Steampunk Challenge - Painting Begins

A very fast color rough-out, all on one layer just to quickly start working toward what I see in my head:


I just wanted to have a loose place to start from, playing with a little bit of color. I really feel like I have to compress my process and run as fast as I can with it, so I'm not doing a grayscale value pass or tightening up any details on the sketch. I'm just going to try to trust myself to find that image that I see in my head with the paint, and hope it doesn't come back to bite me, heh.

Below, the same image without the pencil sketch:


So now on to the first real passes at the main components. I'm going to start with the main subject and hopefully center of attention, our hero Mr. Crabthwaite...


...and his Tortoise machine.


I'm seeing the Tortoise as having copper exterior plating on the shell, at least the top half and the head, with the darkish blue-grays and blacks of cast iron and steel for the frame, load-bearing legs and other structural details. It's going to be a fairly rough finish compared to the Hare, which will have a lot of shiny metal cladding and some painted colors on it. Our Mr. Crabthwaite built it in his backyard out of whatever he could get his hands on, with a shoe-string budget, where the Commodore had his own personal fortune and backing from other wealthy investors.

Steampunk Challenge - Layout "Finalized"

Time is up for doing layout, so here's what I'm going with:


The Hare has been redrawn from scratch. TGF pointed out that the previous pose could be stronger and bring the eye back into the image, so I quickly redid the sketch, then moved it around until it looked okay to me.

IMO, this still may not be the best solution to my illustration problem, but it's strong enough to stick with it. I'm going to keep everything on layers, which I don't usually do, in order to allow some tweaking later on.

Time to start painting! Wish me luck...

Steampunk Challenge - First Steps

Right, so, holidays are over. Back to work!! I only have 9 days to complete my challenge entry, so it's time to just do the painting. I'm starting out with a rough layout sketch in blue pencil on 9x12 Bristol paper:


This is kinda what I saw in my head when I first thought about the Tortoise vs. Hare theme. It's a start, but I'm not sold on it. I've scanned it into Photoshop, so now I'm going to cut out the main components of the image so I can play with them and move them around. First the Tortoise:


And then the Hare:


I'm using Ctrl-J to duplicate the selection to a new layer. Since there's a lot of tone to the original scan, it's giving me kind of an old-timey tracing paper look, which I think is fun.

I did the lower left scrollwork more completely than the right, so I select, duplicate, flip and move it to mirror to the other side:


I like the shape of the picture oval at top right better, so I do the same and mirror it to the other side. Then I erase the mirrored Mr. Crabthwaite...


...and paste in the Commodore instead. I'm really diggin' the tracing paper vibe, reminds me of doing stuff like this when I was a kid:


So here's the main meat of what we've got, the two contestants and the frame. I'm going for a really 19th-century poster or playbill or even newspaper look, basing on things like Barnum & Bailey Circus posters:


At this point I'm not liking how big the Hare is. Even though the contraption is inherently much larger than the Tortoise, the scale is feeling odd to me and I can't really seem to get a handle on how the road underneath it is going. So I'm gonna make the Hare smaller to push it back and allow me to show more of the road, while also really roughly sketching in some of the landscape:


There, that's better. I think this is a workable layout. Then I think to myself, well gee, there's not a lot of crowd showing - you'd think this race would have a pretty good turnout at the finish line. And maybe the whole image is a bit squashed? What would it look like if I changed the aspect ratio to a wide view? Photoshop magic, commence:


I roughly doubled the width of the image and spread everything out a bit, then re-sketched the rough background. You can see there's lots more crowd and a much clearer view of the whole road. We lose some sky but maybe I can re-work the landscape... oh wait. There's way too much dead space to the right of the Hare. Crop tool time...


OK, that's better. Looks more balanced to me. I've got some triangular composition going between the Tortoise, Hare and the guy with the finish flag. The curves on the road guide the eye better, I think. This is workable too.

Now, decision time. I have 9 days. Do I really want to paint a big crowd of people? That takes time. Can I figure out some painterly shortcuts to speed that process up? Maybe. I'll sleep on it, but at this point I'm leaning toward staying with the vertical layout and finding a way to compress a feel of more crowd and also a better suggestion of how the road works in there.

More tomorrow...

Steampunk Challenge - The Hare

Here's the next bit of concept work for the Steampunk Challenge. We have our Tortoise, so here's the Hare:


I actually did another version of this first, a more "iron" mechanical clanking monstrosity:


...but TGF pointed out that it didn't really look much like a hare. I realized at that point that I'd gotten a bit lost in the mechanical details and thoughts of "how would it work" rather than "what will look right for my image," so I stopped and did the second version, which I like much better.

I'm sure I went a bit overboard on the details of the second one, but these drawings are just to get the visualization of what the thing might look like in my head. I'll keep the large shapes, but I'll cherry-pick the details in the final image to make it look balanced and consistent.

Next up, layout for the final painting.

Steampunk Challenge

CGTalk has started another art challenge, "Steampunk Myths & Legends." I'm starting late, all the best legends are taken, so I'm going to do a more humble yet enduring fable instead: "The Tortoise and The Hare."


I'm telling the tale as a gentlemanly race between the champion Commodore Harding Rasmussen (and crew), with his celebrated racing conveyance "The Hare," and office clerk/backyard inventor Mr. Arlo Crabthwaite (and son) and his ingenious competitive land transport, "The Tortoise," which you see above.

This is a concept drawing just to bake the Tortoise (and Mr. Crabthwaite) into my mind. Tomorrow I'll do one of the Hare, and then I have to get working on the final image, which is due January 12, so I'll have to hustle.

If you want to follow my entry on CGTalk, here's my thread.

Just for fun, here's the drawing in ye olde blueprint style:

No Job = More Comics

Yep, I got laid off. I'm officially unemployed. But it's gonna be okay! I've got some cash to tide me over for a while and I'll be getting unemployment.

What this means for you, my lucky readers, is that there will be more Just A Bit Off comics until I get a new day job! I plan on adding Wednesday and Friday to the usual Thursday this week, and next week there will be at least 3 comics, possibly as many as 5. We'll see! I have a lot to do.

Best thing to do is to subscribe to my RSS feed, which will update you immediately when new strips go up. If you haven't used RSS before, I recommend Google Reader!

If by any chance you'd like to help out financially, you could order a caricature or pick up something else from the Jeff Zugale Store. If you don't see anything you like in the store but have an idea for something you do like, please email me directly and I'll do my best!