For the Grand Bazaar of Ethra VanDalia Kickstarter that we successfully ran earlier this year, we had a truly awesome video made by the outstanding Zdenko Basic. I shared the video at the time of the Kickstarter, but I have recently received the final non-Kickstarter version of the video, and I thought I would share it again. I am so happy with how the video turned out, and I feel it really captures the feel of the Grand Bazaar. For those interested, the books are available now!
Today I have for you an overdue post about the process and steps that went into a Magic the Gathering piece of mine that I first shared with you way back in April of 2017, the Festering Mummy. This was the first opportunity to create a self-portrait on a Magic card, and I had a lot of fun working on it. To start things off, here is the final art for Festering Mummy.
As with all of my pieces I began with a photo shoot of reference to get my head around the physicality of the piece, composition, and lighting. Dear Wife took many a silly photo of me being a mummy. Once the photo shoot was completed, I got to work on a series of thumbnails that distilled my ideas down to something usable. Many of these I was excited to work on.
As you can see option 'B' was the winner. I was putting my money on 'A,' 'D,' and 'E,' but it was not meant to be. There was concept work in the style guide for this set of Magic that depicted mummies without arms. I was fascinated by that and had wanted to do a mummy that was armless but still a danger with its mouth. Maybe another day. Now that I had an approved thumbnail it was time to work on the final drawing.
This drawing came together quickly and easily. You can even watch the drawing being created with this handy dandy time-lapse video I shot while working on this set. Now you can watch and learn all my drawing secrets.
With a finished drawing, it was time for the tonal study for the piece where I work out the lighting and values. Not much more to add. It is just the heavy lifting of figuring out the painting.
Now that all the prep work was completed and I had a little bit of an idea of what I was going to do with this piece it was time to paint. This piece came together quickly and was a straight forward painting. A relatively isolated figure on a low definition background. No horror stories to share on this one, it was only a matter of putting in the time working to get it completed.
And with that, the painting was completed. There were no edits or revisions with this piece, and it was approved after submission. Here again, is the final art of the Festering Mummy as well as the production card.
Today I have for you another time lapse video that I recorded about a year ago. This is the drawing for the Festering Mummy that I did for the Amonkhet expansion to Magic the Gathering. This expansion just came out so I am actually posting this when it is half way relevant. First things first, here is how the final drawing turned out...
The video should speak for itself. If you follow my blog at all you will be familiar with my thumbnails that I create as part of the process of creating an illustration. When I go about making the final drawing I use the approved thumbnail as a guide. I make changes and corrections along the way, which you can clearly see in the video when I erase and rework various parts as well as slim down the body and limbs. If all goes as planned, which it mostly did here, it comes together quickly so that I can move onto the next step in the process, the painting. Here is how the final painting turned out, you can compare the drawing with the painitng to see how they are interconnected...
Today I have for you a very overdue time lapse video that I recorded over a year ago. This is the drawing for the Lathnu Sailback that I did for the Aether Revolt expansion to Magic the Gathering. With the next expansion soon to be out I figured I better hurry up and post this while it is still a little relevant. This should have been up months ago... but things are a bit hectic right now. Enough excuses, here is an image of my work station right before I started drawing as well as the video...
The video should speak for itself. If you follow my blog at all you will be familiar with my thumbnails that I create as part of the process of creating an illustration. When I go about making the final drawing I use the approved thumbnail as a guide. I make changes and corrections along the way, which you can clearly see in the video when I erase and rework the creature's front right leg. It was not working and was not correct as per the thumbnails and needed to be fixed. If all goes as planned, which it mostly did here, it comes together quickly so that I can move onto the next step in the process. Here is the final drawing again for a better look...
Lastly, here again is the final painting for the Lathnu Sailback. I will be sharing more about this piece when I finally get to the process post for it... which at I current pace will be sometime later in the year. All at once I feel like I have too much and not enough to post on this blog. It is a strange feeling.
Today I have the finished Eau-de-nil Elder. I previously shared the line work and time-lapse for this piece here on the blog. There has been a couple of months gap during the creation of this piece, but I am happy to say that it is now finished. As with the line work, I recorded myself doing all of the rendering and made a time-lapse of it. Before I get ahead of myself, here is the completed Eau-de-nil Elder.
It took me 3.5 hours, spread over three separate sessions to complete the rendering of this piece. I condensed that time down to 25 minutes for the time-lapse. I know that is a bit to watch, but if it were any faster, you wouldn't be able to see what I was doing. If you are interested in how I work and draw, this is an excellent opportunity to see just that.
If you are doing the math, that was 3.5 hours to render, it was about an hour to do the line work, to do the original digital sketch it was about an hour, and the photo reference shoot took about 15 minutes. Sometimes these pieces go quicker, sometimes they take longer. It all depends on the drawing, the number of distractions, and the amount of time I can spend on the piece uninterrupted.
