3 Little Pigs… A spin-off

The Acts Theatre here in Lake Charles, LA is a great little spot to catch some local actors and actresses do what they do best.  My friend Michelle Woodyear asked me to apply my talents for their next show “The Real Saga of the 3 Little Pigs.”  I love these sorts of projects because of the spin and the classic story material… For example my artist trading card set of the “Don’t Care Bears”.  For this “pig project” I was told that these were young “hip” pigs, 2 female, 1 male.  Add in a momma pig and a bad wolf on top of that and make it look good.

I started with sketching the style of the pigs in a smaller sketch book so I could decide on the “style” of the characters.  Once I got that hammered away I started working on Bristol card stock with my #2 mechanical pencil.  Once the pencil was done I moved to my pens – .08 for the foreground, .05 and .03 for the background.  After inks were done I then scanned it in… then went to digital coloring.  Here’s were I deviated from my normal process a bit. I took the ink scanned in photoshop and applied threshold to it to get the right levels of black to white ratio.  Once I had that I saved out a jpeg and threw that into Illustrator.  Once in Illustrator I did a live trace… this gave me an exact vector version of my ink drawing – very good results from the original! Also, once this step was done I could select all the “shape blocks” in Illustrator and adjust the colors till I got the overall look that I wanted.  Obviously, this was cool and all but I had to get to shading and finishing… which I then went back into Photoshop to do.  I copied and pasted the colored blocks from Illustrator to Photoshop and applied shadows and highlights to those shapes via my wacom tablet.  It was definitely a more lengthy process than what I usually do, I think the reason I spent more time in Illustrator was because of the chance that it might have been blown up big so that the vectors wouldn’t loose resolution.

Here’s some of the work…

Inked / Scanned Version

Original Sketch on Bristol

Illustrator - Vector Version

Final Photoshop Version

Here's the Poster Version

Artifix Noctem – #3 Artist Trading Card Night!

Great night with a gang of friends!  Instead of having iCarly on the tube I chose to play Gentlemen Broncos. The theme for tonight was ATC (Artist Trading Cards).  Each of us was to work on 3 cards of any subject.  At the end of the night we would draw 3 numbers corresponding to each card… so, we would all leave with 3 different cards.  I thought this was a great exercise and the general consensus for the next night was to show up with a planned concept… since that kinda drained some time.

Kraken Killz

I had the itch tonight… not the itch that can be cured by ointment or cow bells (“i need more cow bell”)… the one that’s cured by getting on the wacom and doing the “do”.  I can’t remember the last time I did a 100% digital piece. This is all photoshop and wacom tablet… no pre-sketch or scanning involved.  This is a really good method to launch right into a piece and get it done in a decent amount of time. I’ve been anticipating the upcoming release of Clash of the Titans, a remake from an old cult classic.  I remember watching this movie allot as a kid, it really sparked my imagination to see giant scorpions, Medusa, Pegasus, that magic shield that Perseus wielded that ended up melting in Medusas blood…remember that?  Such an awesome movie for its time.  That inspired this piece… “Kraken Killz”  I wanted to do some sort of pop-art poster with the cult icon coming out of the water as it first appeared to the roman soldiers.  After drawing the Kraken I wanted to put in big letters in the background “KRAKEN”… then it came to me… Kraken’s do kill… and… Crack Kills… so… Kraken Killz – I thought it worked!

After the Kraken piece I’ll also post some other works that I did 100% digitally using Photoshop and my wacom tablet.