Floatharr's endeavours

[Floatharr]

Started feeling guilty for not uploading any of the products of my random art-sprees so here we are. A few drawings made on the side of a D&D game and two paintings made with a Nintendo DS and the homebrew proggie Colors! ( http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/ ). I recommend looking into it if you already own a DS, it's magnificent.

[Floatharr]

More:

[Floatharr]

Felt like I'd up some paintings today. I swear the one with the space ship took like 6 hours due to the lack of layers and a perspective grid. Turned out well though. The sunrise painting was painted live on the spot at around 4am a few weeks ago.

[smuli]

So much improvement on your coloured work lately, that sunrise picture is gorgeous!! Keep on kicking!

[Floatharr]

Taking the entrance exam for industrial design school next tuesday.

I like it how the flower turned out with the ink I threw in.

[Floatharr]

What better way to spend your free time than to make a big mess in the sketchbook. I even tidied up my art table.

Also, I like the winter speedpainting.

[Floatharr]

Something a little different this time. Dug up my dusty old graphire3 and installed photoshop. This is the best I could come up with in about 2 hours after several failed attempts. Crab samurais.

[Floatharr]

One more today. Tanks and a mirror study.

[Floatharr]

I was trying to find some new shapes on the first page and one of the sketches turned into something that resembles a drag queen. I shouldn't sketch tired.

I like the tall horned guy with the book though.

[Floatharr]

The painting got its palette and mood from Mr.Blonde's "Chtulu type thing". I thought it'd be neat to have like a chain of light towers get lit like in LotR whenever the giant flying tentacle attacks.

Also, I'm happier as to where the quality of my sketches are heading on the newest page.

[Floatharr]

Another ds quickie and colors on the ghoul.

[Floatharr]

More Colors! paintings on the ds. Both about a half an hour. Used ref from google image for the lake: http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g1.../scotslake.jpg

[Floatharr]

I've managed to misplace my one true friend, the trusty mechanical pencil with a twist eraser in the end. Nevertheless I've managed to put together a few faces and a funny bird thing using a regular pencil.

Also mixed in: clouds from bits and pieces of reference from google image.

[Floatharr]

Found my mechanical pencil. The damn thing was hiding inside the sofa. Using the marker was a bad idea, went through 3 pages and the smell gave me a headache.

As to the painting, in 3 agonizing hours I was able to get the sketch to a point where I could abandon it without shedding tears. Used this and this to get myself past the first 3 minutes of it:

[Floatharr]

Never use a thick black marker in your sketchbook.

I like the multiple views of the same concept of shoulder/neck gear though. I'd imagine it's some kind of a life support system with solar paneling. The poor bald folk can't breathe without those.

I always draw everybody bald, maybe I should do hair studies.

[Floatharr]

I got a little carried away after not being able to draw a face on my huntress character last night.

I think I even learned a little.

[Mossi]

Hey dude, good sketchbook you've got here, like your speedpaintings alot, good sense of colors and depth.

Btw, are you using just a mouse, or you have a tablet?

If you don´t have it, I´d seriously recommend you getting a tablet.. and if you´re low on cash, WACOM Bamboo Medium would suit you fine... it´s cheap but good!

Keep on updating

[Floatharr]

Thanks for the encouraging comment. I do have a Wacom Graphire3 A6 but the paintings here so far have been painted with a Nintendo DS homebrew called Colors!. I have been considering a new tablet though since the old one is too small for my taste. Thanks for the recommendation.

As for the painting here, this one's the first painting that I'm happy with done completely on my PC. Spent about 2-3 hours on it, started it on opencanvas and finished in photoshop.

[smuli]

Good to see you've been updating this. I like the design and anatomy on the huntress and heads show some improvement already. If you have a stop picture button on your TV remote, I've found that's a great asset for head sketching.
Keep up the great work with the enviros.

[Floatharr]

Been busy with paperwork and final dates up to my knees for the first week of school but it seems to be clearing up pretty nicely. Here's something I sketched for a project on the history of ship design. Might end up doing big and clean pictures for the presentation.

Along with those is a quick 5-10 min colour study with a giant brush. The idea was to pick the correct colour right away and not do any adjustment after the paint's on the canvas. The mountains ended up looking like pudding and whipped cream. I'm relatively satisfied with the product though keeping in mind that I haven't even come close to making anything that makes sense in less than 30 minutes before.

[Floatharr]

Been busy with the sketchbook. Frequent bus trips have given me more time to draw.

[Floatharr]

An another lecture well spent. I think it was about the importance of listening and communication... The first page is a few days old bus trip.

[Floatharr]

I really like the quality of this scan so I thought I'd make a special post. I managed to find out a perfect way to get line-art and sketches from a white background so that you'll end up with nothing but transparency and pencil lead.

Make a copy of the scanned image
paint background layer white or delete it
invert copy layer, noise is easier to see on black
use levels to get rid of noise without wasting important pixels
clean the rest of it with black
make a new black layer
make the cleaned and inverted scan its mask
apply mask

Here's the result:

[Floatharr]

I regret to inform that I no longer posess a scanner as a direct result of moving out recently. I'll see if I can take any decent photos of my sketchbook with the phone cam. I'm currently 12 pages behind.

Also, testing out school's a5 bamboo in PS CS3:

[smuli]

I like your loose hatching, especially on the classroom sketches and the motorcycle. Cool to hear that school has finally got a Wacom and nice troll. Keep them coming whenever you can scan again!

[Floatharr]

The problems with using a phone cam instead of a scanner were the work related to correcting levels and resizing each individual image and the quality of photos in comparison to scans. After trying to do everything by hand I turned over to batch actions in photoshop. Rotate, auto levels, bicubic sharper resize and pop the save for web dialog. As a slight surprise, the resulting quality isn't bad. I'll probably end up increasing the page size by 30% or so for posts containing less images.

[Niku]

yo floatharr,

I like all the sketches, lots of shapes involved in them, guess thats what im lacking, don't jump on the boat if you don't know what the oar is, is kinda what i did...keep it up, some good stuff...

[Floatharr]

Just a quick sketch for now. I call it "Meafat", short for Mechanical Arachnid Fatso. I managed to screw up the colours on this one even though it's black and white. Sometimes I amaze even myself.

[Floatharr]

A reunion with an old friend, the scanner. I fed him a bonsai tree from ref and an another classroom life drawing.

[Floatharr]

lStill time for a couple today. First one's a hilarious failure in terms of perspective. As soon as I realized that I turned 30 degrees left and started with a perspective grid.