I made this poster before I saw the film. I was inspired by the look of the character I saw in clips and since I have not done any art for months I wanted something light. Light was still challenging. This is done in vectors with Affinity Designer and I think is my best resemblance to the real person so far using that technique. I used several shots from the movie as reference and I modified the lighting for the effect I wanted. 

It's a silly thing but I am happy with how it came out. 

Poster: Earth VS the Flying Saucers

(Image was updated after getting some feedback)

 
Another in my sci-fi series of posters done with affinity designer and publisher. I watched it the other night and thought it would be a quick and simple project and it was. The saucers are pretty basic and the alien didn't have much detail. 

Illustration: Lucky bats

 

I had a 1930s silk smoking jacket for years that eventually sort of rotted away. It was black with stylized gold Chinese bats on it and I thought it was the best thing ever. After I had to dispose of it I found myself wanting to reproduce the bat images but I didn't have any photos to work from. I thought the I had kept a swatch but if I did it's disappeared. The one photo of me in it is too far away to see any details. So every now and then I search the internet to see if anyone else had a similar jacket I could use for reference. Nope. So I decided to look at Chinese art and art inspired by Chinese art and make a series of drawings that might scratch this itch to reproduce these lucky creatures. 

I didn't really succeed, so much time has gone by I have only impressions left of what I wanted to draw. That said, I am still happy with the work and I'm sure these will be eventually useful somewhere. Maybe wallpaper in an animation or I would love to have embroidered versions added to a tuque or the top of some knitted gloves. I might add more details at some point and take them away from solely silhouetted images to something more decorative.

Poster project: Flash Gordon poster ( finished (?)

I did redraw much of Flash's face as I was very unhappy with it. I showed Ming to a couple people they really liked it a lot so maybe Flash suffered from being my first vector portrait as well as me giving into some of my worse tendencies like making him too pale, especially the lips. For the ship I used a 3D model I made combining several Flash Gordon designs. I used it as a special effects test years ago. I was able to position as I wanted for the poster and drawing it was fairly straightforward. 

Poster project: Flash Gordon poster - Ming The merciless

 I finished Ming and so far I think I like it... and of course, now I had the Flash portrait. I might start over or at least remake the eyes and mouth and see how that comes out. This one was going to have Ming's hands and his rings showing but I didn't want Flash, the focus of the poster to be a floating head and Ming to be more complete. I think Ming might have worked out better because he is much more of a cartoon with his heavy eyeliner and giant collar. The thing that really brought his face together when when I added the ears. 

Poster project: Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe version) poster

 

I have been starting and stopping and restarting this project for years now. I wanted to make Buster Crabbe front and centre with Ming, the spaceship and the cloud city as elements but I wasn't sure if I could get the likeness strong enough, especially when I decide I wanted to make it in Affinity Designer all in vector drawing. I more recently have been wanting to make portraits with AD and thought if I want to get to a place to do that this Flash Gordon project might be a good training ground and test. Afterall, all the people I'm drawing are dead and can't be mad if I do badly. 

This will work for the poster, though I am not sure I got the likeness as close as I would like. I used layers of shapes with blurred edges overlapping to get the soft blending for a more natural look over the overly clean 3D model look vectors can have. I think I really got the overly dyed blonde hair right. There are 100s and 100s of lines to make the hair and I added shapes for shading underneath to keep it from looking too flat. His shirt was inspired by but not copied from any one shirt or another from the series, there were a few to look towards for ideas and I think I get something with a little of all of them in it. 

I can still make adjustments as I go and likely will. I wasn't going to do Ming but now I think I will start him and see how it goes. 

The final poster will have an art deco feel and I don't think I'll do a logo or anything like that. I made one from the original movie version but it's pretty ugly and not having it will give me more options when making the composition. 

Illustration: Super 8 Movie camera

This is based on my Super 8 Bell and Howell movie camera from the 80s. Might be the 70s to be honest! I LOVED that camera. It could do 18 and 24 frames a second, record sound and do single frame. So it was what I first started film work and animation with. 

It only took about 6 hours to finish and I left out some details, mostly the text and numbers on it but it still came out much more photo real than I was aiming for. It was black but I added a brown tint to the plastic body when I realized by looking at reference photos that the plastic often had a brown tinge to it. The Xray view that shows the vectors always make these things look much simpler than they seem when you are making them! 

Poster project: War of the Worlds (1953) (finished)

 

I decided on a look I thought fit the film and it's style. The stars are a photo I took in Colorado years ago with my brother and the earth is a 3D render I made in Cinema 4D years ago. I had the planet mars and the martian probe ready for the poster but that was way too crowded and counter to my ideas on what I wanted it to look like. The title is remade from the original poster and I used Paramount logo from the 50s. 

Poster project: War of the Worlds (1953)

 

Another poster project caught my interest. I love the martian designs in this movie and the film is really good despite it's departures from the book, maybe because of some of them. The Martian probe and war machine are pretty slick looking. I remade the original poster logo and I would like to draw the arm and three fingered hand of a martian. Not sure how I will fit it all into a poster. My plan is to draw elements I find cool basically and then see what i come up with.  All drawn with Affinity Designer like the last poster. So far anyway. 

