I FINALLY got around to re-painting the face on this illustration. This was one of the first pieces I painted three or four years ago and while I liked it enough to keep it in my portfolio, I was never satisfied with the face or colour palette. I swore I would get around to changing it eventually and that time has finally come. I’m MUCH happier with the piece now. You can see the progression from original to current under the cut.

Original Painting

The original painting wasn’t *bad* but I just hadn’t achieved the mood I was going for and the face looked wonky. Having the face rendered from below gave an unflattering angle up the nose and my render wasn’t very accurate. Not to mention, I originally gave this poor girl a serious case of fish-lips. I wanted the character to have more grace and softness.

New Colour Test

I started the repaint by testing a few different colour palettes by painting directly over the original illustration. Once I arrived at a palette I thought worked pretty well, I smudged out the face entirely, and began repainting.

Revised Painting

Already having the majority of the painting finished, and having a clear idea about the colour palette meant it only took a few hours for me to sketch out a new face I was happy with and re-illustrate the painting with a new color scheme.

My programmer friend asked me to help him by creating some character concepts for an app he’s currently building. Here’s the first behemoth-beast-thing I came up with. This little guy was a fun challenge for me since I typically paint women. Trying to render beefy male anatomy instead of smooth, beautiful skin was really refreshing. I think I might do some more studies like this just for my own enjoyment/study. Brushing up on my anatomy skills would be a good thing.

Process under the cut!

Final Image

I haven’t been able to update as much as I’d like because I’ve been too busy with a lot of side-projects including an entire over-haul of this site. I hope to launch a brand-spanking-new layout in a month or so. For now I’ll just post this little process image that made it onto some of my other internet haunts, but not here. It’s just an image to show some progression in a portrait I’m working on. Hopefully I find the time to finish the piece!

Just a quickie Photoshop experiment I completed with some photos from my studio. No real reason behind it… just wanted to mimic that hand-painted movie poster look that Drew Struzan does so well. Didn’t quite get the effect I wanted, but still some interesting results.

I needed to make a departure from the Sailor Moon fan-art for a new piece. I didn’t go into this painting intending to make something so dreary, but it progressed into this. Painting all those stains and wounds was a great learning process. I had to create some great grunge brushes I’m excited to keep experimenting with.

A few close-ups follow

You guessed it. More Sailor Moon. I’ll stop saying I’m done painting fanart of the character because clearly I’m lying. For some reason, I’m just having a really good time re-imagining Usagi, so maybe I should just keep painting her until it’s out of my system. I blame this new interpretation of her on my recent trip to Japan. Seeing all of the advertisements throughout Tokyo got me feeling creative. I wanted to paint Sailor Moon as a spokesperson and figured strawberry Bubble Tea would be a product she’d get behind.

Another image under the cut shows the illustration without the product shot and Japanese kanji. The style for this illustration was inspired by modern pin-up posters.

This is just the result of a quickie sketch I made in my notebook. It was a pretty big style-departure for me so I figured I would try my hand at digitally rendering it to see what type of results I would get. Creating lineart was certainly new. I labelled this guy as a self-portrait mostly because I gave him the outfit I was wearing that day. I’m not that cute.

Some process, as always, is under the cut.

Process

I’ve already posted one piece of Sailor Moon fan art a few months ago but I had such a fun time painting the character, I decided to take another go at it. This time I expanded the challenge to capture the rest of the main Sailor Scouts as well! My geekery knows no bounds.

Process

Final Image

Overall, this is the biggest illustration challenge I’ve taken on in a really long time. I typically limit my personal illustrations to one character so painting five at once was certainly more difficult. The final result is marking what I hope is a turning point in my personal work. I think I achieved something different from my previous work with this painting and I hope to continue refining it.

Wow. I have been BUSY. I likely won’t be able to make an actual update for a while longer but wasn’t comfortable letting things get too stagnant. Here’s a bit of fun typography from something I’m doing at work this week. Sometimes it’s just fun to be a little more playful and create something from nothing. It’s too easy to just pick a typeface. Much more rewarding this way.

I actually sat down with the intention of doing a Holiday-themed illustration, but somehow wound up drawing Sailor Moon instead. As always, see the full-sized image and the working process under the cut!

Final Image

I fell in love with Sailor Moon when it first aired in Canada but I’ve never done any Fan Art of the characters… or Fan Art of anything really. Figured it was about time to remedy that. Here’s my take on Usagi Tsukino (or Serena as I knew her) and Luna. I’m actually pretty satisfied with this painting. I worked in an entirely different manner for this - most notably using only one layer for the majority of the piece. I also went straight into color work instead of doing a grayscale painting and layering colors on top afterward. The result is something a little different for me, but if I can pull it off again, I think I’d like to keep working like this. Admittedly it took a bit longer than usual. Each screenshot below represents a few hours of work.

Working Process

I started off with a fairly tight drawing in my sketchbook. Nothing was completely refined because I knew I’d change it in the painting.

Instead of working grayscale first like I usually do, I went straight into a color test. It really helped that I’m working on a character with a color scheme already defined.

Several hours later and I’ve worked up the main areas of focus in the picture. The character’s face always takes the longest to finalize as it’ll (hopefully) be the focal point of the image. I also changed Luna’s expression a bit.

Spent a bit of time working on her brooch and ribbon. Also changed her arm placement to create a more dynamic pose. Hand on the hip is much stronger than hand bleeding off the page.

Refine, refine, refine. I really struggled with the skirt without reference images but in the end, it’s believable enough.

And finally I just had to refine her gloves and change the background to be a bit more Sailor Moon-esque.

And she’s finished!