Monthly Archives: February 2014

2015 already?

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   This is my chopper. I’ve been working on it, a little at a time,  for about 5 years. That’s WAY to long!  So I laid out everything and told myself that I will be riding it in Rolling Thunder this year. Wish me luck!

    I say that because a lot of things are on my plate. I’m not sure when I became so busy; a few of my goals are self-assessed. I have no down time built into my life.  There are the twelve art projects I have to work on at night. The three vehicles, none of which are fully operational. The home repair projects my ex left me. Oh, and the pending bills that I’m still playing catch up with as a result of said marriage going into the crapper. All that.

     The good news is that I’m getting a new car in the fall and selling off the other two. I won’t owe anything but my mortgage by August. I’m going to Hawaii in October…

     Life. No matter what, its always an adventure.

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Pretty Girl

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Today I managed to finish my line work! It was not as bad as I thought, so I decided to Export my image into Photoshop. Sounds easy right? Well, it wasn’t! First it didn’t want to take my resolution, then it tried to merge my layers. I finally got what I wanted and started to set it up in ‘shop.

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Once I had it there, I decided to clone the “detail” layer (ctrl J) then merge it with the line work layer. I also decided to add a color background in order to make sure no gaps appeared in my colors. I chose gray.

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Having combined the layers allowed me to make selections that I could color anyway necessary. I chose a black and dark gray layers to add those colors in appropriately.

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That’s it for tonight. Not only will I finish this soon, my muse for next month has already said yes! It’s so good to be me…

Eurodynamic

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birth_of_AmyLee

After going to the Motor Trend International Auto Show, I decided that a new mustang GT was definitely in my future! I took lots of pictures and learned something really important; this car sucks at taking photos! I’ve always been a Ford guy, but the new European mustang is going to need an American front end at some point. Still, I’m in.

I know the modifications I need to make, so that kinda stuff comes easy. However, having a drawing of the vehicle makes it a little easier to know what parts look good on her. Yes her. AmyLee to be precise.

So after getting this far in Photoshop, I realized my line work just wasn’t clean enough to get the look I wanted. I was bummed until I remembered I had Illustrator! So I switched programs and used my anchor points to clean up the lines. Voila!

AmyLeeI was so happy with it that I decided to save it as a template. With a little more detail, it should make a great start for people to customize! What do you think guys? Should I?…

Quickly Go Slow

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   So after pretty much nothing in January, I seem to be loading up the box this month! I have some weird clients and a few don’t want to have their stuff displayed at ALL.  I guess I’ll have to change my contracts to accommodate my own right to display what I create. As long as I’m not mass producing (or selling) personal art,I foresee no issues.

    My kid is crazy about his picture!  Unfortunately, so are the rest of my family, and what I feared would happen has already begun to come to pass. I’m getting pics of kids,  husbands, nieces and others sent to me,  “as a favor”. No. Hell no! So I explained that my art was like owning a store and that EVERYONE had to pay for the goods therein.

   No freebies.

   Then I posted my current contract and pay scale and offered to provide the same services I’d given uncle Roland.

   We’ll see if anyone was serious…won’t we?

A Loving Nightmare

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line work matters!

I decided that this month’s muse would be my son. It’s funny, you would think I would spend more time drawing my loved ones, but for whatever reason, I don’t. Maybe its mental or maybe I don’t want to open the floodgates; after all, once you began drawing family they all think you should.

So I made Sure that I wanted to do this first. because honestly the more time passed, the more it was becoming an issue and bothering me. Friday I started the line work. Then erased. Then changed. Then erased. It had to look like him and have his shape, so after several hours I got the desired effect. As usual, I sketched a rough shape, then did the detail work at one brush size, then outlined the overall shapes in a larger one. Since I’m self taught, it took a few pictures to get this down pat. Now I always organize this way.

Dami

Once I had all the line work completed and organized, I used the selection tool and created layers for the jacket, sweater, t-shirt, jeans, skin and shoes. I colored each with a brush set for 0% hardness and 25% opacity. On the shirt and jeans, an additional blue was brushed in at 7% and 12%, respectively.

The background will be done last. Honestly I’ve had several ideas, but none of them have stood out. We’ll see. In the meantime I’ll keep working on this and others.