Back to the drawing board

Long story short, I was going to use these pictures for my final project, but four days before the due date, I decided to redo everything from scratch.
Try figuring out what the theme is because my TA and prof sure couldn't.

BONUS PIC: Basically, what we had to do for this rushed in-class assignment was to make a collage in Photoshop. So with all the Photoshop editing powers invested in me, I made this. Even though this isn't as awesome as an uncropped picture of a piano in an over-pixelated forest, I still think this is pretty great.

That is Eernie btw.

Then I read how the collage had to be "realistic".

Stuff'd

For all my wonderful friends.

I can't believe I actually finished this in two days...

I think I've always intended, but I've never got around to making a tribute for my friends so here you go: all my friends turned into animals which are then turned into stuffed animals. And just in time for New Years, too.

Have fun guessing what the animals are what who they're supposed to represent. Some of them are more obvious than others, such as Inkeh just being her fursona, but for the majority, I had to come up with an animal counterpart. I really hope I didn't forget anyone because I don't really like vectoring. 

But yes, how often do you see me vectoring anything? Uh, never. But I thought it suited the picture I was trying to make, so I went through the pain staking process of fiddling with the pen tool to produce with (with some cheap tricks thrown in of course).

Original sketch. It's missing some people because I couldn't fit them on the paper so I drew it in PS.

I might make a wallpaper-friendly version where I just isolate each character on their own, because a lot of detail is blocked off with the layering, and that makes me sad considering all the work I put into it.
Speaking of layers, I think I used the most layers I've ever had for a picture, topping at around 150.

Thanks everyone for making my year awesome. I really do appreciate you all.


Made in Photoshop.

Astrum: Demolition Technology

Logo

I guess this is a follow up to a previous post where I had all my draft logos. I'm going to fast forward through previous drafts and just go directly to the final products. We decided to go with the red star in the ring, just cause.
Another big aspects of this project was the design of the business card and letter head. Personally, I think our card is pretty sweet.

Business card front

Business card back

 The checkered part of the star represents a hole I manually cut out before I handed it in.

Letterhead

Yes, I was this close to having to go back, replacing the logo with an older draft, and then reprinting everything during the day it was due (and admits the rush of all the other people who planned to print last minute)  all because my prof told me the logo was too generic and how she preferred the older one. If it was anyone else, I wouldn't shrugged and been like, "Meh, it's too late. Already got it printed." But this is the prof we're talking about. She even urged me to do it, saying it was worth the extra effort.
In the end, my TA convinced me otherwise. I bit the bullet, and I spent my night scheming up bullshit to relate our logo to explosives and not so much film and photography. Good thing my partner's particularly good at that.

P.S. Did anyone notice that our company is Russian?


Made in Illustrator and Photoshop (even though it should've all been Illustrator)

Request: OC Refs

You know I'm always down with requests from friends, right? So long as they're not exploiting me, claiming it's their artwork, or anything else despicable, I have no problems cranking out a picture or two. In fact, if I know you, dear reader, enough and you asked, I'd probably say yes.

But anyways, a friend asked me for a picture not too long ago for her OC. All I had was a description to work off of. That's good for the artistic freedom, bad because it's always easier to look at an arm than be told how it looks like. It helps than her ghost form was pretty much a tweaked version of Miku Append (who can be thought of as Miku ver. 2).

My initial sketches of the characters:

Human form.

Ghost form.

But when I showed it to my friend, I found out that the character is supposed to be 14. Obviously, what I drew didn't resemble a 14 year old so after some convincing that I was fine with redoing it (the sketch didn't take that long to do anyways), it was back to the drawing board.

Luckily, my friend wasn't some assholey-client and I got the okay for the second sketch. And it was smooth sailing from there.

Human form on the left, and ghost form on the right.

No shading because I figured it was a ref and in refs, usually just solid colours are used. I think I only highlighted the hair, eyes, and the lips. Fine with me. Probably easiest colouring job I've done because my lineart was nice enough for once just to use the magic wand tool to do all the work for me. That and my friend gave me the hex codes for her eyes and hair.

Such a shame that a lot of detail I put into the ghost girl's outfit is lost either due to shrinking the picture to half its size after I was done (a little tip if you want to make smooth and thin lineart easily) or the grey being too dark for the lines to appear properly (since most of it was focused on the belt).


Lineart in openCanvas.
Coloured in Photoshop.

