Noir

"I kept a wary eye on my customer. Among my people, the cunning of the Humans is legendary. Especially their females."

This was done for the annual Noir Jam at R3, held in honor of Vlad Fiks.  Along with the Noir genre, another of his areas of expertise was retro sci-fi, so I blended a bit of both for this image.

That's Tracy again, one of my repertory company of actors.  I promise, the bobbed hair is temporary-- we only shortened it in CGI... 8^j*  Across the table is a Daz Sea Dragon, wearing a spacesuit made from a Daz Spuggles character-- perhaps an ominous sign.

Flyers

R3 Jam: Flyers

Here are my avatar and his sweetie, aboard (for the moment) a Flexible Flyer™.

Obviously, thanks & apologies go to Bill Watterson. Now I see why he chose to draw a toboggan for this situation, during those eleven years...

Gnabbist

Summer's End

My humble tribute to Juicyfruit's clean, linear style.

Avatar for Grace

Dancers at the Café Alien

Emerald: Aliza: Kiara:

Oooh [giggle]-- Me, Doctor? Now there's a shock... Yah, who'da thunk it?

A humble tribute pic, for one of our number who often employs kicky color schemes. I do appreciate getting to view those "women of intense color." (Hmm, no wonder this project dragged on.) So once more (and not often enough)-- thanks neutron!

Now to hope that the extrapolated rear view of the avatar's head is recognizable. Oh, and to another of our rainbow warriors: the 8-ball's there, honest-- it's just hidden behind the blue dancer from this angle. I'll show you the layers sometime. 8^b*

Gnabbist

Cute AND Ratlike?

After RT's Jenki Ratkin character. It's an interesting challenge, trying to combine "cute" and "ratlike" characteristics... 8^b*

Bodécious Babe

An homage to the general proportions, at least, of Vaughn Bodé's curvaceous little bundles of femininity.

One technical curiosity: this was drawn using an old SummaSketch tablet-- decidedly not a pressure-sensitive tablet! The variations in line density were instead built up by using a Photoshop brush at partial opacity.

L & L for Imaginos - In Color!

The line work is mostly undisturbed from the grayscale original. The biggest revision (read: "nuisance") was smudging out edge jaggies: somehow, during the resampling down to display size, the layers interacted to create horrible fringes. [Editor's Note: I eventually discovered that flattening the image first makes resampling go much more, uh, smoothly.]  I also removed the old pencilled cast shadows, in favor of a separate airbrushed layer.

While colorizing this image, I discovered a nifty timesaver for skin tone shading. I have a lot more experience working in black and white and grayscale, so it didn't take me long to smooth out my initial pencil cross-hatching into gray modeling. But grays look dead and horrible overlaid on a skin tone base. Using Photoshop's "Image -> Adjust -> Curves", I remapped the grayscale values to a variable-hue gradient, running from dark red through sepia to pale greenish beige tones to white. Much nicer overlay for the two base tones I used here. Also very quick-- and repeatable.

The gradient from green "lawn" to blue "night" added some depth, but it needed more cues. So I loaded a temporary image with Gaussian noise, applied a motion blur, and "tilted" it back with a perspective transform. Had to make it real big, to have enough height left after tilting.

Gnabbist

The Redoubtable Geomette

Here's a sketch I did while trying to figure out what the heck Poser was doing to the hips in neutron's "Pumpkin Lady." So, using some Hogarth constructive anatomy tech, I applied the yaw, pitch, and roll <G> that neutron so patiently described in his response to my questions. Keeping the upper torso oriented toward the viewer, I went ahead and filled in the rest of the figure.

Sorry about the diminutive image dimensions, but this is the scale I work in for quick, direct-to-photoshop sketches. Coloring was a very simple imitation-marker rendering on a layer behind the imitation-pencil layer.

Gnabbist

Beware the Redoubtable Geomette:
she's got a Magenta Triangle around her head,
and a Transparent Hollow Sphere--
and She's Not Afraid To Use Them!!!
(Now, if we could only figure out how to use them...)

1999 Halloween Jam

Here's my contribution to this year's Halloween Art Jam.

Naturally, lack of time (and my faulty memory) ensured that I left out some of our artists' alter-egos and companion characters. Here are the ones who did overcome those obstacles, listed in (more or less) left-to-right order:

Brimstone ... the critic, borne by two of his amazonian lovelies ... FNmagic ... Random, accompanied by his character Heratic ... a "cleverly" disguised spambot ... WolfPup, with his character Mistress Cyn ... my Gnabbist avatar (who has assumed a mesomorphic shape for this party) ... JNG's "Nathan" alter-ego (about to savor his coffee) ... some guy in the window, wearing a blank false face and a robe made of some high-tech bi-color fabric (Note: this is not a sanctioned avatar) ... the construction worker from my site ... Degem (on the railing), thinking about preparing some pumpkin pie ... itieu, (at the window), behind an 8-ball ... Ryoko, accompanying Ryoko's Toy ... JamNut

Leaving A Light On

A rough initial sketch that I didn't develop further.
To absent friends...

