Art World

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Death Eater Mask #1 Build Photo

Gregory Belland sent me this excellent build photo of my Death Eater Mask #1 papercraft. Greg told me he built the mask for a friend then took this photograph which he entitled Death Eater Prepares. Seeing this photo makes me want to do some more Death Eater masks. ;) Nice work Greg!

Related Posts

Death Eater Mask #1

Death Eater Mask #6

Death Eater Mask #7

Golden Snitch Paper Model

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Realistic Strawberry Papercraft

Mmm, strawberries... This realistic looking papercraft strawberry was created by the folks at the Fragarixie pixie blog. Fragarixie is the home of a online comic about a family of tiny pixies who live in the forest and grow strawberries. The template for the strawberry was offered as a free download in the early days of the blog. As the story goes, Pixie Grandpa found the strawberry template among the ancient Fragarixie scrolls. Click on the picture here to build one of your own.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Jack the Giant Killer

So...the big project has started! There's been a big lull in between this post and the last...various happenings in the house (decorating, etc.) have kept me away from the drawing board too long!

It will be obvious from the title of this post that my aim is to illustrate the age-old story of "Jack the Giant Killer". The story of Jack the Giant Killer has been passed down through the generations. The exact origins of the story are unknown, but it is said to have existed in a chapbook as far back as 1711. The earliest surviving text, entitled "The History of Jack and the Giants", was published somewhere between 1750 and 1760.

As stated in my previous post, I am attempting to put my own illustrative spin on the tale. The story itself is not in copyright, and is based on folklore, making it difficult to find its exact origins. (It is actually said to have links with the other famous Jack..."Jack and the Beanstalk".) As such, this makes it an ideal story to illustrate without infringing any copyright!

Anyway, I've posted some initial thumbnails and a character sketch for my own visualisation of "Jack the Giant Killer". The next few months will be taken up with more character sketches, but Jack is done (well, the pencilled version anyway) and available to view:

The next step for the above character sheet is to show the coloured and inked versions. This will help to show the style that will be used throughout the book.

On that subject, the illustrations will consist of black and white (inked) drawings and full-page colour spreads. There will also be various small inset drawings scattered throughout, e.g. pennants, weapons, scriptures, etc. that pertain to the feel of the period.

If you click on the above image it will take you to my Flickr set of "Jack the Giant Killer" images, which also contains some other thumbnail sketches of early designs, clothing, weapons, etc. You will also find more notes with each image that explain the ideas on the setting: Anglo-Saxon England...the "Dark Ages" :)

Audrey the Jack Russell Terrier

Audrey ( see all proofs )

Middle of the week and I am working on doggy art and trying to organize my desk a little bit. I'll have more new works on the blog soon.

About This Project:

I really love this cute little Jack Russell Terrier! You can tell she is a happy pooch.

Audrey's original photo was very cute but also very low in resolution. I did send my client back to the drawing board in an attempt to get a higher resolution file, and even though the 2nd image sent was twice as large as the first 50k image ... at 108 kb it still lacked a lot in terms of ideal resolution. Not to worry, I spent a few hours smoothing out the pixels and ended up painting in a bit of detail.You can see the pixelation below that occurs when we enlarge a low res, image for printing.

See the almost square like pattern on Audrey above? That is what happens when you take a low resolution image ( less than 500K) and enlarge it for printing. You are asking photoshop to fill in data that is not there and it does the best it can, but the quality suffers.
In situations like this I will patiently spend a few hours smoothing out each and every pixel before I can start playing with color and brush strokes. I use the smudge tool to do this.

In the end I think the artwork turned out really well and there is no trace of the pixelated pattern or texture that I started out with. You can see a detail below. After the pixels were finally smoothed out I added some detail with the paint tool, threw on the dry brush filter and then painted on top of that a bit more with my electronic stylus.