Adventures in Aerospace

So, uh, not sure how many of you know this, but I am currently enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering program at Mississippi State University now, and I have become a member of the local AIAA (American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics) chapter here. They needed a new t-shirt design to sale and raise money for the chapter, so I jumped onboard and made this.

This is a work-in-progress. I got the idea one day while sketching in one of my classes. Still playing around with it, though.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

My Postcard

 Here's my finished postcard project...

Front.

Back.

Compared with the concept composition:

My Three Comps

This was the first design I started working on, thinking I would like it best. The robot's face and chest are screens featuring my art, and the box it is reaching for also has art on its side.

My next idea was to have an outreached hand with my art escaping its grasp on wings. I liked the idea, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the overall concept now that I've drawn it out a bit.

This third composition is actually now my favorite, which I was not expecting as I considered it to be a bland idea at first. It features an astronaut inside of a particular illustration of mine which serves as the background, and the Tator Cat is inside of the astronaut's helmet with another art piece pinned on the astronaut's chest. I like this one most because it was simply the most fun to put together. I hope it'd actually make a good final product.

Ghosts of Photoshop (Tutorial)

Photoshop Ghosting Effect

This is the tutorial I chose to focus on. I like it because it really elaborates on the usefulness of layers and their interaction to create the overall image composition. 

It also explains some of the finer adjustments one can make with various filters and the effects they have.

You can take an image like this:

And turn her into a ghost!

Isn't that cool?

I actually tried this tutorial out about a year ago. Here was the result (finally found it backed up on my external hard drive, yay):

I didn't really like how blurry they made the image in the tutorial, so I lessened the motion blur layer slightly on mine. I also added some eerie "eyes" in the background with a simple white paintbrush tool to make it look like I was being chased by some ethereal creature. In hindsight, the added blur would have probably helped a little bit with the image, since I'm supposed to be running in this picture. Ah well.

Anyways, click the link above, read the steps. It's simpler than it may look. The instructions are pretty straight-forward and although it's not in video format, it has a lot of useful screenshots to show what everything looks like.

Guitar Magazines

As I described in class last week, I was drawn to this particular Guitar Aficionado magazine for whatever reason. I believe it was due to the distinct contrast this magazine has against the other surrounding magazines. Notice how the Guitar Aficionado magazine is dark with a figure dressed partially in white while the surrounding magazines are generally lighter. Something so simple really made this cover pop for me. However, I believe that if this magazine were placed further back on the shelf or mixed with other black-background magazines, it wouldn't have had the same effect. So contrast plus lucky positioning on the part of the magazine is what drew my attention.

Bedpost Spotlight

Here's a follow-up illustration to "Grave Bedpost." We see this bizarre villain has escaped his grave and is staggering through the darkness, right into a spotlight, possibly being shown from a helicopter overhead.

Yes, I am fully aware of how silly this character is. Yes, that is a frilly collar. Yes, he's wearing sunglasses. Yes, he has a John Leno chin. And of course, that's his bedpost for an arm. My friend Franky and I came up with this maniacal villain back in high school, and he has remained one of my favorite most ridiculous characters ever.

I've always thought that a beam of light shining through fog or smoke looks really cool, so that's what I focused on for this illustration. I just used a broad digital airbrush tool and used sweeping gestures to get the light to draft in from the source, lighting up the fog around the character. For a little extra detail, I added a brick wall off to the right in the background.

I really wanted Bedpost Esta (yes, that is his name; I didn't name him) to look like he had dug his way out of his grave, so I made a point to add lots of brown and green to his coat, darkening it and using another airbrush tool to grunge it up a bit. I'm so used to drawing sleek, clean objects and textures that it was actually refreshing to draw something covered in mud and grass stains.

Grave Bedpost

Even homemade comic book villains with bedposts for arms deserve their day of infamy. 

"Grave Bedpost" is what I call this one. Back story? It's every bit as ridiculous as one could imagine given the caption, but I prefer to leave it as somewhat of a mystery for now. It's funnier to me that way.

I used some basic watercolor tools and digital airbrushing to do most of this. I was aiming for an eerie fog to mask most of the background and am pleased with the result. It took me a while to get the right color and lighting to give it that reflective glow in the darkness. I was also debating on whether or not I should add in blades of grass, but now that I've done it, I'm happy that I did, as it really makes the ground look less flat and murky.

I usually don't focus on backgrounds so much (as you've probably noticed in my previous blogs) but for this one, I started out with just the background first and added the grave afterwards. The final touch was the fog. It was all done in one layer, with the exception of the text on the grave, which I converted to an image and dropped onto the main canvas layer so I could "age" it a bit on the stone.

"Why do we fall, sir? So we might learn to pick ourselves up..."