Bubblegum

In a thread a couple of weeks ago that touched on the advantages of not needing to achieve a portrait-level resemblance in some pictures, Bigboote offered a comment something along the lines of, "as long as they don't ask what that thing is attached to the shoulders, you're all right." This, along with my avatar's then-recent debut, reminded me of an old joke.

My thanks to Ryoko and her devoted factotum for graciously agreeing to make guest appearances...!

Gnabbist

WolfPup takes a Bite out of Spam!

Back when WolfPup was first designing his alter ego, he graciously invited us pen-&-ink types to have a try at rendering the big guy. Here's one result.

Hope you don't mind, 'Pup, but Mistress Cyn, uh, "suggested" that she should accompany her favorite lycanthrope. And I sure wasn't about to try to tell her no! 8^D*

Technical notes: As usual, it's direct-to-digital, via cheapo PC, Wacom tablet, and Photoshop.

I discovered yet another old friend hiding in the Photoshop toolset, under an assumed name: a flexible-tip porous-tip pen. Adobe claims it's a pencil, a few pixels wide, with the pressure sensitivity set to vary size. But I know better-- it behaves like the Flair™ pens of my childhood! (When the whole tip was fiber, before Gillette put those stupid white plastic collars on them in the late 70s/early 80s.)

It was great fun inking in the happy couple, whom I had originally drawn with a virtual pencil (narrow Photoshop paintbrush, pressure varying the opacity.) The spambot was virtual fiber-tip pen throughout-- wheeee! This is the truest to my pen-&-ink style I've yet gotten out of Photoshop-- indistinguishable, in fact, from a scan of one of my fiber-tip pen drawings. Uncanny...

Actually, it feels a bit livelier-- more of a sketch-like energy-- thanks to the freeing effect of digital erasers. Bad line? So what? Undo, or use a perfect erase! No clumsy white-out fumbling and glopping.

I decided on a flat area color scheme, for the full cartoony effect. This led to GIF outperforming JPEG, for once. JPEG just gets confused by all that solid color stuff-- it showed hideous artifacts, even with the quality cranked up to where the JPEG's file size exceeded the GIF's.

Still, I used up somewhat more bandwidth than I usually do-- but I'm hopeful that it was worth it. 8^j*

Gnabbist

Welcome Back, Imaginos!

Welcome back, Imaginos! Before your move, you asked about the possibility of a Lara or a Leeloo picture. Well, since you didn't specify an exclusive or (heh heh)-- here are both of them, just after a shipping crate has broken open.

gnll4i00.jpg - Sketch, grayscale; L & L & whatever that thing is. In response to an Imaginos request. (Albeit a delayed response...)

My usual 2-pixel-paintbrush "pencil" sketch, although I did resort to using separate layers for the ladies. I expect I'll color this, after a bit more cleanup. Still, I couldn't resist posting the sketch version-- before I crush the life out of it reworking it, very likely... (Kidding, but not quite kidding.)

Gee, I could have sworn I ordered an andro-erotic life form, not a gyno-erotic one...

Gnabbist

Artist Delurking - thanks Bigboote

Happy Red Lectroid - gn_hrl1.jpg

See what happens when you leave a tutorial sitting out where just anybody can read it? 8^D*

Here's a modest thank you (at least I hope it constitutes a thank you) to Bigboote for inspiring this Photoshop user to get up off his background and exploit some dang layers already! Thanks for the pragmatic advice, the beautiful images, and for helping to establish the remarkably welcoming tone of this group. Nice place you folks have here.

Now, to get the commentary ball rolling:

I could've sworn that the girl's face in the original line drawing was a passable likeness. Somehow (perhaps through the magic of my inexperience at full-color rendering) I ended up painting a pleasant-looking Asian girl with a blonde dye job... (?) Nice, but not what was in the blueprints. Oh well, I'll try for better luck (and better photo references) next time.

Yes, the background (chair & purple void) is a bit of a placeholder. But, given my current lack of rendering speed, and a desire to get something posted before the end of the millennium...

Had way too much fun doing Christopher Lloyd impressions while drawing the Happy Red Lectroid figure. I wonder if anybody passing by the studio could fathom the significance of "Eat your HEARTS out, MONKEY BOYS!" Heh heh heh.

Gnabbist