Working Holiday - Shading

Shading has been a slow process. I've had to delete a number of attempts that weren't working. I've made some progress tonight.

Working Holiday - Gun details + some case shading

For the holidays - I'm really freaking stressed right now. Largely due to my sleep patterns being well out of it. I keep waking up in the middle of the night and then am unable to get back to sleep again. Fourth day in a row. Ugh.

Anyway - you don't want to know
about that ! Here's some more on the Working Holiday cover art :

It's largely small tweaks to the gun, but there's the start of some shading present in the inner case. I was playing around with brush opacity to see if I could build up more of a gentle shading gradient. We'll see how that works.

Working Holiday - Gun shade development

Another abysmal night for sleeping at Casa Seraph last night. I've done more on the gun :

I fixed up the magazine somewhat too - which is good.

I am now going to collapse in front of the tv and probably pass out.

Working Holiday - Starting Shade

Ugh - long day. The kids were up during the night - keeping me up from 4am to about 7. At least I was able to sleep from just after 7 to 9. That helped - but I'm still pretty tired now.

Still - I have spent some time on the art. I've started adding in some shade on the gun :

Oh - and added some of the base colour for the case contents.

Working Holiday - Colour

Okay - so here's the thing I'm trying. No outlines at all. Radical huh ? :

Working Holiday - Case outlines

A bit more done this evening :

Working Holiday - Gun outlines

I did something cool in Photoshop tonight - I worked out how to make a custom shortcut ! While that probably isn't that amazing to you, it's a pretty damn handy thing for me ! I use the 'stroke path' command quite a lot these days - and having a shortcut to this command, rather than having to 'control + click' then select the option from the drop down speeds things up a fair amount - particularly when I can map that shortcut to the buttons on my drawing tablet ! Good times.

Anyway - I've been doing the outlines on the gun:

It's not great - but I'm thinking of trying something a bit different with this piece, so the outlines might just be more of a reference point for what's to come.

New Project - 'Working Holiday' cover art

The last few weeks have been very hectic - but let's not get into that shall we ?

I volunteered for this cover art a few months ago, but haven't had the time to start. It's another old podcast episode that I'm helping to update with some new art. The story is called 'Working Holiday', and it ran on The Dunesteef podcast - which is one of my favourites. It's about a guy going to this alien planet to assasinate their king. It's funnier than it sounds !

Anyway - I've been doing a few sketched of sci-fi rifles over the last week or two, and I've learned that guns are pretty freakign hard to draw. All weird angles and detail which are hard to get perspective right with. In the end I took a picture of my nerf rifle leaning up against my chair at work ( I keep it at work for some stage combat work I do with my year 10's ) :

 Which really helped a lot.

Got the original sketch scanned and then quickly went over it in PS, then did the same with a suitcase :

As always - very rough at this stage - but it'll get better !