If: Entangled

Experimented some more with custom brushes I downloaded for Photoshop. I started feeling out buildings and decay and destruction out of it as I built up the brush strokes, an urban entanglement of progress and stagnation, of the glory of achievement meeting the violence of despair and nihilism.

If: Music

"From all the drinks, 
I get drunk off music..." 

—CSS

Done in PaintTool SAI. Linework comes out nicely, but I'm still deciding on how I like coloring in it.

IF: Unbalanced

Just call me Stella, cuz I'm getting my groove back.

I was working on collaging some stuff to put up on my wall yesterday when this week's IF word (and last week's pick) reminded me that symmetrical and perfectly balanced is overrated. So I shook things up, unbalanced 'em, and made a little ode to asymmetry to put up on my wall.

IF: Blur

Been a while.

For Illustration Friday's subject, "Blur." Made me think of being haunted by demons, but pretty much everything has since watching Paranormal Activities. I swear that damn movie didn't creep me out at all until I got into bed and turned out the lights. I felt like I was waiting to either fall asleep or get dragged off the bed by one foot.

That demon was a dick.

Anyways, openCanvas apparently doesn't work on Windows Vista, so I decided to give PaintTool SAI a go (which I found suggested here when searching for an alternative). Did the initial sketch + color on SAI and did the background in Photoshop with some shiny new brushes I downloaded.

So far, SAI seems to have a lot of the features I loved about openCanvas: it's not bulky (it opens fast and doesn't lag the brush when I draw) and it's focused on painting/drawing so it works well with my Wacom tablet.

On the other hand, as it is originally a Japanese program, so some of the tools are hard to figure out and ALL of the brush settings are labeled strangely so I have to experiment more to figure out what they do. And I miss having event files :(

I think I might try some of the other ones like ArtRage, MyPaint, Pixia, and GIMP to compare...

Skyline

Submission for Illustration Friday's topic "Skyline". I know what you're thinking. This has absolutely nothing to do with the words "sky" and/or "line. But it's not as random as you think. I went an elementary school called Skyline, and I remember one of the projects we did, which involved tracing a maple leaf, dividing it into sections, and decorating each section uniquely.

Okay, it is as random as you thought, but I spent three days on it so it works.

Done in OpenCanvas.

Girls are evil.

My thing for the Illustration Friday topic "Sticky." About a half hour in OpenCanvas.

Naruto 280

This is the newest submission to Naruto scanlators. It's pretty sloppy because I felt too lazy to go into detail, but experience is experience.

Original:


Mine:

Again, finally!!!

Yet another project that I had been sitting on for a while, in the good old days before the knowledge that I could lock transparent pixels. I think this came out a lot better than the Clanyad one, but I really don't have the energy to go back and work on Clanyad again. I can't even stand looking at it anymore, so I moved onto this Naruto chapter coloration, one of a hundred things I started as a way to learn Photoshop.

Somewhere along the line on this one, I made the mistake of dropping the resolution to 150 by some stupid mistake instead of the usual 300 dpi. Rather than up the resolution again and clean the whole thing up, I just pushed through. This was another thing I approached with too high expectations, so I figured if I don't get it done in a couple of days, I'll NEVER get it done. I pretty much just had flats laid out from before, so I did most of this in two days. I think I'm getting the hang of Photoshop now.

So, here is the line of progress:


Original vs. First few hours in my renewed attempt vs. Final