Come Look!

 Playing with Studio Artist 5.5+

Lines and fills made with vector tools.

Testing Studio Artist

Studio Artist will be releasing an upgrade very soon.

Easily the most fun software I have ever encountered for making all kind of visuals.

 

A house in Blotville

Textured presets from Studio Artist.

They draw this way. Lots of texture.

cd_brillo07_blotville01_draw-norep

cd_brillo07_blotville01_draw

cd_brillo07_blotville01

Couple more "blotville" presets fun pictures.

 

Designs that might have been

Mad (but not scary) scientists that might have been.

Affinity Designer from Photoshop comps:

 

XMass 2019

Experimenting with textured effects.

Studio Artist

Giants

Giants

I remember a challenge question along the lines of:

Illustrate the word "giant".

Try to avoid cliches of previous representations AND size comparisons...

The one without the other... "giant" without something not giant...

None of these are that. But exploring character looks pays off in other ways.

Using Tayasui Sketches

IF: Imaginary Friend(s)?

Some fun with Studio Artist and wet wash like effects.

More fun with interesting hatch effects with SA.

IF: Witch

Happy Halloween!

And an update with less bad tangents:

Made with Affinity Designer 1.6

Custom brushes (many can be found from links here)

fun little comps.

Literally little Photoshop comps.

Done tiny - these cant have much detail. They have to be about the layout.

Oddly - no tool I have is as easy to use for fast comping as Photoshop. The program gets this level of job done without the strange hinderances that other programs throw into the process.

Just the brush and layers.

Colors for comping - dropped back so far they (hopefully) dont influence actual color design of the final art.

Probably should have dropped it to grey scale - but no color is no fun.

IF: Giant

Giant flying mushroom hideout.

Experimenting with Rebelle 2 watercolor effects

Spider and Fly

A take on the classic using Affinity Designer.

A color version (original) and sepia alternative.

This interpretation was based on a rough done for a book of nursery rhymes.

I liked the comp for its different feel and colors (tho not the original spider).

And then there were some other ideas tried as well.

The mushroom stairs comp:

This was closer to the final version that was finally cut from the book.

The modern slant - with tech being the seductive element.

Studio Artist texture

Experimenting with vector Paint Synth Presets in Studio Artist.

Some key aspects of a hand painted effect like this are the texture and interesting impression of a wet mix (tho the stroke is laid on opaque)

An organic and textured look that can't be reproduced with standard digital art tools.

(cd_vect sample shape brush 5 sm1 and sm2 - fills

cd_vect_et_bleed3 for the lines

)

colored pencil draft

Color pencil from 10 years ago

Big pencils and big pads are the greatest.

Illustration Comps - continued

More comps for Nursery Rhyme illustrations for Starfall

Illustration Comps - Part One

Illustration comps for a Nursery Rhyme book for Starfall Education Foundation.

Many of these served as both layout and color comps. Others use color schemes that deliberately disregard realistic (or cartoon realistic) color choices and as a result are more interesting as art - if not as effective for storytelling.

Each image gave me an opportunity to work with framing text with art.

Setting up dramatic compositions... Staging point and counterpoint.

Working with Photoshop on smaller image sizes forced me to work with shapes and body language and discouraged getting lost in detail.

Some of these comps didn't fly - but are very gratifying to me as little art scenes.

Wording is left to the imagination.

Character design could take directions I was not used to...

I particularly liked the results of building forms with fills - rather than outlines.

I can't take credit for thinking of using the comic book panel-like structure of many of the layouts. That was an idea of Brandi Chase my Producer/Editor at the time. I do enjoy using that form of story/illustration structure very much! Thanks Brandi for opening that door for me.

Final art for print was developed by Dale Beisel. Dales approach to the same imagery was very different from mine. The combination of the two styles (with me poking and prodding the hell out of Dales work) resulted in something very unique. Illustrations of well known and lesser know rhymes - that borrowed very little from standard representation.

Many of the same rhymes are animated to music and song and will be available on Starfall.com.

Lots of very talented artists contributed to the animation! Many thanks to each one of them.

To be continued...