Pastywhyte said:

I am now inspired to start drawing and painting again. Have not really done anything since I quit my job as a graphic designer/illustrator to work in the oil industry, but now I'm thinkin its time to get back on the horse. Maybe do a self portrait for my avatar and spend more than 30 seconds on it . BTW Tmethyl ya got sum mad skillz. I especially like some of the type ya did in your How it should look thread. Props.

---

You're inspired by my stuff? That's really fucking good to hear. Fully appreciate you saying that Pasty.
I've never done any work commercially or anything, I just taught my self everything using GIMP mostly.
I rarely crack open photoshop, I actually prefer GIMP.

Thanks for the compliments, especially for the text on 'How it should look' nobody ever said anything about them.


Heres the first version I made of the above:

Pastywhyte said:

Well if you wanted a critique on the above, I would say that to me your first one was better. The negative space in the bottom left corner provides some nice tension/contrast, and the inclusion of the cloud kinda detracts from that. While the fifth focal point provided by it, and the switch in gestalt that it causes, would on the surface seem more compositionally sound, I feel that the division of negative to positive space in the first one has a more of a 0.618 ratio. I'm a sucker for golden mean

---

Pastywhyte said:

So for your textures, do you take vectors and rasterize them to allow for the twirl and liquefy filters? Then pop on a color/lighting mode with gradent/random color layers behind or in front? Or do you straight up airbrush the shit in raster format? Just curious. No matter what you got a lot o hours put into those bad boys.

---

For the main background textures I'll airbrush a random pattern with a full saturation gradient. Throw in some noise.
Then I'll duplicate that layer, flip it vertically, decrease opacity to 50% so both layers show through and blend. Increase contrast, increase darkness to flavor. Then merge both layers.
Now I'll duplicate that layer, flip it horizontally, switch opacity to 50% again, merge again. Mess with contrast/saturation/levels/darkness to flavor.
Basically the end result is a symetric blend of 4 layers.

Then I like to add in random symetric patterns and such, but I like to employ my photography a lot too, like this clouds in the above background is from this picture I took last night:


I rendered the clouds out, mostly with the color select tool, because the sky was mostly black. I also like to use a warping tool like iWarp