Firebird - phoenix life cycle

For deviantart ~childrensillustrator's April theme "firebird".

Fanart: Akki from Shin Sekai Yori

Painted with a limited palette in Photoshop for weekly art challenges on tumblr.

"Alright, I draw fanart very seldomly - usually I have the feeling I fail to capture the characters’ essence. So I hope it’s ok to post this here.

Today I finished watching Shin Sekai Yori (From the New World) and I realy liked the latest ‘development’. This is the fiend/messiah. In a field of… tall grass…

Technically, I tried to stay with karniz’ rule not to use mixed-up colours, but picked from the original palette most of the times, using the standard brush at Normal mode with lowered flow."

With a limited palette that doesn't have black and white I find it difficult to go lighter and darker in particular areas, so it was challenging to not muck up the midtones to make highlights and darks.

Spring on my daily photo tumblr

I posted enough bleak photos, so at the moment I post a lot of spring blossoms. Only yew, hazel, cornel and which hazel are blooming at the moment. But I can't wait for cherry, willow and peach.



Hahar! Colour-clash!

Riverstone, character portrait, wip and detail

For Weekly Art Challenges Tumblr

Google will not be available TT____TT

Hope feedly will serve me.

Mox - Enter the Maze

I blurred out the background with 'fog', because the maze I had drawn was limited. And I still wanted the perspective.

Spring in my blog theme

Although snow crystals and a snowy blanket are amazing and beautiful, I yearned for a more green theme for the blog and so I went with a couple of white April-blooming bushes I photographed in the botanic garden in Berlin.

Crataegus laevigata

Fothergilla monticola
Lately I'm into Hamamelidaceae (e.g. witch hazel). They are beautiful and appear to be somewhat archaic.

First of March 2013

Do you remember Open Canvas 1.1? It was my favoured drawing program for years. Back than I got it from Gab (I think). From time to time I enjoy my nostalgic feelings, when drawing in OC nowadays.

And I still dig the "event file" function.

I had to pimp the colours and stars in Photoshop afterwards, because lately I'm into oversaturated colours.

Older "First of March"s

Fuck yeah, double screens!!

This is my current screen setup. The awe-inspiring picture is by pixiv-user 飴村.

Particularly when working with photoshop the double screens come in very handy. I switch Number2 (the left one) off, when not working with it.

tiny animation of hair, 4 frames

WIP:

click on images for more infos, linking to tumblr

January and February Sketches

Month of Texture on my Tumblr

Thane Stages

For Weekly Challenges Tumblr.

_{click image for larger view}

250 days, 250 photos

So colourful *_*

February will be my third themed month (after 'green' in June and 'insects' in September). In the beginning I'm always enthusiastic to do these, but midway through I get doubts if I have enough pictures fitting the theme...

perspective practise, bathroom

I'm practising perspective with self-made grid.
Things I have learned:
- next time try two-point perspective before three-point
- don't even try without a grid
- it takes me so much time T_T

Photo post-processing

Here's a teensy insight into how I use photoshop to edit my photographs.

almost never use masked fill or adjustment layers as much as in this picture. But they turned out nice - maybe I should use them more often??

In this case I only have a jpg-file. My newer photographs are all shot in RAW, so I can get the best out of every pixel before messing with artsy stuff in photoshop.

↑ Original JPG. I think it's a nice photograph to begin with.

I add an adjustment layer Vibrance. One of my favourite features within the new versions of the software.

↑ Vibrance added

I could stop here. The train pops out enough and the overall feeling is nice. Warm despite the snow. But I'm not pleased yet with the lighting of the snow. And I want an overall more surreal colouring. So I have to take other measures.

I selected the blue channel and filled the selection with blue on a new layer.

↑ + C) blue fill layer on Overlay

I selected the red channel and filled a new layer with red. I masked the layer where I already had the blue Overlay, so the two wouldn't cancel themselves out.

↑ + B) red fill layer on Overlay

This way I achieved a high contrast between the reddish light on the snow and the snow that's only hit by global lighting from the blue sky above.
Now, the sky in the picture is not blue, but only because we only see the portion of sky that is coloured warmer due to the setting sun.
I masked off most of the upper third of the blue Overlay, because I need the sky really warm. Additionally I use a gradient adjustment layer on Soft Light to warm up all the upper part of the background.

↑ + A) dull orange Gradient on Soft Light. Finished editing.

Thinking so much about it, maybe I bumped the intensity a bit too much? The reds of the locomotive are all 100% saturated... I try to avoid 100% of anything when editing photographs. I don't like to play around for hours and I don't like to undo steps entirely, so I use adjustment and fill layers and masks a lot, where I can always change parts without starting all over.

If I'm in doubt, sometimes it helps me to review my editing a few days later. Sometimes I like it initially or think a little levels adjustment suffices and then weeks later I have an idea how to really get the best out of a photograph. Sometimes I don't like it at all, but I'm fed up and post it anyway. :-D

The locomotive's name is Ernie, btw.

Sparkly New Year!

14 colours

EDIT
omg, I found this "old version" from two years ago. I like the idea, but I obviously gave up the drawing and animation too soon:

not that the "new version" isn't perfectible. Let's see if I can muster the patience next year. Or two years into the future... XD

Fränklin, my first animation short

Fränklin from Lew Bridcoe on Vimeo.

During my free time of three weeks in October I worked on my first animation film Fränklin.

Although some time passed since I finished the video, I still can't judge if it is any good.

When I started to make the first scenes, I didn't plan to do a 'whole' film at all. I just wanted to make my drawings move. I drew a simple and featureless character. I wanted to see if I can teach myself some animation... but after some days, my character evolved and I wanted it to become more and planned scenes until I even found a nice ending.

I made a .psd file for every scene, mostly drawing every single frame by hand, using copy and paste sometimes (the final film is made up from 1012 frames). Since I only had Photoshop, and no experience in layering animations, it isn't very elaborate to the eye, but it was very exhausting to draw it and this and the lack of a proper soundtrack kept me from starting a new thing ever since.

Here are some of the .psds, flatted and some stills.

And thus I depart to 2013 without '2012 legacies'. Mostly. I still got stuff I didn't get around organizing for the blog yet. Anyway! Happy New Year!