Fanciful Wine Bottles

This is just a little sketch with some colors splashed in with Photoshoppe, exploring a few ideas about hand-blown wine bottles and glasses in fanciful shapes. It isn't a fully realized final piece. It will also appear on my Noantri blog, because this wineware is from an alternate universe.

Ink sketch and Photoshoppe, about 2.5" square, October 6-7, 2011.

Cats of the Four Elements

Usually my clients who commissioned miniatures wanted their own portrait and name on them. But one fan from New Jersey wanted her cats to have their own portrait nametags. She had four of them, and from what she described of their personalities, I decided to place them in the theme of the four traditional elements. As was common in those Celtic-centric days of fandom, two of them had names from Celtic mythology. My tag for "Black Powder" was the only tag where I ever used pre-made ("press-type") lettering. My tag for "Tallitu" had a bit of shaping around the edge, since like the others, it was not going to be used as a real nametag badge. The cats are all gone, but as always I wonder what happened to the person and her miniature art.

4 nametags of the usual miniature shape and medium, collected and arranged in Photoshop, April 1982. Click on the pic to see it a bit larger.

Digital Chalk Drawing

I'm experimenting with soft edges in Photoshop figure drawing. What I want is something that delineates the figure around the edge without being too dark and line-like. The edges of a figure are often darker, especially in bright light, but they blend into the solid form of the body and that effect is hard to get in pencil or other media. But chalk and charcoal blend easily so I tried to simulate that effect in Photoshop. I have hardly ever used chalk or charcoal to draw with because they are so messy. But the pixel blender works great (as long as you set it just right and don't use it too much) and you don't get gritty dirty dust all over you. The model here is from one of the excellent "Art Models" resource books for artists. I like working in this muted sepia color.

Photoshop, original size about 5" x 7", October 5, 2011.

C.J. Cherryh character miniature

C.J. Cherryh, a veteran science fiction author, was very popular among the fans in the late '70s and early to mid-'80s. And even now, Cherryh is still writing away. Back in the fannish past, images from Cherryh's books popped up in science fiction convention art shows and were easily recognizable. Hence this nametag miniature, on which I depicted one of Cherryh's warrior space tribesmen, a mri. This is not a ninja but a desert fighter along the concept of the Tuareg of the Sahara. The miniature was among the bunch I gave to a friend to market at various conventions.

Mri fighter miniature is ink and watercolor on Fabriano paper, 2 1/4" x 3 1/2", summer 1981.

Pin-up Nude Digital Study

Here's yet another of my attempts to do a pin-up style nude in digital media. She's derived from a photograph taken by the famous pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager. I'm trying to get the skin color right even though the model photograph was black and white. I know this isn't perfect but I think it's better than my previous tries. The face isn't bad either, though I had trouble with her neck. I'll keep trying for pin-up progress.

Photoshop, about 10" x 7", October 1-2, 2011.

Tange Album Cover Series

Longtime readers (all four of you) have seen my cover art for the Scottish electronic music maker "Tange" before. Tange is now about to release a series of his live improvisations. He asked me to make a single cover which could be produced in a different color for each album in the series. This is the result for the first four.

Even though the design is intentionally retro (inspired by 1960s "modern music" album covers) it is the product of Photoshoppage. I created the starfield in the background, then imprinted the flower-like pattern warped into an oval from a circular original. Then I added the warped keyboard, which was originally a straightforward picture of an electronic keyboard, in fact one of the ones that Tange plays. Finally, the original color was modified through the "Hue" control to produce a different color in the two-color design. The "modern" type came last. All of these elements could be quickly changed at any point, something which the graphic designers of the past would have to slave for hours to do. Click on the pic to see a somewhat larger version.

Critter Encounter

I like designing and drawing fantasy critters. They're not fierce or scary, they're curious. They are often mash-ups of Earth creatures which wouldn't happen. For instance, the guy on the right has characteristics of both an armadillo and a bee, and the thing on the left is sort of a mollusc with a spider's face. Are they going to fight? Try to eat each other? Or maybe just sniff at each other and walk away? That's critter politics. I draw these at odd hours on odd bits of paper, with no artistic purpose in mind. That's right, Emikk, it's the critterdoodle of the forgotten minutes.

Original drawing is about 5" x 1 1/2", Pitt technical pen on sketchbook page, September 27, 2011.