This week's EWG Livestream Wednesday was a lot of fun, and a change of pace from the crazy amount of comic work and other graphic projects I've been cranking on all week. I much looked forward to some more free-style free-reign character art commissions. Well, it was an interesting night for sure. First it took me a half hour to get a good flow going on sketches to where i was happy with it, then I shot myself in the foot getting into the project and getting carried away and adding in way more 'stuff' than the commission was supposed to include. But ya know, I love spoiling the clients when they come out watch this stuff happen on Livestream. They probably don't get that enough. When it was all said and done, I ended up with the image shown first. And then hit CTRL+S like i usually do to save a job, and proceeded to restart Photoshop as it was glitching up pretty bad so I closed, it asked if i wanted to save something i clicked no..... and turns out it was all the work I did below. OOPS. But I figure the client signed off on everything I did, and enjoyed watching it happen, and I was due to get going on the next piece anyways so I decided not to stress out the client and let them know there was still 'some stuff i wanted to do' to it and would get it to them by the weekend, aka tomorrow. Well today all I had was a screen capture shown here of the original piece from the Live stream video, and I proceeded to re-ink over this capture and recolor.
Screen capture I redid the piece from Click to enlarge
And I also, for my brain fart, and for the client being awesome coming out, and there was several spots i wasn't happy with, I decided to make it more than worth the wait, and redo the piece improving it as much as possible. I decided re-inking/ coloring was a great opportunity to do it up right. And so I'm very happy with how it came out the second time around. A lot of guess work was gone because I worked from the original drawing, and new the general background/atmosphere I wanted. All I had to do was make it better this time around and I think I did so. But ultimately its up to the client whether it worked or not. Thanks for coming out Anubis, I appreciate you hanging out and also wonder if you realize this happened or not. But I think your gonna love whats sitting in your inbox waiting for you now. Readers should consider the Livestream video below completely accurate, and maybe like a tight 'mockup' color sketch that I did the final piece off of. Yeah... LOL. I believe you can even see where I clicked 'no' to save on the video. Ooops.
Final piece second time around. I had fun and made it good as possible to make up for the brain-fart karma of it all. Click to enlarge
Second up lastnight was Witty, who came in during the second half and had commissioned a very awesome character that screamed 'action shot' with weapons to toss and everything. So I did it up mid boomeranging and used drop shadow and the grounding backdrop object to create motion lines for a neat effect. I still think that's fairly unique to my pieces but nothings original in this day n' age! Also as late night streams do and fan pleasing goes, I tend to get a lil' crazy. Like I went to the wall on the 'Orchid piece' above I decided to give the client some jollies after they said 'looks like a comic cover!' and I set it up with type to make it just that :) So they got a copy o' both. Never know what random comments in the chat and late night and lots of coffee and software crashes will produce. Good stuff.
The original, click to enlarge
The cover version, just for fun.
Enjoy the livestreams below. One for each piece. The first one of 'orchid' will have to fast forward a bit took me a while to get going. I also had a brain fart (foreshadowing the non-save brain fart?) where I couldn't remember whose commissions or find the emails with the info lol. Wow... probably not a good night to be streaming if I was having issues that much but. I think these two ended up turning out alright! Needless to say I spent way too much time on the orchid piece all day and will be chopping at the bit to get caught up on some comic work and tshirt graphic work. Several things will get pushed back but there were some already being pushed to next week before the recreation of the piece. LOL LESSON LEARNED. SAVE MINUTE ONE! and save often after that. I know this. but. Again. Brain-fart night. Enjoy the videos below, and hope to see people out next week for another livestream, and hopefuly then will go smoother. In retrospect, today after finishing the recreated piece, Photoshop completely broke down so I was looking into other software alternatives and there's some good options out there but nothing 100%. I decided to reinstall Photoshop and actually researched setting it up to run faster, deleting extra plugins and presets, setting the cache and ram usage and setting up the scratch disk onto my external drive (shouldn't hurt the backup files) instead of on the C drive. Its already running 25% faster I can honestly say.
Alright, thanks for checking out the art, the articles and the livestream vids below. See ya round the interwebs.
