Kitty's Drawings

Hi!

All done for this week’s CHOW. I can’t believe I managed to go out Saturday, bum around Sunday, do life drawing today and STILL get this done. Awesome. Oh and I don’t hate it so much either. Omg.

Okay so it’s not fantastic but it’s better than most (all?) my other CHOW entries so I gotta be makin’ some progress. Plus this week’s theme was mega mega awesome.
So onto the drawings…

If you can’t tell – I decided to go with a whacked out junkie as my Dorothy. Tehehehehee. WHY? Cos I can. And you gotta think that whoever came up with the whole OZ thing had to be on something. I know it’s not the original but have you SEEN Return to Oz?? Cray-zee. The first one was bad enough.
Some progress pics (Click it to make it big if you so wish)….

And how was life drawing I hear you ask?? FAB. Loved it!! Much better than what I was expecting. I shall show you my results tomorrow and talk about it in more detail.
Until then – BYE!

Hellooooooo!!!
Lately I’ve had the opportunity to do some illustrations for work. It’s not often that I get to crack out the Wacom but it is getting more frequent as our clients realise we CAN do the fancy pants design and photography without having to pay two lots of people to get their work done. Yay for the customer!!
And Yay for me cos I like being able to potter about drawing while at work.

Today we had a customer that wanted a revamp of their old designs with some illustrations thrown in. I wasn’t sure if they were happy to pay the extra for full colour process plates (cyan, magenta, yellow and black – which in our kind of business costs a lot more than the printers that make magazines etc) so I kept the colours to a minimum. Just one spot colour (Pantone), black, our standard double white (for opacity on the clear bags) and varnish.

First, the illustrations. I found some stock images and redrew them into a pleasing composition. I wanted a sketchy kind of look – all done in Photoshop. Corel Painter 9 packed it in on my work computer too. I think it may have something to do with updating the Wacom tablet drivers for the new operating system so I had to use PS.

Red wine and garlic:

Garlic and herb:

And this is the final result. This is only the first concept for the customer so I’m sure they will change it.

The stripes and colour block reach to the top and bottom of the bag so they will form a band across the meat.

Annnnyways it’s almost dinner time. Hope you have a good weekend peeps and I endeavor to finish this week’s CHOW so I will have that ready on Monday.
Ciao!!

Hello!
I can finally show you all the commission that was taking up my time the last few weeks! Its finished and the client is happy (yay!). I learnt a ton in this one aswell – namely – STICK TO COREL PAINTER! Photoshop is still frustrating and annoying and hard to pick good colours with. Also learning to streamline my workflow and plan things out better from the start.
I will also be ditching the B&W to colour method because while it may be good for controlling values, I find the move to colour is difficult. What is this method I hear you ask?? Well, its all about working in a greyscale palette at the start of your drawing so that the range of contrast is easier to control. You can focus on what is dark and what is light a lot easier than starting with colour.
Which is all well and good but then you have to figure out how to convert that B&W to colour….how?? Tutorials on the web are a bit vague about this as I guess each artist works differently. You’re supposed to use an Overlay or Colour layer over the top in Photoshop but no matter what I did, the result was always a muddy mess. Black and white also doesn’t account for a shift in hue….There is more complexity to a drawing than just the tonal range.
It may be to do with my lack of experience in Photoshop – but I like to just pick a colour and paint with it. SOoooo I am back to Painter.

Enough rambling hey!
Here be the drawing….

I’ve also got something I’m working on for this weeks CHOW….I didn’t expect to enter because I only started sketching on Thursday and it’s due Monday …..but as soon as I started drawing I liked what I was doing and so continued. Its nearly finished so you’ll get a post tomorrow

For a possible commission I have going right now with a lovely Voguette

Only a quick sketch and colour in Photoshop. I like this pose but the face definitely needs some work. I might refine it later. See how things go.

Its kinda cool keeping the original sketch visible. Also playing with layer blending modes in PS. It’ll take me a while to get the hang of that. I understand them for work purposes but somehow it doesn’t translate so well into my more traditional art. I find it really hard to move away from a very natural media style of drawing….just layering colours from light to dark. With digital you can do whatever you want and I’m still struggling with that!

Anyways – I got my hair coloured again yesterday. So its back to the vibrant red. Yays.
Other super news – NEXT WEEK THE BRACES COME OFF!! Holy moly! Sooooo excited!!

Well, better get to bed!
Night!

Quick late night posting today…..

I just squeezed an entry for ConceptArt.org CHOW this week…the topic was Steampunk Harem. Mixing two conflicting styles. Ripper topic! So many entries. And I bit off WAY more than I could chew! The way I envisioned this was so different. I’ve learnt a lot from this exercise…mostly to plan even the tiniest details from the beginning. I wish I had more time…but I’m thoroughly over this…but I like one of my original sketches, so I might paint that in PS just for play and to see how I go.

Hope you like! Even though I am very MEH about it.

Night!

Yay!
Just in time too. I hope it is what was expected I’m quite happy with it too. Could have polished it a bit more but just didn’t have time.

No time to chat today! Gotta work on that harem girl.

Have a good weekend!

Hi All!
Having a great Sunday? The weather is perfect here in Melbourne – not too hot with a nice cool breeze.
Me and Jonny went to the annual Volkswagon meetup out in Cranbourne. It’s been 60 years since they made the first Kombi so there was a whole cavalcade of them from each year of production. Cool as! We also saw a whole tonne of Bugs and quite a few Type 3′s. Not very many Fastbacks like ours which is a good thing I think – our little car is quite unique! Jonny is full of ideas of what to do with it now. Yay!

So…back to drawing stuff. The last couple of days I’ve been working on this. Referenced from a photo – but she doesn’t really look like the girl in the photo – which I’m okay with. Trying out digital painting in Photoshop and only doing tonal values (black & white). I’m getting the hang of working in PS and may be even preferring it over Painter right now. Crazy huh! Hehe. This took a total of about 3 or 4 hours….lost count after the first hour
I could have worked it a LOT more but thought I should leave it before I overdo it. Kinda like the roughness anyway.
As you can see in the work-in-progress (WIP) pics, I changed her proportions a bit….as I was going along I noticed more things that were a bit out of place.

And the WIPs.

Bya!