She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

This week’s Character of the Week assignment is an envoy of the Khemethar, a race of aliens who descended to earth to study the ancient Egyptian culture, and from whence they derived their gods. The brief is as follows:

- Design One or More of the Khemethar envoy, based upon one of the Egyptian Gods (ie, Aten-Ra, Isis, Osiris, Set, etc)

- You do not have to depict them as the Egyptians did - think of interesting things that they might have had/worn that might have been interpreted the way they were by the egyptians either for symbolic reasons, or simply because it was the closest thing that it looked like, not having the same technology/clothing available to them.

I was going to start with Seshet, Mistress of Books, for obvious reasons. But I got diverted by the design possibilities of Heptet and her snake form, and the atef crown she wears. The atef crown will actually be a sort of glass encased electrokinetic matrix where she keeps a copy Osiris’s memories. She and Isis are escorting the Osiris biopod/saracophagus, and will “resurrect” and reactivate Osiris so that he may commence his studies. They aren’t towing him precisely–those are more like bio-leashes, which will keep Osiris alive by drawing from their bodies if his power cells give out while he is in his pod. I’m also thinking that the strips on her snake hood are actually special bio-engineered information collecting cells. When Osiris is present but not conscious, he needs somebody to collect memories for him, and that’s part of what Heptet is doing while she escorts him around.

Here’s what I turned into ChoW:

San Francisco: A laid-back city where you can remove the masks you wear. Kind of a techno-pagan. She’s got a long history and a history of activism and culture. She’s friendly to artists and crazy people. She’s environmentally friendly (and while you can’t tell, her clothes are probably made of all-natural hemp.) Of course, every so often she throws a tantrum, and you end up with a major earthquake, but most of the time, she’s just chilling, making her own beat.

Annotations to the symbols: gold dust (for the gold rush), heart-in-a-cage tattoo (double duty for Alcatraz and "I Left My Heart In San Francisco"), goggles (technologically inclined), marijuana leaf border on her tank top, sash turning to fog, djembes (Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park), rainbow peeps (gay pride), Chinatown, the railroad (railroad barons built SF), the Golden Gate bridge, cracked ground (earthquakes), portrait of Emperor Norton (the most famous craaaazy person in SF history), Chinese coin, and a parrot from Telegraph Hill.

I tend to paint with at least two windows open, and windows for reference for colours and shapes if necessary.

The strong outlines–the inks–will painted over later. I don’t plan on keeping them that bold.

So the theme for this week’s Character of the Week at ConceptArt.org is The City. You’re supposed to envision a city personified: This week we want you to take a city, anywhere in the world, your own, or another, and visualise it as a character. Present a city as a human personality, male or female it’s up to you. If possible try to avoid national costumes, and instead imagine how the city would look as a person.

Anyone who knows me knows it took me half a second to say, “Hey, I’m gonna do San Francisco!”

Ideas for this piece:

My first sketch of San Francisco, doodled yesterday. I wanted to evoke a sorta techno-pagan feel to the city, and evoke the past of the city, the activism and the culture, as well as stress the technology. I’ve got some notes on how I want to do this, since not all of it is in the sketch.

Past: Gold dust streaming from her braids. Stylised railroad tracks circling a drum. (Each of the three drums will probably have a sort of theme.)

Culture: The drums themselves (if you’ve ever spent a summer’s afternoon in Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, you’d know why.) I’m pondering a sort of meditative posture instead of this floating one….something like a partial lotus position. You can’t see it in this sketch because the scan faded out too much but she has three masks tied to her wrist, as well as various talismans representing the city’s history.

Technology: She’s wearing googles (kinda steampunky) has some techy tattoos, and one of the drums will probably reflect this theme as well.

Clothes: Some trailing bits which turn into fog.

This was really supposed to be a quick sketch for the CA forums. Sometimes these things just sorta beg for more. But sometimes you also just gotta call it finished. If I was going to work this further, I’d refine the hair and shirt a lot more–they didn’t get the same attention the face did. But then with portraits, the face is the most important part.

Here’s the links to the in progress shots — the big versions are on Flickr. Feel free to click to see ‘em bigger.

Inspired my jaunt over to the Cartographer’s Guild forums this afternoon, I got the urge to scan my map in and paint it up a little.

Click on the map to embiggen.

….

Background:
Avynthar is the main continent in the world my novel takes place in. There is a High King that rules over the Thirteen Kingdoms of Avynthar, although there are at least one autonomous kingdom and a few independent city states and some rogue states and whatnot which do not bow to the High King. The three kingdoms at the heart of the continent: Illivhar, Gallitor, and Tavaris are known as the Three Civilized Kingdoms, because they have the High King’s Court, the Keep of the Yn Greneiri, and the University at Tallandrith respectively. People in Cadenza and Innstak tend to snicker about the Three Civilized Kingdoms though. (Cadenza is the capital of Maltaias and while technically has to submit to the High King, they’re like the California/Renaissance Italy of Avynthar: a lot of races and cultures coming together, and they are much more chill and not so stuffy. Innstak is a city of merchants and burghers, and they run the trading guilds on the western half of the continent.)

There are three major mountain ranges (although a lot of little subranges spiking off of them): The Cold Peaks, The Vall, and The Avynians. Lake Avar bisects the breadbasket regions. The southeastern coasts has climates similar to the area around San Diego, fading into a sort of piedmont region inland. The left lower coast is rocky, fading to desert on the interior of the Zaelt peninsula. The northwestern coast alternates with fens and marshlands along the coast, and highland hills, with a few patches of fjord like areas up by Eid. Vallada tends to be a lot of highland hills, with late snows. Dallakh is jungly near the shore, and tends to be rocky and barren in the interior.

