I also wanted to mention that the lovely people at Cat on the Wall did a three part interview series with Amaranth Games. It features the producer (and all-around superwoman) Amanda Fitch,  musician Aaron Walz, and little me. It's a good read, especially if you're curious about what goes into making indie games.  Also, there are images that I haven't posted anywhere else yet.  Go see! 

Before I place any brush strokes, I decide the location of my light source.  I know that I want the girl to be the main focus, so I pick an angle for the sun that will best highlight her against the background. I grab a big round brush and set its opacity to something around 75% and start painting on the background layer.

I want the overall image to feel green, but I also want some color variation. I grab some different colors, blues, siennas, and yellows to add variety. I think about the mood of the environment while doing this. I imagine a bright warm sky with some light filtering down diffused from the trees and plants above. The atmosphere of the ruin would be darker and cooler, so I represent this using colors.

Now that the background is generally blocked in, I think about the figure.  She needs to really stand out from the back wall if I want her to be the focus of the image, so I pick out bright saturated colors for her.  I use an orange-red for her hair and shoes because it's a complimentary color to the green.

At this time, most of the big values are established, so I am able to lower the opacity on the lines. Having the lines faded back, allows me to see how the colors and values are holding up on their own. Without the stark lines, I notice the image needs some saturation and contrast.  I open up Hue/Saturation (ctrl u or cmd u) and push around the saturation slide until I'm fairly happy with it.  I know that I'm going to be upping the contrast next and that will saturate it some, so I'm sure to compensate for this now and hold back on my instincts a little bit.

Next I open levels (ctrl l or cmd l) and play around with the sliders to up the contrast.

The piece looks brighter now, but I want the blue to stand out at the bottom.  I could use the brush to work this up, but I want to demonstrate another technique I use frequently.  On a new layer above the background I use a gradient with my foreground color.  I only want the bottom half to have color, so I have transparency as my second color in the gradient.

I then lower the opacity on the gradient layer and grab a big soft eraser brush.  I set the eraser's opacity to something around 33%.  I can experiment and see what looks best erased out and softened.  This would also work with a layer mask. I merge this layer down once I'm satisfied with it.

The top of the image isn't looking as bright as I would like.  I could go in and repaint it, but it is faster to gently brush over it with the dodge tool.  The dodge tool can make colors look horrible pretty fast, so I only use it at a low exposure with one or two quick passes.  A big blurry brush will help to prevent the edges of the dodge showing up too much.

I'm pretty happy with the background adjustments at this point, but the figure is too subdued.  I really want her to stand out, so I grab some magenta, orange and yellow to give her more emphasis.  Once that's completed, I feel pretty satisfied with the general mood of the piece.  Now it's time to slow down and drag out my reference photos to start working in details.

Her first challenge for me was to draw manly men.  No Victorian gentlemen allowed.  She gave me a couple themes  and I quickly latched on to her idea of drawing prohibition era gangsters.  She also suggested that I try to include some interaction of some sort.  I threw in the weird perspective and car to make myself cry. 

Here’s the original line art and a progress shot  as of today. I’ve nailed down the basics. Now I need to go in, clean up and add detail to things I've been avoiding. I think I’m a little past 60% done on this one, woot!

 
In other news, Mr. Desmond Foxfoot has been promoted this month, from desk duster to cintiq wrist pad.  He has aspirations leaning towards art direction though.  Yesterday he sneezed on one of my sketches and I think he was right. It was bad.  As you can see, he also likes seagulls.  (No, Desmond, that's not a duck, it's supposed to be a seagull.  Come on, give me a break... I'm from the midwest and we have ducks there.)

Today isn't one of those days though.  That's probably a good thing, because I don't have anything terribly important to do.  In fact, I'm planning on spending a few hours in Photoshop working on one of these 5 works-in-progress that I've been working on this week. Then I'm spending the rest of the day away from the computer, I promise!

By far, my most used brushes are hard rounds, like 1 and 2.  I start with them to block in color and I don't change to another brush until I'm nearing the stage where I need to add textures. Changing the opacity and color-picking constantly helps me get a lot of mileage out these brushes, especially in the first half of my painting process.

