Gryphon finished

I put some textures into the final piece and will call it done for the time being.

Gryphon - work in progress - laying down the vectors

Gryphon - work in progress, continued...

I've decided to keep this in the same color palette as the Wolf Mother image.

Gryphon - work in progress

Need to pump something else out during the Christmas break. Put sketch into Krita and get to work.

Wolf Mother print final (I think)

I feel this is complete now.

Wolf Mother. Work in progress with Krita

I tried to get some art done over the weekend. I picked the Romulus and Remus theme for no particular reason apart from it popping into my head and any subject would do, besides, it's iconic.

So far I've dropped pencil sketches into Krita and moved things around to get a composition, and figured out my color palette (keeping it simple).

I'd like to formalize the negative space between the babies and the teats, as there is almost a pattern forming there.

Also, I was screwing around, playing with bezier selection masks and created this rough head, I almost dumped the file but decided to save it, and the next day opened it up, deciding to take it further I ended up with this image of a boy walking a dog (with the dog doing all the walking). It's one of those aimless illustrations that has no real reason to be, but I like the dog leash, being the last detail added.

The right caption in the thought balloon would help bring it together.

Vector art in Krita

I decided to try using vectors only for this rather generic monkey design. I haven't decided which version I prefer so I'm posting both.

More animation with Krita.

This was based around a piece of art I had made in Krita a while back. I was looking through some of those works to finds themes or ideas that I might animate.

I will take the opportunity to again promote this incredible free software Krita, I had no idea it would be so intuitive for animation, I had previously made attempts to understand it but became confused about how applying frames worked.

However, when I wanted to sit down and really have a go, I quickly overcame that small issue and the way they have designed the animation work-space makes the laborious process of frame by frame as easy as it can be. You can just get to work and concentrate with the creative process without being caught up on technical UI issues or limitations.

You also have access to the tools and brushes you would normally use for making still images, and the layer system just adapts to any re-ordering or merging that happens as you work, any changes to the layer structure are run through the whole time lime and you don't even have to think about it.

I'm recommending this software to anyone who wants to start animating in a traditional manner without shelling out for paid apps such as Toon Boom or TVPaint.

I will design a bigger project to put it to the test, but it's hard to see why Krita would not be capable.

It's been a while...December Activity Dump.

I almost forgot I had a blog.

Let me update things. Firstly the Fat's Domino CD cover got finished, I did all the graphics (text) in Krita and here's how that turned out.

The thing that was nice was the ability to stroke my vector paths with the brush, so I could get the vari-line pen look on the "Fat's Domino" text.

More Muddling in Krita

I found that there was a filter plug-n for Krita, and then I found that it now comes as part of Krita and you simply have to activate it. So eager to give it a go I brought in an old (possibly my first in Krita) piece and applied some "G'MIC-QT" filters.

Here's the original.

And now with some filters applied.

Rock and Roll took over for a bit

I went through a month or so of listening to cheesy crunchy Glam Stomp rock pop and began compiling CD play lists, on the tenth CD I simply took all the best tracks from those to create the ultimate play-list. So now I needed a cover for the CD so I began working in Krita again.

At some point during this I stopped sketching on paper and importing the scans, and just sketching the ideas out directly in Krita, so that's a thing now (although I'll still use paper because it's portable).

Then I went to work on the whole cover concept and here is that.

Now during this period something quite wonderful happened, someone created Krita-artists.org, a proper forum dedicated to this wonderful open source paint program.
Obviously I signed up and began posting some things, and this piece actually got onto the top row. Which was odd actually because I don't get much feedback about my stuff on there.

Animation. The next step

I'll finalize this activity dump with my latest experiments in Krita, I've been delaying it, animation. Well over two days I got down to studying Krita's animation work-space. After a little effort I found it actually quite straight ahead, there wasn't much head scratching.

Here's my first two animations.




Krita is now the app I'll go to for frame by frame animation. It has everything for what I need.

Two Fats Domino covers done in Krita

I've been listening to the fat man for a few weeks now and decided to make a CD cover for the track list I'd put together. I haven't placed any text on these yet because I discovered that Krita is not good with that (unfortunately).

Loose Doodles in Krita

Just downloaded a free screen capture software and wanted to test how it performed while working in Krita (in case I decide to do video tutorials).

The end result of those two sessions are below. Just loose sketches, but why not post them anyway.

The free screen capture program is called OBS Studio.

Character replacement

Oops! I made a mistake with the previous image, I've now put the right guy in the shot.

Latest character pose

I got busy today and finished this particular image, it took the whole week to work out how to proportion the Cadillac, because they are stupidly long vehicles and I didn't want it dominating the frame. I also experimented with some graded looks over the final image.

MOHO 13 is about to drop.

Even though I intend to use open source as much as possible, I may make an exception in the case of Moho 13.

Moho now has bitmap brushes for proper frame by frame animation.

Moho is great and I used it in the past with the vector tools, however I wanted to get away from just animating with puppet rigs, and it looks like this release will give us more choices for animation types.

In this video McCoy Buck downloads the trial and starts putting it through it's paces.





Also some examples of the different brush types from Charles Kenway.

Speedflow Version 0.13

Cedric has been busy updating his marvelous Blender Addon 'Speedflow', now working here in Blender 2.8. It's essentially a non-destructive workflow tool (or rather a compilation of tools) for modeling.





Please watch it on YouTube if you want the links, I recommend the addon.  Having been concentrating on 2D art, I haven't done 3D in Blender for a while, but I will get back to it at some point, and I would like to get fully comfortable with Speedflow.

Saturday's character pose

I  started this pose when I got back from shopping, it is the next key pose from the last one I posted.

If I continue with this project it will be a lot of work, I may not post every single piece of it here, that could get boring.

Tonight's Pose

I found the only pencil in the house and did a sketch (sketching with black pens doesn't give much room to gently explore ideas), scanned it, dropped it into Krita and knocked this character pose out.

I'm using Gimp to communicate with the scanner, as part of the move to using open source software where possible.

Character poses cont...

I'll be putting up these images as I create them, I've been working on this pose over the whole week after work, making a number of big changes mainly on the second guy.

Some new character designs, and an announcement.

I'm considering doing another little animation, and this time attempting to do it all traditional frame by frame style, in Krita.

Here are the two main characters, using my vari-line pens for that old school ink style.

Also, this blog is going to primarily feature my own work from now on, I'll probably not feature inspiring videos by others or write about the latest interesting motion graphics plug-in, since I no longer work in the industry and have lost interest in many things I once thought were nifty.

I'd rather spend my creative time doing stuff I always wanted to do before I got side-tracked into paid graphics work, and since I now have a job outside of all that (and I don't think anybody reads this blog anyway) I'll let it be an online repository for documenting progress on my own projects.