A little something I worked on for Christmas

Here's a piece I worked on for my Fiancee Rebekah. I got her a book for Christmas, but the cover was so bad that I thought I'd do a new one. In the end my own cover had its own set of issues, but I thought I'd share it anyways.

In color.

In black & white.

I had a bunch of musings to post on digital coloring, the peril of pink skies (it's supposed to be dawn), and illustration as cover art, but I'm out of time and I have to go. Maybe someday.

This was really hard.

I don't like to brag (feel free to dispute this I guess) but I also don't appreciate false modesty, and when I have done something hard I want people to know how hard it was. I took several cracks at this image, and wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the perspective in it. You can see several of those attempts below. The final image is by no means perfect, it does have plenty of compositional issues that we could critique to no end, but the perspective is sound. It looks a little wonky at first glance (that's one of the compositional issues) but by all means, look very hard at the perspective. It works. I'm proud of that.

This was a second attempt, building off of lessons learned in the first. At this point I am lightboxing together two layers of perspective because having all the vanishing points on the same piece of paper was throwing me off.

This is an example of one of the perspective objects that I lightboxed in. I pinpointed the axis on which the cube would pivot so that I could line it up with axis on the ship's gyroscopic thingy.

The first attempt. This one got so messy that I had to start fresh. Also, the cube is wrong.

The finished product. 

This blog is not dead. I am not dead.

Hello all.

It has been a while. I am stopping work for a brief moment to let the whole world know that this blog is not dead. If you follow this blog, and you don't personally know me, I am not dead. I haven't posted much recently because I have been frequently between jobs, and harried with learning new skills (ones that earn money), and sorting out getting married, and eeking out a very little time to draw.

Since I get so little done these days, I haven't been spending any of it on blogging about the drawing that I never get to do. One of the things on my list of things to do (what I am taking a break from right now) is learning web development, and building myself a personal site. When I do I may just install wordpress and move my blog there, but at least the spirit of this blog will live on.

At any rate, don't give up on me yet.

And what the heck, look at this picture!

I was totally going to write some great stuff about process. Oh well. Maybe next time.