(Insert Synonym for "CG Dump" Here)

Let's start off with something from today.

Bleh. Nothing about this picture leaves me proud enough to keep on opening the picture to look at it.

The filename is "Maya" but I don't really have a name for her. She's an OC from the good ol days, but one I never really expanded on because her only purpose was to suddenly appear and cause drama in the protags' lives. She's not really an angel either, she's just dead. The dress she's wearing also looks very familiar, like I've seen it from somewhere.

I think the whole purpose of making this was to find a quick, "sellable" style that would be appropriate for commissions and prints and the like. Something a bit neater than my freehand painterly one I have already. Haven't found it yet. Back to surfing through the internet, stealing finding inspiration from other people.

...and now for things I didn't do today.

Another enviro study. Haven't done these in a while. The clouds/sky actually don't look so bad, especially the big one in the left-hand corner. But then it gets all crappy once you look down from there so just pretend that part doesn't exist.

If I were to explain the inspiration for this, I could probably pass it off as something artistic or that I knew what I was doing and generally leave you all impressed by my knowledge of fine art. But since it turned out so "wtf" that even slapping on the label of abstract wouldn't save it, I won't. Frankly, I don't even know what the heck that's supposed to be anymore.

My tablet wouldn't respond to pressure sensitivity. It was awful.


First and last picture made in SAI.
Second picture made in Photoshop.
Third picture made in openCanvas.

Study study study study

Lets start off with something completely from my head, something I haven't done in a while: an outfit post.

 

Granted, I wasn't really wearing that today. Because I didn't go out, I was just in my plain ol' oversized t-shirt bearing the symbol of a Guide camp I went to (yeah, it's one of those t-shirts). I figured that was boring, so here's something I wore a while back. Enjoy the picture because it's the only decent looking thing to follow.
Used Photoshop instead of my usual SAI/openCanvas. I do enjoy doing these kind of quick doodles on PS a lot more because the lines are bit thicker and sharper.

While I was already on the program, thought I'd do my enviro on it too. Unlike oC and SAI, PS has textured brushes. I really wanted to be good at using 'em. It didn't save how horrible the enviro came out though, but that should've been expected by now.

Note to self: colour in the background first instead of doing the foreground and then doing the background around it.

I hate shrubbery. Takes forever to do and it looks like crap.

Some 30 second figure drawings using photos and not 3D skinless models.

And finally, more figure drawing, but without the time limit. Yay, I get to analyze pictures of naked/scantily-clothed people longer!

I also started a painting in the morning. All I'll say about that is masking fluid is a pain in the butt to remove.


Made in Photoshop or with paper and pencil.

...and some more stuff I did for the school

Except, this time, it wasn't a contest so I was guaranteed to get it.

The picture's self explanatory as to what it's for. As for the usage, it's supposed to be a place mat. Regardless of it going to be stained and signed on by grads, I still put some effort into making the colouring at least look passable.

Check it out, dawg:

You guys get some of the references? They're movie references.

It was the same person who judged the agenda covers who also took care of the placemats, except this time, she actually liked what we did.

It's actually a collab with a friend. Since I have no originality for these things, and she outlined the Japan Day poster I never uploaded onto here, she drew it and I coloured and tweaked a couple of things in PS. I also added all the random copyrighted things around the picture, including Ronald McDonald's head (which was heavily supported by my sister, albeit smaller than she wanted). I think there were some issues with the whole copyrighted thing, though, but when I told my art teacher that I could change it, he was like "I wouldn't." So there it'll stay.

A couple of days ago, my art teacher handed us the very first copies of the place mat. Looks pretty good, especially since I made the sure the picture was big enough to print out onto that size properly without looking pixelly and ugly. The wood didn't turn out so good, though, but I purposely put a filter on it that made it kind of grainy. Oh well, that's not the focus of the picture anyways.


Coloured in openCanvas.
Edited in Photoshop.

I'd better at least get the backcover

EDIT: Okay, I wrote this before the winners were announced. You do not want to know who won (though all the entries - save like three - were all hilariously bad. I'm not mean enough to display them here, though.

