Here are some preliminary sketches for a book I am working on at this time. These illustrate the strange nature of the book and its subject, which is about a serious yet, at times, uncanny condition some people may be experiencing. So far I have 11 of the 17 main images sketched out. Work will progress on upping both the detail and quality next. I've said too much! :) The sketches will be fleshed out and altered as needed. My intent at this time is to create the final book illustrations, get the written part up to snuff and put the book together. Once done, the book will be available through self-publishing (not sure who I'm going with at this time, but have ideas). Then, selected images from the book will be available in poster prints, t-shirts, as well as other merchandise at the various outlets I sell through (Product & Support Menu item will bring you there - and I'll supply the link in another post when the time comes). Enjoy the images! ~ Randy |
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An old saying... Le roi est mort (The King is dead), vive le roi (long live the king)! An image I sketched for fun. I used Krita (a free, open source, paint program). It has some nice tools to mimic pencils, pens and paints of different sorts. I highly recommend it if you are into digital drawing/painting and art in general. It is important to have a graphics tablet (wacom or the like) to take advantage of the pressure sensitive nature of the digital pens, pencils and paint brushes --> Oh, and Krita is free too! Strangely, the model I used in the pose was a rather attractive female on the beach, laying on her stomach with hands digging/clawing into the sand. Amazing what you can transform your reference into (she was much more beautiful than this ended up I assure you!) :) An idea I had that I felt I needed to bring to life. This will be of value for those with children or adults and seniors - those with memory issues, Alzheimer or dementia. Fill in the information with a fine point laundry marker (check reviews and manufacturers instructions to get the best quality pen). Please visit any of the sites below to see the details in the descriptions. Thank you!
Links to save on typing. Brings you to the T's Society6 Zazzle RedBubble This time done in pen :) Needs more tentacles (and larger ones at that). Playing around with the original (digital) sketch's look and feel. I'll probably replace the current eye with that of the Nautilus in the lower left corner as it has a stranger look to it. The amount of software out there that allows an artist to realize their imagery in digital is abundant. But it can also be extraordinarily costly to go the commercial route!
As a graphic designer, I have used packages like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Maya and 3D Studio Max (just to name a few!). Any ONE of these can run you $1000.00, or more, to purchase. Personally I think the price is getting a bit crazy - especially for someone who doesn't make an income to warrant these costs, but still need an income doing what they love! As finances were tight at the time, I had been looking to alternatives and OH what I've found! Looking through what is known as 'Open Source' software, I've found several software packages which do wonderful as substitutes for various other commercial software at a fraction of the price (or free). Blender 3D is a 3D modeling, animation and compositing package which has been used for some pretty impressive videos and effects. Blender is constantly being updated by the large team working on the project (https://www.blender.org/) Krita is software to simulate conventional drawing/painting/artistic medium. With a graphics tablet you can get the pressure sensitivity as well, aiding the overall look and feel. This is another project being updated regularly! (https://krita.org/) Gimp is a pixel based photo editor with MANY features found in commercial software. Works great. Updates are a bit slow coming. I don't think there is many working on it (small team) (http://www.gimp.org/) Inkscape is a vector art program. Images are created using shapes, lines, curves and nodes as opposed to pixels. Works great as it is. Updates are a rarity these days however (https://inkscape.org/en/) Scribus is one for Desktop publishing. Whether you are laying out a magazine of 100 pages, or a single page newsletter, it works great! I haven't used this one extensively, however what I have needed it for it has come through wonderfully! (https://www.scribus.net/) There are MANY others out there! These are the main ones I use in the graphical department, and they are all free! (You can support all of them with donations!) There are a few Cons to Open Source. What I've found is that not all the software can be, or has been tested with all configurations of hardware, so sometimes there might be the occasional glitch. I've rarely encountered this, but have heard of it occurring. So SAVE OFTEN (which you should regardless of using Open Source or commercial!) The other is that they are not 100% compatible with commercial programs. You may, for instance, load an Adobe Illustrator file into Inkscape, but some of the layer effects will not transfer into Inkscape leaving you to do some cleanup (there may be a flattening of layers in Illustrator you can do - I never did however). I hope this list helps those looking for alternatives. If you know of any yourself, please let me know in the comments. A rough sketch I did (digitally) while playing with one of Krita's symmetry mode (it has several!) Krita is an open source, free, paint program that mimics pressure (and tilt) sensitive pencil/pen/paint with a graphics tablet. Along with many other things, it has some limited vector/stroke ability too! https://krita.org/ Back in 2012ish, I completed my first Oracle card set. It never saw the light of day. The idea behind the designs above was to be simple, while giving the observer a 'sign' of significance to their, or the querent's question. After getting a couple of prototype decks done, I shelved them back in 2012. I have decided to revisit this deck (after several people saw a photo that had these in the background). In doing so, I've made some adjustments from the above image that I believe make the cards better for their task and visually pop. For one, I added a background pattern. Two, the cards have been increased in size - from 2.25"x3.5" to 3.5"x5.5". And finally, I added 4 more cards that are not shown above. Here is a prototype of a new card from the revisit. Note: It has already changed a bit from this image, but gives you an idea as to the direction I'm moving with them. Thanks for viewing :) ~ Randy Between October '13 and mid December '13, I worked on close to 70 images for this deck of cards. This deck is originally intended for use as an oracle deck (think along the lines of Tarot cards and you'll get the idea).
I had lots of fun in their creation, and learned some new things along the way - including how to use Blender 3D, which is an awesome program. With the exception of two cards, which are photos, and another 4 other cards which were previously done prior to deciding to create this project, the remaining 64 cards were from scratch. Some may have had rough sketches done, but in most cases I knew what I wanted and just went to town. Pictured below. I'm selling a 70 card deck for $45 CDN (+shipping) for anyone interested. ~ Randy |
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