Some unique imagery from the Starbucks Reserve, Chicago. It was interesting the interior designer was pretty on point with their Starbucks green and yellow color scheme.
This is a necklace pendant of @peppergidget I created using a “Universal Laser Systems” engraver.
As you can see in the first image, the engraved acrylic was originally a completely transparent plastic, the areas that were engraved became more cloudy. However, with the right kind of lighting it can look quite stunning.
The layout for this piece was done in Adobe Illustrator. Cuts that needed to go all the way through the material (to cut out the gear pattern) were made in red vector lines. Raster grayscale images were used to tell the laser what to engrave, darker areas resulting in higher dithering.
My friend @darkangelholder was working on designs for an ink shape shifter. They showed me a drawing they did, and this is my take on it, adding new elements such as his weapon, and giving him a different color scheme. Full resolution image here! Work In Progress shots below the cut.
I started with rough sketch, trying to figure out roughly how I’d want the character to look along with the pose they’d be in. They were a shape shifter made from liquid that took on different forms (a species I created called “Inks”). I wanted to incorporate that into the design, and planned to have his feathers dripping with the liquid, and also his tattered outfit be ripped but as they went down they’d turn into drips, betraying his true form.
Next comes the cleaned up line work, getting the lines just right, fixing mistakes, and adding details omitted in the sketch.
I knew black outlines would look bad on his orange ink, so those were colored. The rest of him would be fine, as most of his colors were either very dark or light, and not a free form liquid.
I kept the wings on a separate layer and started with base colors. Later I could use these shapes to make masks or easy quick selections.
At this point I’m trying to figure out the color scheme for this character. It was important that you could distinctly make out the shape of the figure, and tell his body from his wings, otherwise he’d just become one big blob. This particular character is made of orange ink, so they could be any shade of orange, from white to black and all the tones in-between.
I started adding yellow to show where light was coming from. He’d be in the clouds, with sunlight shining up from the clouds. Light from below can look a bit eerie, which I’d use a bit, though the secondary light source and ambient light would keep it from being too stark an effect.
Adding highlights to his wing ink really gave it a nice liquid feel, and adding shadows to his rube helped give it more depth. I continue to add details at this point.
More layers of highlights and shadows are added, along with his halo.The ink on his wings had a layer of red added to give it more depth.
At this point I make the background, it’s a pretty simple cloud background, giving a light source.
After adding him on top of the background, he looks like a sticker stuck on top of a picture, not like he’s really standing there, which really detracts from the digital painting.
I duplicated the background layer and dragged it on top of everything else. Below it I created a masked layer- the brush strokes here will be “painting with” the image above, but this layer controls where it will show in addition to how opaque it will be.
Now not only does it look like his boots are partially covered by wispy clouds, but the illusion of a slightly foggy atmosphere with intensely bright light shining through is created.
Lastly I add a few strategically placed bits of blue where the clouds are just a bit thinner and you can see the sky through, in addition to action lines on his weapon.
To see this collection of images at a higher resolution click here!
A client of mine asked me to animate their logo for them. While it was fun breathing life into this little guy, one of the more challenging parts was working within the style, especially when the head turned. I had to make some stylistic decisions on how to distort the head while preserving the iconic look created front on. Another challenge came when I had to figure out how to move this character of a solid color without losing the details- originally his wing was going to go over his head but then he mostly became a blob shape, and while there were other possible options, I think his final animation came out rather adorable.
dededos
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