Category: Art

Yunyu Tour – Sydney Leg

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Hi all, I’ve been flat out busy working on the tail end of Small Shen… so much that I feel I’m going a little crazy. Luckily I only have 1 more week of inks to go, before I plow into the tones and then FINITO!! Wow, it’s been a sprint – doing 2 books back-to-back without a break. I need a 3-week holiday after this, and I don’t care what’s a-happening!!

I also set up a Tumblr account, just to see what the fuss was about. It seems an easy place to upload pictures, so that’s what I’ve done a few pics of (in whatever spare time I have), mostly for the next series I want to work on. I can’t reveal anything right now because (a) I need to finish Small Shen, and (b) I need a holiday, but I’m thinking of giving this site a bit of a facelift soon. We shall see.

Anyway, today I’ve got Yunyu’s Sydney concert to promote, which is happening 30th June! It’s the last leg of the tour, and here’s the tour poster I made for her. The Brisbane show at the Powerhouse was a big success (full house), so here’s hoping the Sydney one sells out too.

 

What: Yunyu: Twisted Tales Tour
Where: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Sydney, NSW 2012 (Australia) – Map
When: 30th June, 8:00 pm
Cost: $25 – Buy

 
 
yunyutour

Small Shen: More Art

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Hi all! I have finally finished all the pencils for the “Small Shen” book! It’s got 9 chapters in all, plus a prologue, making a total of about 163 illustrated pages, including the chapter covers (which I will be doing in an interesting and very different style for a particular purpose – ha! Not telling you!). The whole book is on track to be finished at the end of July, which will give it a Xmas 2012 release. It’s looking good so far!

Now that I’ll be working on the inks for the last part of the book, I will show you some art from chapters 3-4!

SS_03_01

SS_03_02SS_03_10SS_03_13SS_03_20SS_04_17

Doodles for Odd Thomas books

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This week, I am blazing through the pencils for the last 3rd of Small Shen. I also went to Free Graphic Novel Day at Kinokuniya, which was a lot of fun. I signed some books and did some sketches for them, and here I show you a bunch of sketches I did for a series of signed (by me and Dean Kootz) books that I get to send back to someone who’s been doing this since the very first Odd Thomas graphic novel. This book is the last Odd Thomas book I’ll be doing, so I look back with some fondness.

 
sketch-odd

sketch-stormy

sketch-ozzie

sketch-nedra

sketch-vern

sketch-cassandra

sketch-kirk

sketch-youngodd

sketch-mum

sketch-cover
 

And here’s a picture of Dean’s autograph! With mine below…

 
autograph

Extreme Photoshopping – Yunyu’s “Dorothy” picture

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This week I was interviewed by Eastyn from PanelBound.com – thanks to Eastyn, an the interview is here. I’m also toning Small Shen at the speed of light, and it looks to be that chapters 3-4 will be done by the end of April *pumps first*. Meanwhile, I get to show you some Xtreme Photoshopping I did a while ago, for my musician friend Yunyu, who released a single called Dorothy which I did some art for. Chief among the art was a picture of her I photoshopped. Here, I get to show you how I did it, and what the original looked like.

 

Yunyu-milkyway1

The original: This was a studio-taken picture Yunyu, which is fantastically done and needs no retouching. The backgorund was a picture of the nightsky a friend took, slapped together in a composite picture.


 
Yunyu-milkyway2

Step 2: One of the problems with the original pic is that the picture isn't composed well. Yunyu is too small, and while the background is meant to emphasise the milky way, Yunyu is standing directly infront of it. So I cropped the picture properly, to show the foreground and background elements properly


 
Yunyu-milkyway3

Step 3: The milkyway looks kinda plain, so I flipped the picture around, and added a bunch of glow effects of it to make it pop out more. I also changed the hue to a bluish glow, to even out the diffferences in colour. A nightsky should be bluish...


 
Yunyu-milkyway4

Step 4: With the milky way now so bright, obviously I need to get the lighting references right. It doesn't make sense to be standing to the left of the lightsource when you can clearly see that Yunyu's lit from the left, so I swapped the picture element around so the light-source makes sense.


 

 

Final Step: Since the blue and the red contrast is so strong, I changed the hue of Yunyu's skin and hair to match the bluish glow. I left the red jacket mostly untouched, so that the red will pop out, whereas her skin tone will match the blue glow. And Viola! Click on the picture to see a larger version.