ahaas

LeewiART environment book

2012-01-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

Also forgot to post this one : leewiART , a publisher from China published a series of books : Environment, characters and illustration. I'm in the environment book together with 11 other talented artist from around the world. I believe you can order them here .

CGMagazine China

2012-01-17T10:48:00.000-08:00

I forgot to post this here : a publication for CGMagazine in China that came out last year. I provided text and images, but what the article actually says I've no idea

Meeting

2012-01-05T07:58:00.000-08:00

Finished this one for the portfolio yesterday. It took a bit too long but I'm still pleased with it.

CS5 with a bunch of custom brushes and mixerbrushes.

junglescene wip

2011-09-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Harvest

2011-07-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

I imagine a kind of bio-tech floating organism that gets harvested by privateers. This one also took me a bit too long but I like the outcome nevertheless.

finished

2011-06-07T02:31:00.000-07:00

It was actually finished more than 2 weeks ago but I forgot to put it on this blog. I'm pleased with the outcome but less pleased with the process, it wasn't a smooth flow, got quite mindy about it at times.

update

2011-05-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm actually updating my progress on this image. Finally getting the composition and atmosphere to my liking. Now it's (just) fleshing out details.

sketch

2011-05-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

I realise I hardly ever put sketches on my blog while that was actually my pupose for keeping it, I thought. So here are two. This top one I defenitely will continue working on. The bottom one I gave up on. They're both Alchemy-started sketches, top one with block shapes, the bottom one a line drawn chaos.

Here are the original Alchemy starts for both:

Cintiq

2011-04-30T13:05:00.000-07:00

I have finally been able to buy a toy that was on my list for quite a while but was too expensive so far: a 21 inch Cintiq. God, I love it, such a perfect combination of that direct contact you normally have with paints and all the advantages of the digital realm togerther. Oh yeah, why I've been able to buy it: I've worked quite a bunch of hours on that pre-produktion phase of a sci-fi movie.It was a blast designing alien jungles, not to mention being on the same team as george hull, harald belker and neville page and many other amazingly talented concept artists. If and when I can I will show some stuff here but that might be a while.
I've also done a tutorial of the duststorm piece that is published on 3d total.com here

Bookcover

2011-03-22T04:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a bookcover I did for Orion's SF Masterworks series calles RUR & War with the Newts by Karel Capek. The top one is the one they'll print in september, the bottom one is how I made it originally. They had to color-correct it to make it fit in the series. I had quite some fun making this one.

Interview CGSociety

2011-03-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

I did an interview recently for CGSociety about how I work, what moves me etc. I think it came out really nice, but you can be the judge of that. I'm really thankful to Paul Hellard for giving me this space on their site. It's this kind of exposure that has landed me this incredible job for a sci-fi movie, for which I was asked to design some environments ( can't say more about it as this point).

forgot

2011-03-22T04:22:00.000-07:00

Made this one last year but forgot to post it, so here it is. A small gouache on canvas 20 x 30 cm.

Alchemy

2011-01-22T06:26:00.000-08:00

It's such an appropriate name for this programm, Alchemy , I really have an alchemy with it too. It's like a warm-up for the creative side of my brain, these random shapes it produces. Nowadays I start with Alchemy to get my blood flowing AND to get compositions I normally wouldn't get if I tried. The two images above were also both started in Alchemy for the composition, then worked upon in PS.

Gorge

2011-01-22T06:12:00.000-08:00

A small gouache on canvas painting I did a while back, 20 x 30 cm

Waterhole

2010-10-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

My daughter asked me to make her a picture. She asked really nicely. Watercolor on paper A4 size

Dusk

2010-09-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

Inspired by a beautiful photograph I saw on the net. A bit over a day's work, 20x30 cm, watercolor on canvas.

Desert Tree

2010-09-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

Finally tried out this special canvas for watercolor somebody gave this May. It works quite nice but is very fragile: paint comes off quite easily and sometimes unintentionally. Still I'm going to use it more often.

finished

2010-09-28T03:35:00.000-07:00

Another one for the illustration-portfolio. Did some interesting brush experiments here.

New brush

2010-06-25T03:06:00.000-07:00

Well, actually I just combined two existing brushes I have and got this one which creates quite a lot of happy acidents. I had a lot of fun with this sketch, which I will definitely work more on soon.

More mixerbrushes

2010-06-25T02:34:00.000-07:00

They are fun to play with, these new mixerbrushes in CS 5. Especially the palette knife variant I made feels likea knife through butter.They really give this Painter-like feel. This plaything came out a bit Ryan Church style I guess, unintentionally so.

Another Finally Finished

2010-06-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

This is the painted final version of a digital sketch. The sketch was much more fun to make actually. Which makes me think I'll rather be doing landscapes digitally for now.

I love this new Photoshop!

