Caricature experiments

A couple more caricatures exploring different inking textures and colour schemes.



Photos

The Thing revisited

I originally posted my Thing illo a couple of years back, but recently decided to give old Ben Grimm a bit of a makeover. Below is the new version.


Back when I created the original in 2004, I was very wary of making major changes to my 3D work in Photoshop as I thought it would lose some of it's realism and start looking...well, Photoshopped. Four years on I've become a bit less precious about older art, and have also used many different programs together, both 2d and 3d for other jobs, and know that they can be used well together. In the end it's all about the final result, making a job as good as possible no matter how many programs were used in the process.


So from the side-by side comparison above, the most major change you'll notice is his mouth. I was never completely sold on the way the left side seemed to smile. It didn't feel right for the overall expression. To make this change I used what for me is one of the most useful and timesaving tools in Photoshop, the Liquify filter. It lets you push and pull areas of the image with any brush size and degree of subtlety. It's great for making changes to one's artwork which would normally take many hours to redo. Also his brow and nose were adjusted with the Liquify tool as well.

Additional changes were made in the eye area, a new rock texture was overlayed, and a more convincing cigar smoke was created. Also the colour and shadows were adjusted as well.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Let me know your thoughts.

Edit 9th August 2008- Thought I'd try my hand at a little bit of simple gif animation for my new forum avatar. Bit of a learning curve but it was fun.

Keeping the ball rolling...

Here's a few recent sketches and drawings.

The first one was for a Spanish fan who wanted a quick sketch of himself. Inked with a Pitt pen and some digital washes converted to dots in Photoshop. I quite like the way the dots turned out. A nice spontaneous feel to it.


The second was a quick caricature inked using an old Tombow brushpen. It's lack of ink and frayed tip gave a good drybrush effect.


Lastly a caricature of fellow caricaturist 'LeftyJoe'. He supplied an extra small reference photo to work from, so I poked fun by drawing his head to match. This was scanned pencil, coloured in Photoshop.

Photos

Magazine illos

Waaay way back in December 06 I posted a piece for a magazine article about the perils of illustration and fussy clients. Well it's finally getting published in Australian Creative magazine, along with the article written by the multitalented Matt Jackson.

Here are two new spot illustrations which are accompanying the main illo in the article. Once again exploring the problems of fussy clients, the power of the almighty dollar to buy the artist's ability to think for themselves, and the 'bastard child' that your artwork becomes when clients interfere unnecessarily.