Alright, as I mentioned in class, I decided to spend an hour or so sketching during a particularly stressful time this weekend. To make a long story short, I was sick, kept losing things, was frustrated, and to top things off, the family dog died, adding to the general aura of depression. This particular art piece is different than my usual work in the sense that it is NOT cheerful, sci-fi, quirky, or anything along those lines. I just wanted to draw an emotion, anything to connect with how I was feeling. What came of this was a fallen man looking up for some help, or maybe just looking to see what pushed him down. It was meant to be simple and to the point. I chose not to give the guy any kind of hair on his head or face because I feel like that conveys some form of vulnerability; a lack of identity in a way. Just a generic human, which oddly enough came out looking more like a cross between Michael Stipe, Billy Corgan, and Chris Daughtry.

I honestly really didn't even want to upload it at first, merely because it was depressing, representing a somewhat low point in my life. But then I decided, hey, that's what art is... It's an expression, not this picture-perfect happy illustration that the artist or creator particularly likes; it is what it is, and that is ultimately what led to my decision to just go with it.

With that said, I really hope my next sketch/drawing/etc. is a little less of a downer. lol

Kickstart

 Well, I was debating about what I should upload to start off my art blog and ended up picking some random examples of art I've done over the years. As you can tell from the pics below, I have kind of a quirky art style, and my interest in science-fiction is often brought out in my art. I also enjoy drawing comical subjects, such as the "Tater Cat" and the "The Three Vikings" examples.

This first sketch is basically something I did in an attempt to learn better shading methods. I just took a piece of printer paper and a charcoal pencil and sketched out a scene I had envisioned for a story. It's a bit rough, but something I enjoyed drawing nonetheless.

This is a depiction of what I consider a "western science fiction" character. I imagined this dude being some sort of futuristic gunslinger or bounty hunter. I made this using my Bamboo drawing tablet and Corel Painter Essentials. I played around with the lighting effects in order to give the image a little more depth. The results vary.

This is the infamous "Tater Cat," a cartoon inspired by a friend who wanted to see a cat obsessed with eating tater tots. I also drew this using my tablet and Corel Painter Essentials.

This isn't particularly one of my best works by any means, but it was fun to draw. I've always been interested in space exploration and figured I'd make a slightly cartoonish astronaut sketch. Once again, I used my tablet with Corel Painter Essentials.

Here is a piece that started off as a sketch on paper. I drew this ship, which I called the "Guardian Nine" and then decided that it really needed something more. This was long before my tablet days, so I simply scanned the picture and imported it into Photoshop, where I then inserted a generic NASA space background that I found somewhere on the internet. I also used some contrast tools to make the ship stand out more, and I gave it an engine flare with the basic paintbrush tool. After applying a slight motion blur filter, I decided it was finished.

This is actually one of the first drawings I attempted on my tablet. You can probably tell I used numerous different techniques and brushes found in the Corel Painter Essentials program that came with my tablet in an effort to experiment and figure out what I liked and didn't like. I wanted to draw some sort of biomechanical beast, and this was the result. I call it the "Necrophantastic." Yes, the name is meant to be semi-morbid and funny.

"The Three Vikings" is a tablet drawing inspired by another drawing a friend of mine made using MSPaint. He basically drew humorous versions of himself, another friend, and me as pillaging Vikings. I couldn't help but draw my own version in Corel. The one on the left is in fact wearing a full bear pelt as clothing. The one in the middle is your stereotypical angry Viking with a battle axe. The one on the right has a live fox draped around his shoulders, and yes, he is wearing a Yarmulke. Inside jokes abound.

I drew this for one of my friends who is a huge Final Fantasy fan. I was actually just showing him how my tablet works and ended up with this depiction of the character known as Sephiroth. I really like how the texture of his armor and leather jacket turned out. Once again, I was using Corel Painter Essentials for this particular piece. I felt like I learned a lot from using different brushes and lighting/shading techniques to get the armor to look the way it does. Now if only I could learn to apply that more often.

This is actually one of the latest sketches I've been working on. It's a work-in-progress, which is why it looks like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. I started this in Photoshop, using different layers for each "element" in the picture. I'm not actually sure if I'm going to finish this one or not. I kinda want to just start over on something new, but I figured I would upload this anyway since it was a Photoshop piece rather than done in Corel like most of my other drawings and sketches shown in this post.


I hope this gives you an idea of how I draw and what I like drawing. I'm going to attempt to be a little more diverse with my art throughout the Spring term, though. I hope to add completely new artwork rather than just posting about stuff I've made already (essentially what this post is) or just drawing the same material I've been drawing for so long. I want to make progress with my art, and I believe one of the best ways for me to do that is to simply draw outside of my comfort zone, so to speak. We'll see how this turns out over time.