Rocket's Red Glare (Process)

The following is an overview of the process I have been using to paint my last few illustration commissions. There is some information here that I touched upon in my last process post, but "Liberty City" offered unique challenges that I thought were worth exploring in a little more detail.

At this point in the process, I have already developed my idea with pencil drawings and digital sketches. Rather than transfer the composition to illustration board with gridding, or a projector, I begin by redrawing the sketch with my brush. This is sort of a shortcut, but it also means that the end result will be a little different from the preliminary sketch, (which I think is a good thing.)


As I move paint around, nothing is important except the overall proportions. Values, lines, small details, all these things will be fussed over later. Painting them now would only inhibit the work at hand. There is no mark so beautiful that I will hesitate to scrub it out and redo it in an instant.

This is my favorite stage in the process. My palette consists only of whitest white, and blackest black. Shapes are massed in one, then refined or erased with the other. But unlike using graphite and an eraser, here you are using the same material to create both light and dark shapes.

With the surface of my quarter established, I am ready to build my city. The first step is to lay down the roads. It is not important that these lines be particularly beautiful, or smooth, but if they do not appear to lie on the same plane as the quarter, the illusion of dimensionality in my city will be compromised. ( There are systems one can follow to create this illusion of depth [1, 2, and 3 point perspective,] but it is also possible to "wing it," as I am doing here. If the lines convince you they are receding in space, then you have gotten close enough to the laws of perspective to pass mustard.)

The city blocks are then divided into building size rectangles. . .

and the streets are cleaned up with a coat of black paint.

At this point, the two dimensional plan of the city has been established, and I can begin to focus on the work of pushing my buildings into space. Rather than treating each building individually (which would require a great presence of mind to keep so many small bits of perspectival information consistent,) I first paint each block as if it were a uniform, rectilinear slab.

I then "decorate" the walls of each slab with a row building shaped outlines.

Finally, I outline the corresponding roof planes. In this way, I am working from biggest to smallest plane, keeping the perspective consistent by checking the pitch of one plane against the one that proceeded it.

I repeat this process until all available space on the quarter has been occupied. Massing in my forms in white, and refining them with black line.

Mass. . .

Refine. . .

. . .Repeat.

Once the field is largely covered, I clean up the surface of the quarter that remains visible,

. . . and drop shadows onto the horizontal planes of my buildings with a thin wash of watery grey.

Ostensibly, the drawing phase of the painting is done at this point However, something isn't right.

As I had layed out my city, I had been intentionally leaving holes in the grid that would allow for key bits of the quarters surface to remain visible. But now the city feels cramped, and artificially reined in. Before moving into the final painting stage, I need to make some surgical edits to my city grid; scattering new buildings into the clear spaces, and thinning out the original blocks.




Finally the layout is complete, and I can do a final pass of painting.

Assigning grey values to the planes of the buildings . . .

differentiating the vertical planes with the introduction of a light source. . .

reestablishing the grey values of the quarter's surface. . .

adding shadows in the reflective surface of the quarter. . .

adding lots of little windows (freehand, with very diluted grey acrylic and a #6 watercolor brush,). . .

and a final clean in Photoshop. (adjust levels, clean up distracting inconsistencies in paint texture, edit out paper texture of background.)


And thats it!

Thanks for sticking with me.

Ghost Factory Magazine (Process)

Here are some process shots from the painting I did for the cover of Ghost Factory magazine.

I was working on a piece of relatively toothy illustration board with Golden acrylics, (Titanium White, and Mars Black) and FW acrylic ink, for the line-work, and to mix into my blacks instead of water.

Initially, I laid down a wash of diluted ink, to give myself a mid-tone to work off of, and so that I could lay down the basic shapes in white, rather than a darker tone.