UPDATE: Martian arm

Poster Project: The Day the Earth Stood Still

 I have been drawing a local house recently and, as always, until I reach I certain point I HATE it. Every single house drawing has been like this. To give myself a break I became obsessed with doing a poster for The Day the Earth Stood Still. I am drawing the elements separately and will arrange them in Affinity Publisher when they are drawn. I am using only vectors in Affinity Designer. I would like to maybe try a realistic portrait in Designer and all or mostly vectors and this Michael Rene shows me... I'm not there yet. I do see my getting there though so it's a good step in that direction. 

Below is an "Xray" view of the drawing that shows the lines some light greyscale but not the shading and tones. some invisible elements like the mesh show the entire mesh of that before I distorted it. This took 15 hours to drawn and the Xray image makes it look WAY too easy! 

I would like the poster to have an art deco feel to it and I had a composition in mind but after an online search I saw someone else had done something very close to what I was thinking so I will have to come up with something else. 

Gort the robot will be next. The saucer is already done. I still have to decide on the logo design and how much information like cast, studio etc I want on the poster. 

Illustration: flowers from my garden part deux

 

I had a little time so I worked on turning the second live drawing pencil sketch into another colour illustration with Affinity Designer. 

Illustration: Flowers in my front garden

 We had a huge water main break that cut power, water and flooded 100 places very close to my house a couple days ago. I, somehow did not lose power or water when every house around me did! I did lose cable, phone and internet all day so I couldn't work on clients stuff. Instead i sat in the front garden and drew a couple drawings from life. Then the last 2 days I decide to take one, for now and make a Designer illustration from it. 

Illustration: Lost in Space Robot

 

I have been pretty sick all week among other things happening and decided to do make an illustration just for the fun of it. I am not a fan of the TV show to be honest but I love the robot and I might do the spaceship and the chariot transport if I feel like it. 

I drew Robby the Robot a few years back, designed by the same guy, and was very happy with it. This I'm pretty happy with as well. I used 4 reference all of which differed in details here and there. So if this is missing or adds elements some purists don't like... draw your own. LOL

Infinity Designer - which is really the most comfortable vector drawing program I have used. Not sure what my style is with these things but there seems to be one. 

EDIT: Could not leave well enough alone and made the Jupiter 2

Another Damn EDIT: CThe Chariot, the thing they drove around in. It had curtains! 

Cirru book series for children

Over the last 6 months or more I have been working with authors Danny and Melissa on a series of children's books featuring Cirru the travelling cloud. The books teach young children about colours, shapes and how to count to ten. I not only designed the books but did all the illustrations.

The books are available to buy on Amazon, so buy them and leave a good review, especially for the illustrations! 

Click the title to go to the Amazon page! 

Cirru Counts to Ten

Learning Shapes with Cirru

Learning Colors with Cirru

Cartoon: Sheep (moutons)

 

More animals from Mobius Meadows farmstead. It was a bigger challenge than expected. This is the third iteration, the other two were... not good. mostly because I was too biased towards realism and couldn't seem to get my head around the cartoon part. In the end this came out OK. 

Illustration: Alpacas

 I have wanted to make cartoon versions of some of the animals on the farm in Vermont. Earlier attempts went... not so well. As I have been cartooning my heart out lately for a client I gave the alpacas another try and I think they came out ok. The sheep... not so much. I will need to rethink how I want to draw them.  Made with affinity Designer. 

3d Mock up to Illustration

 This is a part of an illustration for the children's book I am working on. Some of the panels have been very complicated and difficult to fit what the client wants into the frame and in the same perspective. I had been using Cinema 4D to make simple mock-ups to make the items fit in the frame and to keep the perspective consistent. Sadly, my C4D version no longer works on my OS and I started to learn Blender... again? Still?  In any case above is the finished illustration made in Affinity designer and I managed to make the mock-up in Blender  over a couple hours. Still don't know enough to do much but I made progress so that is a positive! 

The children's book looks basically like a cartoon and keeping all the images looking like they belong in the same book is not easy. 

Comic Strip

 I can't say I have never done a comic strip, I did many of "The Happy Houseboat" with my cousin Sue over the years but I am not sure they really count. Not sure this does either! It was just one of those ideas I could not get out of my head for a couple years and finally did something about it. You might have to click on it to enlarge to make it readable. 

Software desires for 2023

 I don’t actually expect much of this list to really happen anytime soon. But it’s good to make lists of things you need and see what happens over time, isn’t it? 

MAC OS

Bugs: Fix the really annoying I cloud terms and conditions bug! It keeps popping up at a warning 100 times a day and agreeing to the terms does nothing to stop that. 

The window to update the stuff on my iPod touch keeps popping up at random times during the day.

Both of these bugs stop my work to a halt when they happen and break my concentration and workflow. 

