A lot has happened in the past few months, which has unfortunately cut into my sketching time. Since my last post, I have moved twice, attended and presented at a conference, coded and launched a new html site, started a new job, and participated in a close friend's wedding. Phew!
My new job is fantastic, I am working at a company in Long Grove IL called the Body Scientific. Most of what we do is textbook illustration using Photoshop, so I will be getting quite a lot of practice in the coming months. While I won't be posting anything from work on my blog, I'll try to put any new tricks I've learned on the job into practice on some fun stuff. Here are some recent photoshop graphics I've made using photo references, enjoy:
Here is the final draft I submitted for our pathology assignment, but I think I may have to do another iteration yet. But I'm quite happy with how my mosquitos came out!
While making a lengthy phone call, one often becomes fixated on minute details of the nearby environment. On one such occasion I happened across a romantic pair of snails nestled between the planks of a wooden bench.
Using the photo for a reference, I first made a sketch which was inked to practice contour shading. Although simple forms, getting the angle and twist of these shells just right was tricky.
I attempted a color version of the subject, but unfortunately some of the red/violet hue seeped into the white, so the specular highlights became purple! Thank goodness for photoshop!
There is a great, simple command in Photoshop that I found by accident awhile back. If you just hit command-i, you will invert the image and get a photo-negative. This looks especially nice with black and white images, and is how I converted several sketches of mine to be used as graphics on my website.
