James O'Brien at Drawger.com!

The Ape Fell

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 04:40:44 EST

This is a personal piece about a man called The Ape, kind of a pulp noir, fall from grace type of narrative, a story about failure and resurrection. “Cursed are you among all.” A tragic villain.

An Wang portrait

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 05:04:25 EST

A couple of weeks ago, I was commissioned to do a portrait of An Wang, co-founder of Wang Laboratories and creator (along with Way Dong Woo) of the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949. For this portrait, I focused on a close-up 3/4 view of Wang in a suit and bow tie with his patented circuitry as a background pattern. A set of thumbnail sketches allowed me to explore translating his features into line and investigate composition and posture. I used this to create a sketch for the likeness.

Next, I sketched out some circuitry to use as the background pattern.

I combined this with the likeness sketch to create the final rough sketch to show to the client.

For the next step, I painted shapes with gouache for the head, suit, tie, and background. For this step, I was only concerned with the edge quality, the shape, and the texture within the shape from the brush strokes and subtle color value variations. I scanned these gouache shapes in grayscale.

Following the gouache step, I created the line work using a Pentel brush pen. I made an alternative line drawing for some of the facial features. In the first ink drawing, I made three left cheek edge lines intending to choose one of them, but then decided to leave all three.

I used the sketch in Photoshop as a guide for placing the gouache and ink elements.

In Photoshop, I converted the gouache elements to Index Color, limiting them to only two values; a medium gray and a dark gray. I then selected each of these grays and converted them each to a color that matched their value.

Next, I introduced a third value for the face texture and then began replacing the sketch with the scanned ink line work.

I decided to make the darker background and bow tie value match the face texture value.

Up until now, I had been working with a monochromatic red palette. For the final illustration though, I wanted the background to be a second color, and first tried a dull bluish hue…

…but then decided on an acid green…

…and finished by completing the final background circuitry pattern.

Luke Russert

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:54:04 EST

Luke Russert, with UFO.

Angry bear

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:10:39 EST

Here’s another Illustrator doodle, beginning with circles and triangles, no plan but quickly developed into a bear. This one has a more finished look than the previous doodle, and is mostly made up of transparent gradients with a bitmap texture. No set rules for this one other then left/right symmetry. Below are the path outlines.

Water illustration for WellDone

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 22:06:22 EST

I was asked by Kate Worum to create an illustration about water for a project she’s working on at WellDone. I often use Adobe Illustrator to doodle, to make an image with no plan in mind, just play around with shapes and color and see what happens. For this illustration, I set up a few simple rules for the doodle. The format was 6×6″ so I began with a blue square. Then, since I wanted it to be a face, I began with two circular eyes. After that, I made a drop shape to use as the only shape for the rest of the image. I could re-size this shape and rotate it, but I could not distort it, redraw it, or crop it (cropping could occur if the shape extend beyond the format edge). The palette was limited to three values, white, black, and blue as the middle value. My final rule was to create a left/right symmetry to reflect the symmetry of the eyes and the left/right symmetry of the drop shape (not counting the eyes, this rule was broken once, can you spot it?). Again, I had no plan for this, other than a face. Would it be a human face? an animal?

a Proboscis monkey?

a bear?

a lemur?

an odd-looking man with a mustache?

a butterfly?

a clown or masked wrestler?

But, eventually, what began to appear…

…was a tiger!

a decorative tiger!

with a winged one-eyed bug on its nose!

Bun E. Carlos

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:00:57 EST