They said "steal".

Got bored last night...what have I done?

For all of those who aren't paintball savvy, this is a Halo B loader. At least it was before I desecrated it. It's a container that loads your paintballs into the chamber very very quickly. I'm getting back into my paintball game and thought I'd add a little illustrated flavor into it. Of, course I'd be open to doing commissions.

Here's a really quick one from tonight. Mmmmm...about 4 hours from thumbnail to finish. More like an elaborate beat board than a concept piece. I think I'll do a proper prop design layout for this one.

New Sketchbook

Well, it's been a week and a half since my last sketchbook got stolen out of my bag. The cover was a pretty, attractive, beveled green leather piece that wrapped around the actual sketchbook. So I had the opportunity to spoil myself with come new materials. Here's a few pages from my new one.

When Stupid Ideas Are Taken Too Far

Old Ma Robot-Process

The goal for this one was to experiment with Golden Acrylic's Digital Ground Medium. It's a medium that will pick up vivid prints from an inkjet printer and can be applied to any surface. Here's the subject thumbnail sketch with Tombow markers and Prisma Eagle Series black pencil. Just your typical sweet, elderly female robot with gears for curlers, holding up her copper wire hair.


This is the step after the designing of the subject. After painting on the canvas, I apply the non-porous gloss digital ground medium to the areas I wish to print. I haven't used it before, so I gave it two healthy coats and let it dry before scanning it.

Once scanned, I send it into the collage stage in Photoshop. I decided to keep the printed objects achromatic and just let the color of the background show through the negative spaces. I just used images of chain gears and scrap copper wire. Now it was time to print. I used a typical "U"-shaped feed printer and found some dificulty, but not too much. Golden recommends to used a straight-feed or an "L"-feed printer.
The print came out amazingly sharp with fidelity in the gradations. Then I just painted the copper wire on top of that and had a little fun with my new comb brush over the face to get more of a polished steel look. After all the big stuff was done. I brushed on the Golden digital topcoat UV gel to protect the print areas and punch up the true saturation of the print. Clean up this and that, cut it to size, then...BAM! Time to get my real work done. It was fun beacause it married two aproaches that I cherish- digital and traditional. A special thanks to Steve at Continental Art Supply for agressively recommending the digital media kit to me.