d r a g o n b o n e s    

Another quick warm-up sketch. This time of a steam-punk-y character in a top hat, and complete with goggles and wax tipped mustache.

Working with Nevermet Press has given me an appreciation for the steampunk genre that I never had before, and this character design seemed a great way to work the bugs out.

There’s likely to be more where this guy came from.

Another in my 3 minute portraits series. This set includes, from left to right: Mick Jagger, Marty Feldman, and Richard Nixon. Done digitally with my LS800, and each in 3 minutes or less. Quick disclaimer – yes, I recognize that these might not be the greatest likenesses, but like I said – each done in 3 minutes or less. The idea is to get better and capturing a likeness very quickly.

A quick concept sketch of Ororo Monroe – aka Storm of Marvel’s X-Men. I redesigned her costume just for fun (not that you can tell too well from this shot). The X-Men come in a solid second place for my ‘all time favorite comic series’, following hot on Spider-man’s heals. Yeah, I was a Marvel kid growing up.

As I grew up, I found an appreciation for DC. They tend to create more iconic characters, imho. Or rather, they did when I was a kid. Both companies (and many more) blur the lines a bit more often now, but it seems (to my memory at least) that Marvel was always about muddying the waters a bit – making things not so clear cut. Peter Parker started out trying to make a fast buck with his powers. Ororo made people believe she was a goddess. That always made those characters more real to me.

I love a good icon, but when I was a kid, I wanted to understand right and wrong, and it didn’t seem like those lines would ever be as clear cut as they were for Batman or Superman. I was a Marvel kid.

A bunch of very quick sketches of random faces/characters that I did just to get warmed up recently. Done entirely digitally, and spent only a couple minutes on each face. I just wanted to get a feel for each of the characters/creatures and then move on to the next. Also played with lighting in a couple of the characters.

As anyone who has been following along with my art can tell you – I’m a big fan of Open Canvas. Sure – there are much heavier hitting applications when you want to do some hard core photo editing, manipulation, and even just good ol’ fashioned painting. Here’s the thing though – OC is lightweight, it works, and it stores every brush stroke in an event file that you can play back as an animation.

If you’ve seen one of my illustration videos, you’ve seen this aspect of the software in action. I use OC to create the animation, and then CamStudio to record that animation in a file that YouTube can use. (I touch it up and add credits / soundtrack in Windows Movie Maker.) Yeah – I guess you could say I’m a fan of inexpensive – or better – free software. I’m a believer in the philosophy of KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. When things get complicated it’s just too easy for them to break down.

The problem with the newest version of Open Canvas (4.5) is simple enough. They’re a Japanese company and they’re struggling to get the English help files in place. The software is set up / designed in such a way that even a clueless gaijin like myself can muddle their way through it, but the help files really would be nice to have. If only for the hot key combinations.

What’s that? You’re looking for the keyboard shortcuts / hotkeys for Open Canvas 4.5 too? It’s you’re lucky day. I just went through and dug out all that I could the old fashioned way – I tried them and watched what happened. I’m sure to have missed some and/or managed to screw up the definitions for what some of them do, so feel free to correct me in the comments. I’ll edit the post to make the corrections and that way we’re all on the same page.

I’ll put these behind a cut to save your RSS feeds from getting bloated:

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