Michael's blog

Yes, someone at work got me sick over the weekend, so I did little else than sleep and take meds to try and stave off terrible headaches and endless amounts of congestion blowing from my nose and mouth. I am still kind of sick, but not quite as bad (just have retained the stuffy shit, at least the headaches are gone).

Been agonizing over a couple of pictures while not feeling terrible. One cool sci-fi floating city landscape for my dad, and a beach lighthouse for my grandma. I would say the lighthouse is giving me a fair amount of trouble. Tried a few new techniques, found them lacking, was thinking about something else in bed last night, might try it later.

I'll attempt a comic, but I got no suggestions :( oh well.

I have been posting my process in the body of my image posts. Generally I use a ragged hard round brush for everything, which I got out of ImagineFX's CD in one issue a while back. Other than that I have a plethora of textured brushes and other crazy things I've downloaded from conceptart.org and brusheezy.com (m@'s brushes come to mind, they are buried in there somewhere).

I feel like I am settling down on a process now, but it will still need work, and I will detail my work-flow in the posts.

Oh yea, and tomorrow is my birthday. 27 is the new 20, right?

Also, twitter at http://www.twitter.com/galefire
need to setup a links box on the right over there still, might do that tonite.

This will be quick, I have work to do on Christmas pics.

Majority of this image was done with the standard photoshop Charcoal brush, with some tweaking done on my brush setting myself. This is pretty much the brush I do everything with now, I feel that it works very well. I initially started using the brush from a suggestion out of ImagineFX magazine (which I love... I need a links box come to think of it) from Marko Djurdjevic. In the tutorial from him, he says he uses the same brush for mostly everything.

I started with a couple rough sketches, mostly just quick doodles to figure out what I wanted to do. After that I went ahead and took it into photoshop and redrew it, taking the best parts of the sketches. I'll try to remember to preserve my sketch layer on the next few images so I can toss it up here. Once I was satisfied with the sketch I blended out some colors off to the side and then just started tossing them on top of the sketch. I like to work only on one layer, I think it simplifies things, and that's how it is in the real world. After I had a few plates of metal done, I felt the color scheme was working well and I just kept going.

Doing the blue on the other side was a relatively late decision, because I didn't want to do another fiery side of majik. I went with a cool blue, flowy look instead of flame. I really enjoy how it came out, especially twining around the runed blocks I put into it. There I actually worked on 2 layers, first making the blue flowing majik and then drawing the rune blocks on top of that on a separate layer. Once I was finished I merged it all together and did some highlighting with a soft airbrush.

The text is "Fires of Ysgard" I believe that's the name anyway. The text came broken up like stone, and from there I tried to link the letters together with their side's majik color.

Thats about it!

Not of the emergency broadcast system.

Man that header logo looks bad right now, I need to make something to go up there.

I don't really know what I am going to do with this, but I wanted to try it out and see how it shows up on the site.

Probably will have technique details in here or something.