Sunday 30 March 2008

New prints



The Candy Fantasy triptych painting has now been made available to buy as three 7.5″ x 11″ archival giclee prints on heavy, acid-free fine art paper. 'Candy Fantasy 1-3' is only available through BlueFlip Art.
Grab yourself a copy! Candy Fantasy Triptych prints on BlueFlip art.

Have a look at the creation process in the previous posting: Promotional mailout illustration.

Saturday 22 March 2008

Bit of a break...

Once again a big gap in my posting, but with very good reason- i have been enjoying the arrival of my baby daughter erin- who has been keeping me exhausted but stupidly happy! When things settle down a bit i should be able to get around to getting some new work out and posting a bit more.

I have just received Victionaries latest book 'Fashion wonderland' for which i contributed some works. Fantastic book- buy it if you can, they tend to go pretty quick. Link to the Victionary site. Im also in the latest edition of Imagine Publishing's 'Photoshop creative' mag (issue 33) with a few tips and some pieces of work included in the digital painting feature. I will leave you with a look at the spreads for the fashion wonderland book. Back soon.







Monday 3 March 2008

Promotional mailout illustration

As i mentioned in a previous post, here is a look at the new mostlywanted mailer and a few process shots. As you can see, the initial sketch was little more than a few scribbles, really just defining the general shapes and the flow around the image area. I had already decided that the illustration would be framed as a triptych so that was taken into account during the early stages.



The next stages where really refining what i had scribbled down and starting to give a sense of shape with hints of color roughly washed in, more detail was added, the background characters shaped up and the girls pose changed. Her hair was roughed in to see how the shape contrasted with the other lines and the frame was ghosted in to give a better idea of the images as separate cards.



Onto the final painting- the original sketches above were scaled up to 450dpi and dropped in as a flat base layer so final painting could begin. The girl was painted almost completely in painter with my favorite oil brushes then the hair and dress were finished off in photoshop.



Additional elements were painted on separate layers such as the grass, clouds / smoke etc with the painted background being combinations of scanned watercolor and ink and some photoshop channel effects.



The characters are started and fleshed out together with some other midground elements and more refinements along the way..





Finally the color corrected and tweaked image is done and the frame placed over the top. Each panel was then output for print and indesign used to set up the rest of the card. The cards themselves were digitally printed on an HP indigo on heavy weight stock, you may be able to see that the cards can be cut to seperate the panels as individual postcards or kept as a small book. These have now gone on their merry way to the desks of creative directors and buyers all over the world- hopefully putting a smile on the faces of the recipients!





Finally, here's a few close-ups at 50% original size.

Illustration: today & tomorrow

Computer Arts gets a facelift for the 146 issue. The new look includes some nice new features and a nice logo re-design, there is also an article on the current state of the illustration industry for which i contributed a few pieces. The feature is well worth a read if you can get your hands on a copy.