Mill Avenue Vexations
Friday 13 August 2010
Here's something I've just finished up for Kyt Dotson at Mill Avenue Vexations. Kyt's been a friend of mine basically forever and this is not the first time he's asked me to do an illustration for one of his books.
Media: Digital
Once again I decided to try drawing entirely in photoshop, and I'm starting to feel pretty good about it.
Here's a quick little thing to give you an idea what the process looked like:
Sketch / Draw / Color and then the next stage is what you see up there.
Time: About five hours.
As is often the case, I spent more time thinking about this one than actually putting it together. Once I'd decided how I was going to approach it, it all came together pretty easily.
Christine Gordon-Manley Twitter profile
Monday 21 June 2010
This is a Twitter profile that I created for Christine Gordon-Manley.
She's a freelance editor and creator of Edwards Magazine, so the idea was to have a sort of a writer's cluttered desk backdrop.
Originally I had conceived it as a lot more "graphic", that is with a less realistic more stylized look, with low-fi woodgrain and a vector graphic for the pen.
Once I had that set up I found that the vector graphic look of those elements clashed with the photos, so I decided to use a photo of a pen from my own desk, and some woodgrain from a nice desk at the office supply store in the mall.
There was to be a coffee cup on the desk as well, but I found that somewhat difficult to make attractive alongside the other flat or nearly flat elements. In the end I offered Christine both versions and she is testing both out to see which she prefers.
The cards are very simply scans from actual business cards that she gave me to work with, meaning that every element of this is actually photographic. This is new for me, as I traditionally don't work with photo manipulation much at all.
Overall I think this was a success, and I ended up using skills I don't often work with which is always a fun bonus.
Media: Digital photos/scans
Time: This sort of project is difficult to really estimate a timeframe on because there is a lot of starting and stopping, and stepping back to review. It's likely that it was close to four hours of work including the coffee cup, but it was spread over three days.
If you are wondering about getting your own Twitter profile, I am taking commissions!
Send me an email at luis.boisvert@gmail.com with a description of the background you'd like to see, or if you'd like to leave it up to me to design something just let me know what interests or activities you'd like it to highlight or what themes you'd like your profile to portray.
These jobs will be $50, and my aim would be to complete each within a week.
"First come first served" and all that!
Seaside Slide
Sunday 20 June 2010
This is an entry in a $10,000 contest to design a sliding door. The idea here was to have a neat stained-glass picture when the door is closed, and then to have it overlay to make a more complex abstract image.
But here is the fun part!
I only found out about the contest when Allan mentioned it about 26 hours before the deadline!
26 hours is a lot of time really, if you can use it all. Even accounting for sleep that is a fine margin - the real problem was that I wanted the glass to look nice and that meant raytracing.
Raytracing, for the layman, is a different sort of rendering than I normally use. In normal rendering, the lighting is very approximate - there are a lot of things that real light does that don't happen in Blender's normal renderer.
Things like:
Bouncing off of an object onto other things (like if you have a brightly coloured object in a white room, you'll see that the color bleeds onto the walls in real life).
Refracting when going through things, and picking up the color of those things (light through green glass should change direction and become green).
Those two things especially are important for nice-looking glass and natural looking lighting, but blender doesn't do them normally because it requires a lot more work and takes a lot longer.
Of the 26 hours, I spent about 4 actually working on this and about 16 waiting for raytracing results. I actually wanted to do a third angle, but time was running short so I submitted it as you see here.
Birthday Tarot
Saturday 19 June 2010
Here's one I rather like. A couple of weeks back it was lazysmirk's birthday, and I had the idea to make her a card based on her character Sef.
Some of you might be wondering who lazysmirk and Sef are. Well, lazysmirk, whitetrashpalace and I are working on a comic project together, and Sef is a character she designed who'll be appearing in that.
I don't want to say too much more about that until more's been done, but the project is called Modus Operandi and it'll hopefully be ready to look at this fall.
About the picture then!
Media: Digital
I just drew it up in photoshop. I'm trying to get used to drawing right on the computer as opposed to drawing on paper first. There is a bit of a learning curve but I think this turned out allright.
Time: Under three hours.
I spent a fair amount of time rebalancing the color to get an old-timey tarot card kind of look, but aside from that this came together pretty smoothly.
The Rest of the Deck
Well, I couldn't really use this card because it's not my character.I have always wanted to make a tarot deck, just because it's an interesting subject and could be fun.
[ Luis ]
Luis Boisvert Twitter background
Friday 18 June 2010
At the suggestion of Allan Manley, I've decided to post some interesting behind the scenes info about some of my art.
Today's pic is my new Twitter background. You can see it in its intended context here.
I put this together as an experiment, to test out what works well for Twitter. The illustration there is actually reused from my Deviantart ID.
Media: Digital
Time: Since I had already drawn the picture, the layout itself came together pretty quickly. I'd say less than two hours in total.
Things I learned: Twitter resizes images wider than 2048px, so my first attempt ended up all squished up.
The twitter feed isn't fixed in position and the background aligns left, so any elements you want on the right of the feed are in dodgy territory. Elements for the left side seem to be safe for about 200px.