Soft rounds don't get nearly as much use from me. I like the textures that layering hard edges creates and I've found that if I use the soft brushes too often, my paintings start to look airbrushy.  However, big soft brushes are great for heightening washes of dark and light in large areas.  If I'm applying color in brush mode other than normal, I often use the soft brushes to keep the effects subtle as well.

4 is a new favorite of mine.  It has a nice toothy texture and works well to emulate pencil strokes.  It's also a nice alternative to hard rounds, when I want a less mechanic stroke.  The calligraphic angle helps add an extra variant to my strokes, so it works well with a lot of organic shapes.

6 is a rough round bristle brush which works great for smeary textured shapes.  It is my go-to cloud brush guy.  Upon discovering it, I found that painting clouds became about 10 times easier for me. This alone makes it one of my favorite brushes, but it is a great texture brush even without considering its awe-inspiring cloud powers.

7, 8, and 9 are a few of my favorites for texturing images. I have a ton of these kinds of brushes and they make up the bulk of my collection.  These three are some of the more commonly used ones.  I especially like 9 if I'm trying to make things look a little more painterly.

10 works great for wood boards, but I mostly use it for clothing.  When I cross hatch with this brush, it works well for creating a cloth texture and it's really good at building up believable form on fabric.

11 and 12 are hair and fur brushes.  I usually start with something like 11 to softly brush in the general forms of the hair and then I work details in with 12. 12 works great on a high-strength smudge brush when combing out hair as well.

I use 13 and 14 mostly as smudge tool brushes.  I don't use the tool a lot, but occasionally I need to soften up the edge of an object or blend skin tones.  13 works great around 5% strength in a small size for blurring effects.  I lightly smudge with the brush, by outlining around the form to soften edges. I find that it works better than using the blur tool, especially with really large canvases.    14 works best with a high strength (75%+) smudge.  It blends colors while adding texture.  It's tempting to take a shortcut and use it to blend everything, but overuse seems to muddy colors too much. 

I've been working on a few private projects in my spare time.  The first is a business card I worked up for Casual Connect and other events.  I edited the typography on one of my portfolio images to work as a promotional piece with my information.  It is fantastically fun to hand out "Admit One" ticket stubs instead of business cards.  I did change my phone number for the web version, but you can still imagine what it looks like.

The other two are little side illustrations that I am working on in my spare time.  The first is really close to completion.  Most of the image is refined, I just have small objects and textures left to paint.   The second one has been slower coming along.  I've done about 6 color studies and I haven't found one that sings yet.  I'm giving it a break for the time being and focusing on work illustrations.  I'm hoping I'll have a better idea for it after I've given it some time alone.

Earlier this year, I was contacted by the lovely people at Amaranth Games to do some background art and other game assets for a time management game, Yummy Drink Factory. I was told it would be a casual game in which you play as a barista who serves drinks to various fairy tale creatures. I jumped at the chance to illustrate for them and there was probably some excited squealing too.  I love things that are quirky and cute, so I knew that it would be a treat doing the art for the game. 

I spent a few months working closely with the game designer and she gave me a lot of freedom to create some unique and colorful backgrounds.  At some point, I was even asked to draw a bowl of warts, which was oddly delightful.  I believe I sat there with a stupid grin on my face while I was drawing them. Honestly, I made them look quite tasty.

While I was smitten with drawing warts, the wonderful Claire Belton created some fantastically adorable creatures to inhabit the villages and various game assets as well. Together we managed to cram all the cute we possibly could into this game.  So I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart.  If you're diabetic, I'd avoid it, because it's awfully sweet.  

As you can imagine, I've been eagerly waiting for the game to be announced so that I could share the artwork here on the site.  The game has now officially been released over at the Amaranth Games community.  There's even a nifty one hour trial version available for download. Later this month, it will be available at some large game portals. I strongly urge my fellow gastropods fanatics to check it out.  I, in fact, challenge you to find the slug on a stick in the game.  Oh yes, there's a slug on a stick in the game.  That alone is worth the $20.