With the basic shapes estalished in truly rough drags of white acrylic, I go in for some definition with indiluted FW ink and a 6 round watercolor brush. Mainly, I am establishing the form of the ships that will be the focal point of the illustration, but I also take the opportunity to play around with a texture on the ocean. I can always paint it over (which is exactly what I end up doing.)
With the forms of the ships established, I fill in the ships once more with white acrylic, to take take down the severity of the ink line, then lay in the shadow shapes in a slightly darker than midtone grey. I always like to work near the middle of my value range at first, so that I can save the blackest blacks (and lightest lights) for where they might be needed. (In my experience, it is easier to make a piece darker than lighter.

I paint the background second, starting with the light circle, and cleaning painting the dark margin last. As each plane of paint masks the one under it, I take the opportunity to clean up the contours, and sometimes correct the outline of shapes.

Finally, after a little back and forth with the values of the major shapes, I lay in the details.

Finally, I desaturate the colors in photoshop, and superimpose a " #3 " that I have painted separately.

Rocket's Red Glare (Final Pencils)

David Peak, who last commissioned me for the cover art of "Ghost Factory Magazine," has given me a new assignment: to render the image of a city growing off the surface of a quarter for the cover of his upcoming novel, "Rocket's Red Glare."

In my intitial sketching phase I spent a lot of time looking at pocket change, but gave short shrift to the task of urban planning. For this go around, I decided to invest a little more energy in the architecture of Liberty City, and hopefully save myself some head aches down the line.

I used a new strategy (new for me) in the development of these drawings. I built up all of my perspective lines in my sketchbook, than did the final line work on a sheet of tracing paper. It saved me a lot of time that I would have spent erasing, and now I have these kind-of-cool "under drawings." (Maybe I'll post them later.)

I took low-res digital photos of these, then did what little coloring there is in photoshop. (isolating the vertical planes of the buildings with my polygon-lasso, then adjusting the levels)

Little City


Big City

Rocket's Red Glare (roughs)

David Peak, publisher of "Ghost Factory Magazine," has commissioned a new illustration for his upcoming novel, "Rocket's Red Glare." Here are my first sketches.

The brief calls for a city to grow off the surface of a 1983 quarter. I have worked off that idea and stuck to a pretty literal interpretation of the material.

I began with a drawing of a quarter as seen from a low angle.

Next, I created a generic city texture, trying to match the angle of the first sketch, and leaving all the detail for a later stage.


And, finally, a composite of the two images in photoshop.



Here is a slightly lighter rendering, letting the line work tell more of the story.

This is, of course, just a sketch. I will be doing a lot of tinkering with the layout of the city, adding detail and adjusting the scale of buildings relative to the quarter.
The challenge in rendering the final piece will be to make both the city, and the quarter details visible, without loosing the quick read of the image in visual clutter.

Logo Sketches (26 Letterpress)

My parents, ever the entrepreneurs, are in the process of self publishing a series of essays that my mother has been working on for the last few years. (In the time since I  posted this, the book has become available. Go to amazon for your copy of "Drinking from a Cold Spring" now!) Papa Birmingham tasked me with the assignment of designing a logo for their imprint: 26 Letter Press.

The following are a dozen or so variations on two initial drawings, both playing with the idea that the 2 and the 6 are actually pieces of movable type from a letter press machine.

Enjoy. . .

Ghost Factory ( second round )

(We return to a process thread already in progress. . .)

After settling upon the "Shipwreck Graveyard" image from the first round of sketches, I set about creating a few variations upon the initial theme.


In this first sketch, I try to imagine what the cover would look like completely filled with ships, scattered evenly, more or less, and seen from above.

The second sketch puts the viewer into the field of ships, creating a greater sense of depth, and perhaps a little more drama.
In these last two sketches, I have included a slice of the world above the water. In this first one simply a seascape. . . .

and in this, an armada of ships that one could imagine might be joining those below.


After doing this initial sketching, I began to experiment a bit in the actual rendering of the scenes themselves. At this point my plan is still to use more traditional materials in the final illustration, but many of the decisions can be tested in Photoshop, which is what I have done here.








So, that's the update. Keep in mind, these are still just sketches. I am going to take a day or two away from the project before settling in for the final draft.