Recycling

It's been a while since I've posted anything...not because I haven't been doing art (I have) but because what I've been doing I'm not allowed to post! My job for the past year consists of designing products for the video game industry...often for games not yet released and, of course, nothing that I actually own.

But I recently started working on this piece again and decided to go a different direction with it. This is a Work In Progress, so don't judge it too harshly!

Click to enlarge

Mostly it's been a job of blocking in colors and playing around with the layout of the butterflies (yes, there will be more than one). It's done in Photoshop CS6 with my trusty Intuos4. I've jumped from CS to CS6 and the difference in pen pressure sensitivity is unbelievable. I knew Photoshop CS only registered half of what my tablet was capable of, but you never quite believe that until you've done a straight comparison.

It's worth noting here that Adobe is offering Photoshop 7 for around 10 bucks a month. For a program this powerful, that's a steal.

As for brushes, I only use two: the #17 square chalk and the soft round (both are default with Photoshop). All the elements are on layers with the bottom layer being the sepia image. I've learned through hard experience that layering your jobs makes it much easier to revise it later. As for working method, I go dark to light mostly and I don't use ctrl+z  to undo my mistakes. I let the mistakes happen and work around them. I learn more that way and it gives the digital image a less than perfect look that is ironically more pleasing to the eye. Remember, perfection is boring.