2010-06-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

I mean , this is what I was hoping they'd do one day: a combination of Painter and Photoshop. These mixer-brushes are just like the artist oils in Painter with the obvious advantage of having them in a stable programm like Photoshop and being able to combine them with all my custom Phtoshop brushes. This doodle happend while playing around with the settings on these mixer-brushes. About one hour.

Finally!

2010-06-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

This one took me a bit too long over too long a period. Didn't have the best reference material and people I find just a bit harder to draw then ..uuh, aliens. But I'm happy with the result though.

Exposé 8

2010-06-16T00:17:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I got 1 image in Exposé 6 and was thrilled. Last year I got 2 images in of which one was chosen master of science fiction and I was ecstatic. This year I'm getting 5 images in and I'm going through the roof. They also asked me to do a video tutorial on how I made one of the images and I did. I'll show a part of that soon here.

brush tryout

2010-03-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

Quick sketch (aprox.2,5 hours ). God,I love these weird brushesI'm making lately. They really help me to quickly lay out a composition, something which I find hard to do but what kind of happens by itself like this (and yes, I used the same colorscheme as the last one 'cause I like it and I didn't feel like working to hard on that part)

I'm thinking about using these sketches as a guide for an actual painting- which no doubt will look completely different from this one.

Oh yeah, I found these and these pages in chinese with my work on them.When I let google translate the text it comes out like this:

"I mind at all times will be out of a lot of wonderful pictures, I need to do is to draw them out." Huh!

It has something to do with being chosen master of science fiction for Exposé 7 last year. Still, weird.

Techscape2

2010-03-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

I started this one as a black&white sketch but somehow I found it really dificult to add color later on since I messed up my layers. Man, do I love that paletknife-brush, especially with an art pen. If only Wacom would update some decent drivers for it: it was really buggy in CS4 so I switched back to CS3 which improved things considerably, not to mention much less brush lag. No rotate canvas on my touchring though.
This is the B/W sketch:

Techscape

2010-03-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

More experiments with brushes in Photoshop, with the brush-images made in Painter. I realise this image came out a bit like a much cooler one done by Sparth who I'm a big fan of. I'm really starting to dig this painting digitally , again (first time was from 9 to 5 years ago).

Droids?Me?

2010-03-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

This is not something that would've ever come out of me had I not started these weird photoshop brushes and getting these random surprise effects. I love it. This one up is the first. The one below I really didn't see coming, what the ...it looks 3d but isn't. Had a lot of fun exploring these shapes.

transformaris digitalis

2010-03-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

This is not something I ever thought I would be doing ever again, painting digitally that is. But my tablet, an Intuos (yes,no number, an Intuos 1, 10 years old) fell and didn't do much of anything anymore afterwards. Now I still used it for things like adjusting the photo's I took from my paintings and stuff so I bought a new one,yes,a nr. 4 large. And once I got started watching Vyle's dvd I got really excited and bought an art pen too, to get that bit closer to having a flat brush I can rotate. The pic up here is one of the first attempts and though I never finished it I still like it. The one below here was less fun,took too long to finish it and should've left it alone much sooner than I did. Ah well, live and learn I guess.

happy new year (a bit late, ahem!)

2010-01-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

Yééh, my favorite subject: alien jungles, anything goes really in these places. This was my last/first painting of 2009/2010. It's a small one, 20 x 30 cm, 2 days of fun painting with open acrylics on paper.

Translucence

2010-01-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

This one was done in open acrylics with regular acrylics for the background, 80 X 60 cm. I had fun with the detailing this one but had some issues with the composition.
Here's a detail pic:

All systems are go!

2010-01-05T07:46:00.001-08:00

This small one turned out nice once a blob of paint became a head and I turned the image on it's side. Decided to use it as a header too.

quickie

2009-11-26T12:40:00.000-08:00

I like doing these small b/w ones, they come easy somehow, a few hours work. Watercolor on paper this one, A5 size.

Another Alien Abstract

2009-11-25T03:00:00.000-08:00

By want of a better name that's supposed to be really meaningful and such I just prefer to give them generic names like Alien Abstract # and Structure # so you don't have any preconception of what it is you're looking at.
Did this one in a paint called open acrylic which let's you play more with the drying time which for me means I get to do transparent layers on top of one another immediately but NOT having to mix my colors again every day which turned me off from acrylics for a long time.

2009-10-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

After a big painting, like the bubblescape below (90X70 cm) I like to do something smaller ,preferably in black&white like this one (30x40 cm) which comes out much faster.

finally finished

2009-10-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

I managed to wrap this one up and walk away from it finally, spent too much time on it really but what to do?

some figure exercises

2009-09-16T11:56:00.000-07:00

Just in case I want to put a human being in a painting. Never thought I would like to do this but I do. Apparently

This one is after a Barontieri design which I used for a base to doodle with.

a new blog

2009-09-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Had this blog-account for years, never did anything with it. But I want to give it a try. I'm not making promises I can't keep by saying I'll update this weekly but I'll do my best ... at least for a while. I'm currently working on a landscape/abstract painting which I will photograph from time to time and post here as a work in progress thing.