Graphic Design and Illustration.

Metal World

I couldn’t believe we finally made to Bernard’s Star. The first extra-solar world humanity colonized. It was before terraforming, so we just started building enclosed metal city, after city. Without having to worry about ecology, or habitat, the whole planet was eventually turned into one, giant city.
It also meant it was totally dependant on trade to survive.
That’s were I come in.

A quick test to see how well I could come up with a quick looking sic-fi world. Came out pretty good even if it does rely on a lot of Photoshop trickery to work. The nebulae in the background was fun to do.
Enjoy!

Nerdy Girl

Everyone loves a nerdy girl, right?
A quick sketch from my trusty sketchbook, inked with a brush pen, scanned into the computer, and then quick colours dropped in using Photoshop.
I tend to use more simplified backgrounds for my cartooning. It helps to keep the foreground/midground elements and the background elements separate. Plus, it’s easier to draw! Got that tip years ago from watching an interview with Matt Groening of the Simpsons fame.
Enjoy!

You’ve Got Mail

Another quick pencil sketch that really came to life digitally! This was the end result of creating a workflow that could be incredibly fast and would respond quickly to changes.
Tried to keep the colour loose and used nothing but available brushes that come with the current Creative Cloud of Photoshop.
Enjoy!

Sir Justin and the Questing Beast

A fun pen and ink sketch that got a bit out of hand. Some edits done digitally along with the text and fake screen tone. Sources of inspiration include concept art from the How to Train Your Dragon series of movies. Was created for a self promo piece.
Enjoy!

Mail Kobold

This little guy was a fun one to paint. Started off as a fairly tight pencil rough and then all the rest done as a digital painting in Photoshop. I wanted something firmly visceral and loose without being too sloppy. Special thanks to the artist Matt Dixon for the inspiration for this piece. And apologies for not being nearly as good as him.

Enjoy!

Mermaids

 

Every year there is a art challenge called Mermay. For the month of may, artists are encourage to try and post a new mermaid every day. Having a busy work life and young family, I don’t always get the chance to participate, but in 2018, I managed to do it with just pen and ink drawings. Over the next year, I managed to flesh a few out in colour. These are the result.

 

I tried to go for a variety of different styles. Though I think there is something that links it to me every time. So despite my feelings (and reputation) that I am some sort of design/illustration chameleon, I do seem to have some sort of emerging style. Enjoy!

Among the Ruins

Nobody ever came here.

The monolith rose out of the only oasis in the Sea of Broken Glass, or Quaa Rouchar, in the local dialect of the desert nomads who managed to survive out here. It was built eons ago in the hopes of banishing an ancient menace from the land. One thousand souls were sacrificed in the dedication rite, so determined the ancients were to rid the land of it’s tormentor. It was never permitted to happen again, And it was thought would never need to happen again. So the ancient blood rite was forgotten, and place abandoned. Even the reason for the monument’s existence was a faint and distant memory. All was well.

It worked, didn’t it?

Sarna knew otherwise. And he had a plan on what to do about it.

This was a redo of artwork long abandoned by me (it’s not just ancient monuments that get left on the dustbin of history). I wanted to monumentalize something that is ordinarily quite small. In this case a chess piece. A knight. Was fun to really play around with the sunset style colours.

Started out as a pencil sketch in my sketchbook that was totally repainted digitally in Photoshop. Enjoy!

A Boy and His Bot

“This is no place for the likes of you,” said the giant robot. His old gears creaking as he bent down.

“Come with me. For an adventure. I’ll not harm you.”

This was a fun one to draw. Started out as a pencil sketch. Was scanned into the computer, and colour loosely dropped in behind in Photoshop. The lines were then redrawn over top with a fairly gritty brush in Photoshop. I tried pretty hard to preserve as much of the original line as as I did that. I wanted to keep everything fairly loose. Adding in the texture to the robot was my favourite part.

I can’t take full credit for the design of the robot. In my son’s Kindergarten class, the had an in class assignment to build their own robot to teach them about different shapes. This monstrosity was all my son’s doing. I just added a few details.

Enjoy!

Pulpy Book Covers

For a personal project, I wanted to create a series of book covers for fun. Something in the Public Domain so I hopefully wouldn’t have to worry so much about rights. And maybe even something that I might follow up with by putting together at least one book. Maybe as a downloadable PDF or some sort of eBook. Or maybe just a few sample pages as my personal time is rather precious to me.

I settled on the John Carter of Mars character from Edgar Rice Burroughs. According to Wikipedia, the first few books are public domain (at least in some places) and while the movie bombed at the box office, I rather liked it. It was hardly the greatest, most thought-provoking sci-fi movie out there, but it was a little disappointing it didn’t garner enough attention for at least a sequel. And I could find the text here, should I ever want to try my hand at designing some more pages.

In designing these covers, I wanted something with a bit of a western flair. I also wanted to have fun with the pulpy origins of the source material. A nice, fake worn cover a-la the classic Pulp-Fiction movie poster (I did spend my formative years in the nineties after all!) would do just nicely.

I settled on the font Western Bang Bang. Its free for personal use. And since I’m not too sure what, if anything, I’m going to do with this, I figure free should work for the project. There is a commercial license available should the need arrive.

As for the images, all the images used can be found over here at NASA. Interestingly, a good chunk of the images released by NASA have been colour corrected to look more Earth-like. This is so Earthbound geologists will have an easier time understanding the different rock formations the various landers have studied. I wanted a more “authentic” Mars look. So I found an image I was pretty certain was untouched and used that as my target for Photoshop’s “Match Color” feature found under “Image” —-> “Adjustments” (towards the bottom). This only really got me part of the way there. Some of the darker regions were looking a little odd if the adjustment was used too strongly. I then used a colour filter to add a bit more of a reddish warmth to the image. In fact, the default one work best. Hardly scientific, but it got the job done. Went from slightly hazy Earth to a very dusty Mars in no time.

And yes, I understand that using these images could pose as a problem should I try and do anything more with them. And so should anyone else. But a man can dream can’t he? Besides, it might be fun to try and replicate similar images in a 3D program. Or paint them myself. Or maybe just shoot some rocks and perform similar image adjustments as I explained above. This was just the easiest way to find useful images just to see what I could come up with design-wise.

The rest are just a bunch of black and white rips and tears pieced together. Enjoy.