The map was handdrawn and handlettered, although I’ll eventually replace the lettering I think. (I like to doodle map contours. I find it very relaxing.)

I’m thinking I’ll want to do several versions. Probably an illustrative version along these lines with little icons showing the production of various regions: fish, horses, wine, grains, incense, etc. (I played Civilization one too many times.) And probably a more topographic/realist version, just because I would find it handy for the novel.

I decided to try this technique posted by Bumskee in the ConceptArt threads. Here is the sketch with some of the basic colours blocked in. Below, the finished sketch.

In case you ever actually have these items hanging around in your kitchen, you can make a very yummy risotto with them, provided you also have the arborio rice and some gorgonzola and a few other piffling ingredients. I mostly follow that recipe, but I am pretty freeform when it comes to risotto. So I added leeks, because I like leeks, and because I had half of an old onion (red) waiting to be used, my onion is half red onion, half yellow. I decided I liked the red, because it gave the mixture a little bit of colour. You can optionally sautee the leek and onion with a little garlic, but I don’t recommend more than two or three garlic cloves, since you don’t want to overwhelm the pear. I use two pears worth of pears. And for the cheese part, I did some parmesan–what I had left from the last time I made risotto–and probably a quarter cup of gorgonzola crumbles. Again, not totally sure, because I just sorta throw stuff at the pot. Spices: freshly ground pepper, parsley, a pinch of basil. (Majoram also works nicely, but I didn’t use it this time.)

Anyways, how I do this:

Dice pears. Caramelize pears. Once they are browning at the edges, but still goldeny in the middle, toss in the leeks, red onion, and garlic. (Don’t wait too long. You don’t want squishy pear.) Add more butter. Sautee. Once leeks and red onion are softened, remove mixture. Sautee yellow onion in butter. Add risotto rice. Add broth. Stir a lot. Probably stir on and off for about 25 minutes. Keep adding broth whenever you can see too much of the rice. (You will probably go through about five cups of broth.) When rice is a little al dente but not too (25 minute mark approximately), I add the caramelised pears and sauteed leeks and red onion. Then I add my parmesan, then I add gorgonzola, then I add the spice mixture I put to the side. Then I stir it all, dish it up, and garnish with pear slices.

Okay, I went a bit farther with this then I meant to. I was just gonna lay in the basic shapes and some colours. Instead, I ended up inking my initial sketch. Once I got started, I wanted to go further with the colouring, but I also wanted to have something that looked fairly cohesive, so I ended stopping here:

Reference is from my photos at the Seattle Aquarium. I took this particular shot during my brother’s visit earlier in April. I managed to get some fairly decent photos despite the flash and despite the fact that our camera’s lens needs cleaning. Well, decent enough for reference.

Here’s the in-progress shots. First, the sketch:

Then I put another layer on top of the sketch layer, and ink in a more refined version with more subtle details. The reddish-orange is the inks layer, the orange is the sketch layer beneath. I’m inking with a 3 and 5 solid round paintbrush at 45%.

And the finished inks:

The colouring was done in three different layers. The flats–the orange background. I later dropped its layer opacity to 66 percent. Then the shadows, painted roughly on with a fuzzy round brush, and then set to multiply with the layer opacity set to about 15 percent. And the highlights layer (100 percent opacity on the layer itself) but painted with brushes anywhere from 7-25% opacity.

I’ll probably revisit this in the future because I am really aching to try painting his awesome colouring, but for now, let’s call it a night.

I’ve been experimenting with making my own custom brushes. You can pretty much make anything a custom brush, if’n you want, and so I’ve been making me some handy foliage and texturing brushes. I started off by painting a greyscale painting on a white background…and painting it fairly largely. These brushes are all from approximately 350 pixels minimum size to 700 pixels. (So I can scale to whatever I want.)

I recommend not filling your brush all the way to the edges. Leave some ragged edges for better foliage. (With the brick brushes, I leave scatter and shape dynamics off, and sorta paint swathes of brickiness, and try to fill in the gaps later with other brick brushes I’ve made. If I wanted really uniform bricks, I wouldn’t use a brush at all but just make a straight up pattern.)

Select all, then head to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Voila! A brush. Open the brushes Palette to toy with scatter and angle jitter and dual brushes. So much fun. Also kinda relaxing to make the initial brushes.

Mostly, I’m just sharing the ones I’ve made recently. If you want a fun brush tutorial, I recommend Linda Bergkvist’s brush tutorial.

Here’s the current piece I’m working on for fun. It’s fanart for Lois Bujold’s fantasy series, The Sharing Knife.

My workspace setup inside Photoshop. I tend to have two windows open, one zoomed in, and one at the size (roughly) of the final art. (I paint in 300 dpi, but most people will be viewing at 72 dpi.) And I generally have photo references open around, depending on what I am painting.

There are about five layers in the canoe folder: sketch (multiplied and set to 30%-35% roughly), the leather and wood layer, and THREE algae/waterspots layers. I’m still probably going to add some water highlights later, once I get the water layer (in a different folder) masked out the way I want. (Hrm. Looking at this, I must’ve screen capped this before Algae Layers 2 and 3.)

It’s about this point that I start turning the master sketch layer off, and snipping bits of it to add to the folders for individual objects.

Lilies. *shrugs* Four layers: sketch, water highlights and bubbles, lilies, the roots and fronds underwater.

Click the pics to see slightly bigger versions.