Inspiration – Digital Portrait Magazine Cover Art – Cesar Moreno
This is the ‘How it was made video” for a project for Clase Premiere Magazine by Cesar Moreno. His work is fantastic…i love his rough painting style. His Digital Painting style kind of crosses from fine art to almost a cartoon style and his use of limited palettes is extremely cool. Cesar is an Illustrator and Graphic Designer hailing from Mexico and you should really check out the rest of his work as it is pure class. Below is the final artwork.
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My Work – Digital Painting – Goldie Hawn Update
Ok, so here is an updated version of my Goldie Hawn Digital Painting portrait. As you can see there are still a few bits i haven’t finished, like the hands…still need a little work, but overall i’m quite proud of it so far. I’m really liking the face and hair, i think i’ve pulled those elements off quite well.
The difficult elements are really the hands and clothing…cloth is hell to paint and get right.Digital Painting is also a real time eater…i would love to get to the point where i can knock a portrait out in a day or even a few hours but right now it takes a hell of a lot of time…time to step back from it and take a break and to come back to it later with fresh eyes etc…anyway, i’m determined to get this digital painting stuff nailed…i’m working on something that is more towards the style i want to achieve, which is more along the lines of 50′s – 70′s film posters and magazine art so i’ll hopefully have something up soon…meanwhile i hope you like the evolution of Goldie Hawn.
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Inspiration – The Eagleman Stag by Mickey Please – Studio Den75
This Animation by Mickey Please is the awesome tale of Peter Eagleman’s life and his quest for an answer to his existential angst.
This is one of the most brilliant stop motion pieces i have ever seen
Oh if i had the patience, the imagination, the talent and the wit to be able to create work of this calibre. Amazing stuff. Worth aspiring to for sure.
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Inspiration – Hajime Sorayama
Hajime Sorayama is amazing!!! Fact!!!! and slightly perverted!!!! Jokes!!! No, but really… he is a little perverted.
Hajime is obviously famous for his ‘Sexy Robot’ series from the 70′s, for which the term was coined for, but i didn’t want to put those images here as they are widely distributed on the net, as are these above, but slightly lesser known images. The guy is straight up amazing at figure drawing yes, but even more amazing at drawing women…c’mon…these women are amazing and the painting beautiful…pure male fantasy, but so realistic looking they could be photographs…true talent at work…if a little perverted. In saying that though, to be truly honest, if i could draw and paint like Hajime i’d be painting sexy women all day too, in fact its one of my aspirations, to be able to draw women like this, not necassarily with all the bits hanging out and stuff but…there is a definite lineage back to the old illustrators of the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s here where illustrations of beautiful women were in all the magazines and advertising and this is part of what i love about that style and what i think has somewhat influenced our man above…that and sci-fi porn.
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Ralph McQuarrie – Illustrator – 1929 – 2012
This may be said a lot at the moment and i’m sure these images will pop up a lot too but there is no denying how much we designers/illustrators and certainly any of those of us who’ve done any concept illustration, owe to Ralph Mcquarrie.
To have even been involved at an even miniscule level in what was to become Star Wars (in fact this goes for numerous film projects that RM was involved in) would have been every boys dream in the 70′s/80′s, but to have come up with the concept look for iconic characters such as Darth Vader is pure genius.
Lets give him a round of applause boys and girls (probably a few more boys) nerds and geeks for a life that helped make our lives, certainly mine, more enjoyable and more full of exciting and imaginitive images that are positively burned into our memories and imagination.
May the force be with him (ahem).
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The InnKeepers – Poster Design
This is my favourite poster of 2011…created by Tom Hodge(AKA Dude Designs).
There is so much to love about this poster…i love the Art Nouveau decorative elements that frame the illustration and kind of flow into the image of the ghost bride and he has the two main characters spot on.
The Balance in the imagery is great and the typography is really nice to adding to that turn of the century vibe that gives you a little insight into some of the elements involved in the story, along with the ghostly bride…which doesn’t really give anything away because this is part of the story you find out from the beginning of the film.
The film though, is so much scarier than this poster gets across, there truly are some creepy moments in the film and i guess the fact that the poster doesn’t include all those moments could be seen as a good thing, though i do think the poster comes across as a little…i suppose teenage friendly is the right word…more the Goonies than the Crazies…but that doesn’t take away the fact that this is an awesome poster.
Whats also great is the poster does invoke those posters from the eighties for films such as the Goonies, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the… etc, so i guess its pretty Drew Struzan in style which is so a good thing cos if i was a kid of today this is exactly the kind of movie i would be smuggling into the house to watch when my parents were in bed instantly putting it into the ‘classic cult’ movie category along with its poster, which also puts it into the Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead and the general batch of awesome horror movies from the eighties that i used to watch unbeknownst to my Mum & Dad.
But the thing about all those old horror movies that got me excited to see them in the first place was seeing the artwork for the posters or video covers first and thinking they just looked so cool and scary…just from the artwork…and thats the power of the art right there…and truth be told, sometimes the artwork was better than the films.
In this case (The Innkeepers) the poster fed my desire to see it and the film didn’t let me down either so you get both…which makes a change.
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Beyond the Black Rainbow – Movie
Can’t wait for this movie. Looks really cool. Don’t know much about the director but he has an eye for making shit look cool, reminds me of 2001, Dario Argento, Alien, you know what i mean. Looks good though eh!?!?!
Lets not forget the poster…can’t seem to find the designer but its a wicked poster…love the red and pink colour palette and whoever designed it caught the whole 80′s poster/video cover vibe extremely well. I haven’t seen the movie yet so i can’t comment on the way the poster illustrates the plot of the film but i’ve heard rumours that it misses the mark by a mile…still…style wise i love it.
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