d r a g o n b o n e s    

In honor of the 4th of July:

Always been a fan of Norse mythology. Thanks to that, I’ve never been a huge fan of Marvel’s version of Thor. I know, I know – just being honest. He’s a god, and he always seemed… awkward in the standard Marvel world. In recent years, I think that they’ve done a much better job of placing him within the world without making things so odd.

At any rate, when the folks over at Xion decided that the May Art Jam would be Thor, I figured it would be a good time to have a go at the ol’ Odinson. I decided to make his costume a bit more traditional – a bit less… tights.

As should be obvious, this needs a lot of work yet – especially in terms of Mjolner. I like the more traditional shape of the hammer, but it needs some knotwork to finish it off. This was really just meant as a quick sketch though, so perhaps another time.

Another in my 3 minute portraits series. This one includes Keira Knightly, Steve Buscemi, and Steven Tyler.

Note to self: in order to keep things more simple, and (for lack of a better term) ‘sketchy’ – stay with a smaller brush when sketching things out. Thicker brushes work fine if you’re just trying to block some forms in, but when the ‘finished’ image is going to remain a sketch, a finer brush (as demonstrated by the Keira image) is a must. Too much gets muddied when using a larger brush and moving fast.

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.

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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