Ben Crowder

I was reading Brenda Ueland’s excellent book If You Want to Write last night and felt like making some more art, so here is “Sleeping Bird,” a new illustration I painted in Photoshop. This one’s a different style from my usual:

It was (rather) loosely inspired by Chinese art. And it’s a ton of fun trying to achieve a not-so-digital look using digital tools. Next goal: learning how to do woodcut-style illustrations in Photoshop. Mmm.

Oh, and yes, I know that Brenda’s book looked like it was about writing, but it was actually about artmaking in general. But I’m still writing. :)

I’ve noticed a lot of cool photo manipulations online lately and got the itch to try my hand at one. Here’s the result, which I’m calling “Komodo King”:

As usual, it started out with a sketch:

I then went on Flickr and found some images (hurray for Creative Commons) that fit what I was looking for. First, the background wall (via cameliatwu:

And then the fighter (via fatniu):

Originally I was planning to use a frog or a chameleon, but I ended up going with a Komodo dragon instead (via jason_coleman):

I opened Photoshop, pasted the images in, and then moved, resized, and rotated them until I got a basic composition I liked (and I added a floor and did some basic lighting on the background wall and color correction on the dragon):

Next, adding a floor, basic lighting, shadows, color correction, and some rotation to get the dragon at the right angle:

Darker shadows (through burning and curves), more texture on the background wall, painting in some reflections on the dragon’s eye, and trying to figure out what to do with the fighter:

Cleanup on the dragon’s edges, shadow fixes, and a new dusty kind of lighting on the dragon (which I really liked):

At this stage I finally got something I liked with the fighter. Also did more cleanup on the dragon (including burning the shadows to make them more wrinkly):

The last stage was mostly just revising the fighter’s magic/weapon, painting the light reflections on the dragon, and doing some slight cleanup on the background wall (getting rid of the seams):

And there you have it. It’s meant to be sort of video game-esque (ala Street Fighter). And no, it’s not perfect (far from it), but I’m relatively pleased with the result. Taking random photos and weaving them together into a coherent piece is so dang fun.

You know, I seem to be doing a lot of art lately (and I’ve got another illustration in the works that’s coming along nicely), and wow, I’m loving it.

Got the urge to start painting again, so I did this in Photoshop:

For some obscure reason, painting smoke is really, really fun. :)

A couple weeks ago I designed some cards for stake conference:

I did it all in Photoshop, then got them printed double-sided at a normal business card size. A fun little project.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the drawing thing, but here’s a piece I put together in Photoshop this morning since I had a craving to make some art:

More later once I get caught up.

I don’t know if this even counts as a drawing. I might just change my goal from posting one drawing a day to posting one drawing or painting a day. It’s looking like that’ll be the de facto rule before long, at any rate. :)

Done in Photoshop by taking one of the default brushes and modifying the settings till I got what I wanted. I generally don’t care much for abstract pieces, but it was fun.

This one started out on an index card, then got photographed and redone in Photoshop:

I think I ended up getting more towards painting than drawing here. I have a feeling that’s going to keep happening, too. :) Anyway, the door is too dark, and there isn’t enough contrast in the rest of the drawing, but it was fun. And that’s exactly what I’m finding: messing around with art is delightfully, giddily fun. I’m trying a variety of styles and almost each one is something I can work with later to make some real art. I’m also finding that I’m drawn towards illustration rather than realistic drawing. Interesting.

Today’s is a total cop-out — I’m really trying to get to bed early (because I’m really tired), and I forgot about this until just now, so I quickly popped out this drawing and colored it in and now I’m foisting it on the public:

And no, I don’t know why I like to draw clouds so much. They’re easy? :)

For this drawing I sketched out everything first on index cards, photographed them, then pulled them into Photoshop and traced them:

We’ll pretend that the guys are supposed to be ghosts or something. :) And that the one on the right has really long limbs. If I had more time I would have stippled the rock textures, but instead I used a large brush, which unfortunately gave a very obvious repeated look. (I should have randomized the variation. Next time…)

Until I get a scanner (or start doing this early enough in the day that I can use a library scanner), I think I’ll switch to drawing them in Photoshop. This one’s called “What the Stork Dropped”:

I think I need to start doing these first thing in the morning. :)