Writing...writing and more writing
Well it's been a while since I updated this blog...so whats going down? hmmmm well if you reeeeeally want to know. I've kind of busy trying to finish up writing my children storybook as well as doing research and reading up on the market so I can know what to expect and how to start. Believe it or not you just can't just up and write & draw a book then go to a publisher and say, "here yah go, now when do I become famous?!"
I found out it's a lot of frickin work, full of rejections and pride swallowing; also you have to do a lot of your own self promoting.
With my story I should be done before the end of winter and I'm already starting to do thumbnails for my characters. I can really start drawing actual pages really though it'll I do a dummy-book and plan out the layout of the pages, book size and boarder style. The only suck part is getting bombarded with distractions of other side projects. As far as I know I have 2 gallery pieces to get done and a UBER business venture involving character designs for a DL cell phone videogame (but that's all I'm going to say about that...it's a secret)
Anywho, back to business...
Vampire Eating Wormgetti
Backstory: Originally I drew this about a year ago and it just got lost in a pile of unfinished drawings, then one day I decided color it. As usual it was drawn in pencil, ink with pens & markers then scanned into Photoshop and colored. First I want to say the worms were a pain to draw and color as they look, but you know me I love to point gross details into my cartoony pictures and exaggerate them.
When I colored it I was toying with the idea of something more realistic than cartoony, but have way threw I wasn't really having fun with it and said, "Screw it" and went back to my normal coloring approach style.
When I drew this picture I forget to put in a table, so the plate is pretty much floating in space. So I just made the area extra dark like he's eating in the dark with little light. I added some bloodshotness to the eyes in the pic, but to the vampires eyes I added in a slight reflection of the worms. To get that effect I just re-uploaded another picture file of the drawing and crop it to the same shape of his eye and adjusted the opacity lower.
The fork in my opinion was a coloring pain to get it nice a silvery. Now if it was a sword, sphere or something my organic looking it would be childsplay, but the angle I drew the fork cause a bit of a problem. I added a default chrome gradient and toyed with the opacity and color to get it the way I wanted it. The rest was just using an artist eye and optical illusions for the pattern to give it a 3dimensional look to it...it paid off I think.
I may go back and play with the shadows in his right eye(your left) I took a tad bit too much artistic licensing because I love his wrinkles. Speaking of wrinkles believe it or not, the wrinkle on his cheek were added in after the fact.
All and all I like it and that's all that really matters in the grand scheme of me doing things my way in my work. For a picture I was iffy about and did a tad bit of Photoshop surgery I'd shake my own hand if I had two right hands...naaaah I'm not a ego guy.. to be doing that...hahaha :) well ttyl
