dragon I chose to be blue, to contrast with the yellows and tans of the background.  To spice up the image a little, I added visible "mists" of inspiration, ancient knowledge, and magic emanating from the books themselves.

The image ended up darker than I wanted, it made the library look gloomy and spooky.  I lightened the entire image about 10%, which got rid of the unwanted darkness and made the picture cozy and comfortable.

I had been worried about the title, whether I could do it justice or not.  Since this was a fantasy-themed book, both Alena and I wanted it to be properly fantastic and exotic, not just Helvetica Neue.  We discussed the title and its look, and settled on vaguely Gothic lettering, rendered in brass and gold colors.  I drew it first with ink on smooth Bristol paper, and then scanned it.  From here, I would paint over it in Photoshop and give it the ancient-beveled-gold look I wanted.

Next up is Part 2, which will cover the watercolor painting and rendering the digital title.

Heracles and Telephus WIP, Part 2 - Finished!

Heracles and his son Telephus are done!  The scanner washed out the lightest grays, most of the white in the image is 10-20% shaded gray in the physical drawing.

Total time for this drawing was around 8 hours, over the course of two weeks.  The first couple hours consisted of laying down the outline, lightly pre-shading areas that would be heavy shadows later, and of course fixing any mistakes I had made.  The remainder of those 8 hours was taken up slowly, carefully shading in the drawing.  Everything, outlining, shading, erasing, was done with a light hand, so that I could easily rectify errors.

I like it.  I still see problems in it.  I have, however, declared it "finished", and that means I never put a pencil to it again and move on to the next piece.  In this way, I keep myself from worrying about "screwing up" and keep sharpening my drawing skills.

Heracles and Telephus WIP, Part 1

My next work is a pencil drawing of Heracles and Telephus.  Heracles (or Hercules) is obviously the well-known Greek hero, while Telephus is his son by Auge, daughter of King Aleus of Tegea.  This is based off a statue that stands in the Huntington Gardens in Los Angeles, California.

This is drawn on smooth Bristol paper.  I outlined the statue with light lines with a 4B pencil, and defined the shapes with very light shading.  After fixing any mistakes I had made, I darkened the outer lines further and filled out the shading with an HB pencil.  This was all done with a light and careful hand, so that mistake could be easily erased.  It's one of the big advantages of smooth Bristol.  Another plus is that you can get nice and detailed in the final stages of the drawing, which I will cover in my next update.

Reference photo of the statue.

Sketches 11/01/15

Colored pencil sketches of landscapes.

Sunset Sketch

Colored pencil study from a stunning photograph of sunset-lit clouds.

Sketches 7/20/2015 - Magic and Robots

No finished paintings this week, unfortunately, life has been busy.  Here's a peek at some of my characters for a story involving wizards, witches, and maybe hostile sentient robots.

Wizard #6

This scurvy sorcerer shares a smoke with his scallywaggish parrot.

Wizard #4

Today's wizard is attempting to communicate with the spirit eclipsing the Sun.