Bring back: Scheduling! And make it more robust! Let me schedule on a real calendar timetable not just open and close at certain times. Week days, vacations, interruptions and I have to reset the schedule… well when I could schedule! 

Podcasts: Why on planet earth is there no way to make a playlist yet? I use my iPod touch everyday and especially in summer when biking, walking long distances but I can’t make a play list. I have to stop after each podcast and pick another or it randomly picks one I already listened to or isn’t "Online" even though I only keep episodes I have downloaded and haven’t listened to on the device. It’s easy making a playlist for songs so what is going on? Why does the device say something is downloaded but when I get a certain distance from my house it suddenly not available because there is no internet connection? There shouldn’t need to be one! 

iPad IOS

Handle fonts like they are handled on the desktop! Now we can do page layout and professional design on an iPad, we need access to all the fonts we can for making decisions about projects. Allow plugins! Being able to use the NIK or Topaz plugins on Affinity Photo would be a game changer. 

Affinity products:

I haven’t had the crashes and issues I’ve read about online and many of those seem Windows related for now. That doesn’t mean I hope some improvements are not on the way.

Overall: When I hide a program and unhide it, the program opens but no windows do, I have select one from a list and then they all open. This should be automatic and is a known bug, I think. 

Publisher on iPad: I hope it gets all the features the desktop does soon. The Book function is of interest to me but the power duplication and grid feature would be nice as well. 

Designer: The long sought after vector trace feature. A spiral drawing tool would be cool.

Photo: I would love better compatibility with Topaz plugins - mainly to resize images. This is possible on photoshop and the programming in Photo restricts it. Better integration with NIK and DXO plugins would be nice as well. Overall they work great together but I would like the Viewport app/plugin to work in Photo and be able to send a series of bracketed photos directly to HDR Efex Pro. 

Affinity iPad Apps: being able to save export preferences for difference situations. I need different, specialized setups for different printers as an example and I to set them all from scratch when using the iPad. 

A "DAM" from Affinity: This is another long proposed app I would love to see implemented. Most other DAM (digital asset managers) do not show Affinity previews or allow for any actions to be taken like selecting series of bracketed photos and opening them as an HDR in Photo.

Topaz Labs 

An iPad version of Topaz photo AI! It would really make it more possible to do ALL the work on the iPad not have to go to the desktop to finish up when returning from a trip. 

review: Affinity Photo, designer, Publisher V2

 

The Affinity Suite of graphic design products just went for a long awaited V1 to V2 update. The last year had been quiet and missing the frequent updates and improvements of the last few years so many speculated something was up. The bizarre speculation of the company closing, or being sold to to Adobe was not founded in any reality but it was all over the place. To me, it seems there has been some obvious trolling going on to downplay this release and some people were left to speculate far too long on what was to come. A one minute teaser 5 days before the release that told you basically nothing except a new version was coming out but generated a lot of unwarranted expectations and wild theories.

What was released:

V2 of all the apps and a new, looooong awaited,  iPad version of Publisher. What happened was many of the missing features people have wanted were implemented in all three apps. Not all of them, of course, and it is 100% normal to wait a long time only to find that something you need for your work wasn't in the update very disappointing. Designer and Publisher got the most love but the whole suite got a nicer interface that bled over to the iPad. Many of the key features like the style eyedropper were added to all the apps and Photo got non destructive RAW editing and new versions of some features that were somewhat poorly done in the previous versions. All of the apps were elevated to much higher professional level. The "big surprise" was not a D.A.M. but a universal licence that let you install all three on windows, Mac and iPad under the same license and a ridiculously low price considering improvement and updates will be free until V3 comes out which will likely be 2-5 years away. 

The good stuff:

Designer's vector warp tools, a criminal omission in V1 were implemented. Also they added a shape builder function and knife tool. Photo got some nice masking improvements and new features and the before mentioned non destructive RAW processing. Publisher, the newest app needed the most work and got it. A book function that lets you organize separate external files into one project, style dropper, automatic page generation when importing a long text file or many images. Publisher on iPad has the same studio link function as the desktop, which lets you simply turn Publisher into Photo or Designer with a simple button to work on graphics and never have to leave the app. We can now realistically work from an iPad for everything most graphic designers need with the exception of epub and web design which Affinity has shied away from, at least for now.

The disappointments:

Digital Asset Management is really the missing piece in the suite and some of the new Publisher features do not work on iPad. iPad also has a terrible font system for publishing. I have to add one font at a time with a 3rd party program that takes a couple minutes for each one - if it works. Many graphic designers need over 600-800 fonts on a desktop system to pick from. This is something Apple will have to address. Designer would profit greatly from a bitmap to vector tracing function as many artists use that in their workflow, a vector eraser and the ability to warp a shape inside another shape (like a word or words inside a heart for example) would fill out it's feature set nicely. I wish there was some way for plugins to work on the ipad and be better implemented on the desktop. 

Overall this was an AMAZING release that added many of the features users have been asking about for years. This is not the last update, something I think many don't take into account, and Serif has been responsive to customer needs more than most companies - even if it takes them longer to realize those needs it has been worth the wait.