Category: Work-In-Progress

Artwork, writing and special projects in progress.

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WIP Wednesday – Medusa and Bats

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Medusa and Bats, WIP – 31 August, 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a Work-In-Progress blog post, and it’s been even longer since I’ve done any work on the image above. According to my files, I’ve not touched this piece since November, 2010. But I pulled it out on Monday and have played with it over the last few days and have actually seen some progress. There’s still quite a bit of work to go, but I’ve definitely gotten farther with it in the last few days than I would have been capable of almost a year ago.

I think this marks a big change in what’s going on in my life right now. A couple weeks ago, I wrapped up my podcast novel, The Little Death, and decided to take a break from writing and podcasting. I had simply reached a point earlier this year where it was a massive struggle to write, record, and produce the podcast all at the same time, and I was drowning under the workload. Plus, I was doing more and more digital art, thanks to the iPad I got last Christmas. In fact, I’ve done so much digital art this year, I’ve produced over 50 paintings since first cracking open the packaging on the iPad. It’s ridiculous how much drawing and painting I’ve done, compared with previous years.

So I made the decision to take a break from podcasting until I have something new completely written. And I’m taking a break from writing until the whole family’s schedule has settled down for the school year. I expect in another few weeks, I’ll start writing again, probably picking one day a week to knock out as many words as I can. Once I have something written, then and only then will I look at podcasting it. And I will not write and podcast at the same time. It’s just too much to do right now.

But as for the artwork, that’s become a daily thing. I’m now getting up most mornings at 5AM to spend time working on digital painting. Once I finish up Medusa and Bats above, I’ll move onto a robot painting I’ve got sitting in ArtRage waiting to be finished. And while I’m not working at my desk, I’ll probably be working on something on my iPad. Or maybe even pick up an actual pen and paper and do some drawing there.

Basically, I’m finally making the big shift from full-on writing to full-on art, and I’m very pleased with the results. I’ll keep posting pics of the the WIPs as I go, and when I’ve got something finished, the plan is to make it available for sale as prints or whatever else people might like. So look forward to that!

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WIP Wednesday – A Little Animation

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I haven’t posted one of these in a while, and I apologize for that. I’ve just been so danged busy again. We’ve had lots of family visits and holidays and I’ve been doing all I can just to keep up with the basics. I’m reaching a point though where I can once again see the light at the end of the tunnel. I do believe sometime this summer I will have pushed certain things off my plate for good and that will free up some time for me to focus on certain core projects that I really want to do.

And here’s a taste of one of those core projects…

DoInk Sample Animation

It may not look like much to start, but this is the result of an hour or so playing on my iPad with an animation app called DoInk. I’ve done animation before, mainly with Flash, and have even published a couple of cartoons for which I was paid quite nicely (see AtomFilms.com for my very NSFW animated movies, Stick Figure Porno and Stick Figure Porno II). Having been away from animation for a while, I’d like to get back into it and I think DoInk may help.

The upside of DoInk is that it’s vector animation, so I don’t have to draw every frame by hand. I can simply modify the shapes I draw using the usual vector tools. If I make several small animations, like I did in the sample above, I can combine them into a more complex animation to get some pretty cool results. With the fly, I created separate animations for his eyes, wings, legs, etc. Then I created another animation to put all those pieces together. Then I created the flower in a third animation and then combined them all together in the fourth animation to bring everything into one animated clip.

So I now have a portable animation program to play with, and that’s cool. Unfortunately, DoInk doesn’t have all the features I’d like to see in an animation app; for instance, layers aren’t available in the drawing mode, which is a shame because it would really help to create complex animations more quickly. However, I’m sure the app will continue to develop and grow and I’ll be making the most of it as it does.

I should also mention I ordered a copy of Smith Micro’s Animation Studio Debut and will be using that as well. It’s a desktop program, not an app, but as I mentioned earlier, once I’ve got some stuff pushed off my plate for good, I will be shift gears to work on other projects, and animation is going to be one of them. Can’t wait to get into that!

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WIP Wednesday – Ooozelong redux

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“Ooze-Long” Work-In-Progress, by Helen E. H. Madden, 20 April 2011

This is a clean up of an earlier image I did on the iPad. I took it into InkPad, a vector drawing app on my iPad, and started tracing it, then exported it and continued working on it in Adobe Illustrator on my desktop computer. The next step will be to take the now much larger digitally inked drawing into ArtRage (again, on the desktop), where I can recolor it with fun and bloody colors using the watercolor brush.

Why am I doing this? A lot of folks have commented on how much they liked the original (which you can see here) and a few have stated they’d love to have it as a print, t-shirt, etc. So I’m working on making that happen. Hopefully I’ll finish this up in the next week and have prints of this ready to take to Balticon with me on Memorial Day weekend. Let me know if you’d like to buy a copy of this. I’m looking into printers now and am working to make this as good a deal possible for anybody who wants to buy a copy.

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WIP Wednesday – Sketches from “The Little Death”

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“I Do Not Wish to See” by Helen E. H. Madden,
Character Sketch from “The Little Death” Podcast Novel

I took a break from my other work-in-progress this past week to do some other drawings and catch up on writing. Frankly, I haven’t been able to make it to my desk that much. But I’ve been doing a lot of artwork on the iPad (did I mention how much I LOVE my iPad?). This was drawn with a new app I picked up, Sketch Club. Sketch Club is a bit different from the other programs I’ve got, missing some of the bells and whistles of Sketchbook Pro like the ability to resize a layer as you work on it, but it’s got some fantastic drawing and painting tools. I love the rough scratchy style I can get with it.

