Queen of Neverwas & FCBD

I haven't been posting as much as I'd like these last few months -- there was a health issue as well as a work crunch, but the largest issue was this aging computer and my attempts to keep it going.  I've had to relent and order a new computer after losing far too much time fighting a losing battle in keeping my little XP driven box working.  All sorts of things fell by the wayside including several Burning Itches, which I really regret as some, I thought, were quite clever if not funny.

One thing that did come of all this was my rediscovering other things I'd put aside over the years while going through the archives in this hard drive as I start prepping for the new machine.  I'd started the above painting back in the August of 2010 with the notion of making a print of it for the FanExpo that month.  I wasn't happy with the progress so put it aside to work on it later, which turned out to be this evening after dealing with yet another computer crash.

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It's Free Comic Book Day this weekend and Dale Keown and I will be the guests at Comic Book Addiction in Whitby!  I'll do sketches and have prints (including the one above, though it'll be in the back of my print book since FCBD does skew toward all ages material).  If my computer allows I'll be able to finish the piece I was working on specifically for this FCBD.
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Not sure if or when I'll return to doing Burning Itch once I have a more stable digital working environment -- I already planned on ending it in October to replace it with something else, so I'll have to think about that.  If you really want them back, do let me know!

~R

Jungle Girl update -- dinos!

I stole some time to get back to this painting this morning. I drew a bunch more dinosaurs and tried them in the hole made by erasing the previous T-rex. So far I've just "colourized" the pencil drawings and smudged and erased a bit to get them in the direction of matching the rest of the piece. It's kind of obvious they're both sitting on different layers and I haven't done any painting to them yet.

Gonna let these sit a bit before I decide on which one to go with and exact placement. Right now the left one looks too centered in the opening and the right one could be rotated counter-clockwise a bit to feel more like it's moving.

I've also decided I have to place a few more bit of ruin here and there so the giant stone head makes a bit more sense

Jungle Girls Update 6

Spent about an hour or two on this so far this morning. Realized the tools I needed at this stage were in Painter, so I flattened it and ported it out of Pshop. There's still a rather long list of things I want to finish or tweak, but I don't want to rush this as I'm really enjoying the process and pace of it, so it'll get done Monday instead of today for the second and last day of the convention.

Dunno if the work that apparent from the last WIP, but it feels like I've done a lot of smaller, but important changes to the overall piece.

So far I'm pretty happy with the trees in the midground, but everything else needs more work. I might redo the T-rex completely, or at least turn its head so it seems like its looking at the main characters (yeah, I know T-rex's had horrible forward vision) -- it might be me, but it's pulling me to close to the edge of the image today.

Also have to make up my mind about what sort of dagger she'll be holding -- but that'll get drawn in pshop.

Jungle Girls Update 5

Grrrrr. The clock beat me. This is all I'm able to to before I have to start getting ready for the con today. Put, maybe, another 40 minutes in this morning, but the changes and additions are getting smaller and incrementally less noticeable. I did notice that my monitor calibrations were off again, so the image needed quite a bit of tweaking on alteration layers to fix that.

Still lots to do on the main figures -- hopefully I won't be too fried and I'll wrap it up tonight after the con.

Jungle Girls Update 4

4:41 in the morning -- the dinosaur has put me way behind where I'd thought I'd be (done), but it's worth it, I think. The main colours are all in, but it needs a few more passes, adjustments and a knife before I can call this done. Don't trust myself to do that too well when I'm this tired and looking at a full day at a con, so Ima gonna gets sum Zzzzzzzz. . . .

. . . And try and wrap this up in the morning before I drive out to the con.

Jungle Girls Update 3

So, my son looks at the screen while I'm working on this and asks what the ruins I'm drawing are for. When I really don't have a good answer, he goes "Why don't you add a dinosaur or something."

So, deleted the ruins layer and about two hours work and drew a T-rex. Prolly gonna put another hour or so into that then start working toward the top layer, leaving the girl and tiger for last.

Gonna be a late night, I think.

Jungle Girls Update 2

Slapped tones on the tiger -- yeah, decided I really want that orange/red happening in the foreground. Just as I saved this as a jpeg I realized I hadn't finished the jungle girl's leg. Gonna quickly do that before I start blocking in a background.

The jpegs I'm putting up here are work size -- 15x22"@300 dpi, 150% of my intended print size.

Jungle Girl update

Update:

I'm rendering in the values in black and white. At this point she kinda looks a bit like Storm from the X-Men, though I'm intending to lighten the values to make her flesh tones that ghostly-white that so many of Fritz's women had. When I start to colour I might change my mind -- it depends on how the overall piece starts fitting together when I start blocking in background and colour.

Thinking I might make the cat a jaguar, though a reddish orange tiger would pop from the greens I'm envisioning for the environment. Many hours to make up my mind as I start toning the cat then putting together a speedpaint for the background. For that, it's gotta be overgrown ruins of some sort.

Jungle Girl Print for FanExpo

Decided to try and squeeze in a piece of artwork to make a print for this weekend's Fan Appreciation Event in Toronto:

Yesterday I did a bunch of thumbs after I developed an inkling of what I wanted to draw. I've been itching to do something Frazetta-inspired since his passing. I didn't want to just draw or redraw one of his classic pieces, so I focussed on the things that really said "Frazetta" to me. Despite his amazing male figures, it has always been his women and big cats that made the biggest impression on me. So, some sexy amazon astride a giant lion/tiger-type -- perhaps even a sabertooth in some dark jungle ruins is what my brain spat out after ruminating while chugging away on an elliptical machine in my gym.

I really like drawing parts of a piece at a size comfortable to draw that part at. Working on 14x17"bond, the above cat is about 12" wide. It's been a while since I drew something like this, so I pulled out my various How To - books to make sure I was getting the forms right. There was no way I was going to draw the jungle girl that size and get anything I could be happy with, so I merely placed in a scribbly manikin for gesture and position so I would have a good feel for how I'd position the girl.

The above drawing is around 14"tall -- so it's even larger than the cat above despite how small she's going to be in the final piece. Working this large allows me to draw with my arm instead of my wrist which, hopefully, allows the figure to look more fluid. The details that show large here, will largely disappear in the final, but the suggestion of the necklace and other ornamentation will work better if I can place it accurately on the form -- something that's easier to do at a larger size.

here's how they look merged together:

I have an image in my mind of how the rest of the composition works out, but that's something I'll actually do when I start painting in photoshop later today.