Annually, my school would hold a contest for the next year's agenda cover. Two years ago, I made something, but forgot to hand it in. Instead of getting something relevant to our school and mascots, instead, we got this ugly-ass compilation of someone's portraits of random people, arranged on a blue background, with the school name printed in some cookie-cutter 3D word art I used to make all my titles in as a kid. Not saying that the portraits were bad - no, they were fine - but what do Twilight people have to do with my school (other than asking if they could use the school to film the high school scenes in Breaking Dawn), or Michael Phelps for that matter? Seriously, everyone I showed it to laughed. I vowed to submit my entry next year.
But then next year came, they pulled a dick move and changed the contest regulations that we all knew and loved. So now we're not allowed to use our school mascots or emblems, but instead focus on our motto of the year, "Killarney Cares". Lame. We ended up with a pencil crayon picture of stick people encircling the school. Better than last year, and we actually got to vote for it this time. Second place was a cover consisted of two stick people with our school name underneath it.

Anyways, end of tl;dr. What you needed to take from that is when I didn't submit something, something worse became the cover. No, not this year, dammit! It's a good thing we got use cougars and shamrocks again.

Sketch:

Cover:

Event File.

Thank you Google images for all the inspiration. Sure, you'll give me creepy pictures when I image search for "cougar", mainly hunters going "YEAH!" while holding up a dead cougar, and even a box of decapitated human heads, but...
(Maybe I should consider turning on my mature filter again...)

Only took me two days, and a big big improvement from the one I did two years ago. I was so proud of it, too, but now when I compare it:

Yeah. Not as blurry, I can say. Better text, too.


Made in openCanvas.
Edited in Photoshop.

Yukiko 2010 & Avvie

First and foremost:
Happy New Years!
I hope all of you guys are having a marvelous winter. :)
That being said...

It's about time I made myself a new ID for my deviantART. Seriously, the one I was using before was a sketch a did on whim so I could have an ID. Needless to say, I spent way more time on this.

Oh yeah, and don't know if I said this, but I found on the openCanvas website that they opened up a sister site, PGN Community, and the cool thing about this is that you can upload your event files and it'll actually play 'em. So here's the first entry on the site:
Event File.

I had the concept for the picture for a while. Back around August, I actually had another sketch planned out that I was going to use for my new ID.

EDIT: Found an even older concept!

Yukiko 2010 Sketch 1

Didn't like it so much, but I wanted to keep my stuffed animals in the back. So I tried again.

Yukiko 2010 Sketch 2

I wasn't too fond of that, though. I did like the whole "drawing on my page" concept, though. So I drew a new one but put Yukiko in a different pose.

Yukiko 2010 Sketch 2

The clothes on both these pictures are pretty much the same ones (as they're actually clothes I wear).

I outlined and coloured the picture during a family dinner party. With any kind of dinner party my parents throw, my sister and I would just finish our food early, and stay locked up in our rooms until dessert or something. In the meanwhile, I had lots of time to finish this:

Yukiko 2010

I'm actually quite proud of how this came out. I don't have a set palette or anything for skin so most of the time, the tones get a little funky looking. Here, the skin's nice and bright, and I love the technique I used to blot the colours in.
Skirt and hair's also nice (the skirt especially just for the folds).
But yeah, really, when I finished the picture I was like, "OMG, did I ever improve! If I keep it up, at this rate, I might actually produce stuff coloured pro-like!"

In total, from the final sketch to the colouring, I'd say the picture took about less than a day to complete.


Sketched on scrap paper with mechanical pencil.
Coloured in openCanvas.
Writing done in Photoshop.

Also, heyy, new avatar!

Floating on Heart Bubbles

The name kind of just appeared. There's really no reason I called it that, especially since it's a heart balloon, there's only one, and she's not floating on, she's floating by.

However, stupid deviantART's size limit forced me to make it lose a lot of weight, so the animation's a lot faster on my actual avvie there.


Made in MS Paint.
Animated in Photoshop.

The Awesome is too Awesome to ignore

I can't believe I didn't upload this! This is too awesome to ignore!

Behold, my Photoshopping skillz:

Don't you like Pokemon? I love Pokemon. I even made a tribute to pikachu and ash here!
The size is awkward because it's intended to be used as an avatar in CR. Quick, someone use this so they can make a statement against "serious", anime, brush-spammed, colour-rape avatars other people have!

To be honest, I think PSing is fun every once in a while. I can't do any cool graphics because, god, I can't do anything that requires precision, but I can manip adequately. Yup, nothing better than trying to crop out real people and make them look alright to amp up my OCD.


Made in Photoshop.

Alright, bye. I sadly have work to do.