Anyway, this is a drawing of Robin Helki, the main character in “The Little Death,” the novel I’m currently podcasting at www.heatflash.libsyn.com. I’ve shared snippets of the story before. Robin is a telepath who reads psychic information by touching things. She collects evidence for the violent crimes division of a police precinct in a dystopian society, and is slowly going mad as a result of her work. You can find all the episodes of “The Little Death” on the Heat Flash Erotica Podcast. If you like the story, feel free to pass on the episodes. They run under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, so it’s free to listen and share.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing, continued

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“What’s Missing?” Work In Progress by Helen E. H. Madden, 30 March 2011

I haven’t had much time to work on this lately, but I did spend half an hour on it today and got more color down on the background. I’m also playing a bit more with the palette knife, seeing how well it blends the oils together. That may become a key tool in getting this painting to work the way I want it to.

Anyway, I’m still working on this. Hopefully, I’ll get a little more time this week to paint some more.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing, continued

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“What’s Missing?” WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 23 March 2011

I’m still at work on this one, putting down as much paint as I can to cover the canvas. The actual image is VERY large, something like 3000×4000 pixels, which is the largest I think I’ve ever put together. I’m having problems recreating the technique of the artist inspired this painting. This was originally from a tutorial on ArtRage in Digital Artist magazine. I was able to get the drawing down the way I wanted it and the underpainting, but when it came to putting down the oils, I’ve had less that stellar results. The original tutorial showed the brush settings at instant drying, non-cleaning, very low thinners. I’ve had to change that to 50% things, non-instant drying. Plus I can’t use the full metallic effect of the paint. I’ve had to reduce that to 50% as well, otherwise it just get’s overwhelming.

And none of this makes any sense to you if you haven’t used ArtRage before. Suffice to say, ArtRage simulates oil painting and metallic paints, but the tools in the program have a wide variety of settings that will achieve various effects. I’ve been having to play with all of them to get what I’ve got so far. Most of the blending has been achieved with the palette knife tool, which I had hoped to avoid, but hey, it gets me the effect I want, so I won’t cry about it now.

Anyway, I’ll keep working on this one. Wish me luck!

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing, continued

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WIP – “What’s Missing?” by Helen E. H. Madden, 9 March 2011

Slowly but surely, inch by inch, I’m getting more work done on this. I’ve switched to painting this on my desktop since, as expected, the iPad simply isn’t big enough to handle a detailed oil painting in ArtRage. The actually painting is now around 3500×4000 pixels, extremely large, but it makes it much easier to handle the brush strokes of the oil brush. I’m also trying to use the metallic paint setting on the robots, which presents unique challenges all its own. Metallic paint comes out much darker than the color actually picked. And I continue to experiment with the oil brush settings in general, switching back and forth between insta-dry, square and round tip, thinners and no thinners. I’m slooooooooooowly getting the hang of it.

I’ll continue working on this throughout the week. I think the one thing I’ve learned so far is to let go of expectations and just keep putting down the digital paint. I can’t really control what each brush stroke is going to look like, so I just have to trust the process and continue to work from there. We’ll have to see if I get much farther next week, since I’m going out of town tomorrow for a few days, but hopefully, there’ll be some progress.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing continued

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WIP – “What’s Missing?” by Helen E. H. Madden, 2 March 2011

Well, I got the sketch as finalized as I was going to get it, so I finally switched to the underpainting stage. Again, I’m still following the tutorial in Digital Artist Magazine (this was last month’s issue, with the article on using metallic paint in ArtRage). I’ve got all the basic colors laid down and some ideas for the lighting. Next I want to import some photos for texture and then get to the nitty gritty of the painting stage.

So far, I like it. But I have a feeling before too much longer I’m going to have to move this piece to the PD and blow up the size to really get the detail in the painting that I want. We’ll see. I’ll post the results next week.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing?

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What’s Missing, WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 15 Feb 2011

I haven’t gotten too much farther on this one. The whole Girl Scout Cookie Mom thing has pretty much eaten what little spare time I had. Hell, it’s eaten my entire life at this point.

Anyway, I finished up the sketch, combined all layers of the pencil drawings, and then started adding in loose shadows using the oil paint brush in ArtRage. I’ve got the thinners set between 80-90% and the loading up around 100%. I laid the oil paint down in a separate layer over the pencil sketch. I may put a copy of the sketch on top so I can continue to see it as I work. Don’t know yet though. I do know the next step will be to lay down the basic colors.

I’m going to be at Farpoint this coming weekend and plan to take my iPad with me. Hopefully I’ll get some more work on this done while I’m there.

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WIP Wednesday – What’s Missing, part 1

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What’s Missing, WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 6 Feb 2011

The latest issue of Digital Artist magazine had a lovely article on using the metallic paint settings in ArtRage. I’ve been reading everything I can find on ArtRage lately, since I’ve been enjoying using the program on my iPad, and I decided to see if I could replicate the results of the Digital Artist article in some of my own artwork.

I decided to follow the same process outlined in the article, starting with a detailed sketch of what I wanted to paint. This is a big departure from my previous ArtRage drawings, which have pretty much been created on the fly rather than planned out. Thus this image is going to be here on WIP Wednesday rather than showing up on Freaky Friday, because it’s going to take longer to produce.

The sketch is heavily influenced by the artwork in the DA article, which was also of a robot. I like robots, so I’m more than happy to try and paint a few. I’m still working out the details of the sketch, especially the background. I have a hard time creating environments for my artwork, thus my preference for doing portraits. But I think it’s time I stretched my wings a bit, so I’m going to create as detailed a background as I can here. I’ve borrowed other elements from the DA painting as well, including the windows with a strong light source and the idea of a robot painting something. However, the theme is a bit different, as you’ll see if you check out this month’s issue of DA.

Next week I hope to have the sketch finalized. Then I can start the underpainting stage, something else I don’t normally do with my ArtRage doodles. We’ll see how this works!