In an attempt to do a better job of documenting and recording my process and steps I have been trying out a new camera set up to record myself working. Ultimately, I would like to be able to offer time lapse of some of my work as well as record while I am working to explain what I am doing better. The first test of the new set up was a little rocky. I had originally thought the entire recording was corrupted, it turned out a large piece of it was salvageable. This time lapse does not include the entire drawing process, it does record most of the line work going down on the Eau-de-nil Elder.
Details about this drawing and my drawing process:
I am using tan BFK Rives paper and black (and eventually white) Prismacolor colored pencils.
I created the thumbnail sketch for digitally and printed the thumbnail onto the paper at 20% opacity.
I create a digital thumbnail for most of my planned drawings for both myself and clients. This allows for a much faster product and for a cleaner final drawing. I can revise and work out ideas so much quicker and easier when working up my initial sketches digitally.
I still continue to draw without using this digital thumbnail method, but this is usually when I am relaxing or drawing without a set goal of a finished drawing.
I generally always start at the top and work down the drawing.
I will continually revisit what I have already finished working on to add detail and edit parts that might not be working fully.
You will notice that I spin the pencil around in my hand while drawing (watch the markings on the pencil to see the spin). This is to get more life out of the tip while I am drawing. By spinning it I control the marks the pencil is making.
When my hand disappears I am sharpening my pencil in an electric pencil sharpener.
When my hand pauses on the drawing I am thinking about the piece.
While the thumbnail is already worked out I often change it if I think the piece would be better suited to go in a different direction.
Now that I have the completed line work drawing done I have scanned it and will now proceed with the rendering of the entire image with black and white pencil to build up the values and complete the drawing. This will easily take two to three times the time it took to work up the line drawing. I will do my best to document the entire rendering process.
That is all for another exciting Wednesday on the blog, see you back here on Friday! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
Today is a holiday in these parts so I am letting the monsters run the blog today. To that end, they have decided to share some monster reference that I took during my recent trip to the Yucatan. Turtles, iguanas, and coati... OH MY! Lots of wonderful scale and pattern information in some of these as well as some movement reference in two videos! Hope you enjoy...
Video time! The iguanas at Tulum were the most mild mannered and allowed me to get the closest. Because of that, here are a pair of videos showing an iguana in action, doing his thing...
RAWR!
That is all for another exciting week on the blog, see you back here on Monday! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
I worked up this drawing a little while ago and a space in the blog schedule has finally opened up for it. RAWR! TONGUE MONSTER! ...or something like that. Just having some fun with pencil on paper and this little guy took shape. Hopefully it offers up some good nightmare fuel. One of the process photos I posted on Instagram has ended up my highest voted images... which I find very odd since I have posted finished paintings and wonders of the world. But humans and there 'likes' are fickle, unpredictable, and often complete misguided. Silly humans...
If you haven't gotten your fill of Tongue Monster yet, you are in luck! I managed to remember to take a couple of photos as I was working on this drawing and I can now share them with you. More of an insight on how I build up and go about making my drawings...
Still not enough? Well, I did manage to capture a quick little video of my pencil actually making contact with the paper while I worked on this piece. Enjoy, because that is all I have for this piece...
Scribble, scribble, scribble...
That is all for another exciting Monday, see you back here on Wednesday! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
Playing around with some pencil and paper recently resulted in a mess of a monster. Sometimes you should not cut parts off of a monster... you never know what might grow back. Or maybe this monster was just born or grown this way. Here is how the mess of arms, heads, and tongues turned out...
While I was working on this drawing I uploaded some 16 second videos to videos to my Instagram. While 16 seconds is not a long time you can get a look at my mark making when it comes to building up my forms...
My coworker at the day job who supervises the audio/video department was doing some tests with Crazy Talk to see what options it could offer us to quickly create animated characters. He asked if I had any monster drawings available to test on and I was all too happy to provide some. A very short time later this was happening...
Crazy Talk just make Cyvus Vail that much wackier...
In a couple of clicks the program added the eyes and teeth and after rigging the mouth it handles all the lip sync on the fly. These two segments of audio are built into the program but I understand it will sync to your own recordings. The program creates the 3D illusion and I have to say that for an off the shelf program I am impressed. Unfortunately, at the day job we will not be doing any animated demons anytime soon, but it could be a resource to have. If only we had this eight years ago...
If you were wondering what this drawing is from, it is my Cyvus Vail redesign from 2011. Vail was originally created for the Angel TV show 10 years ago...
If you have not heard about it, Peter Mohrbacher and Sam Flegal are doing something pretty cool over on Google Hangout. They are doing a weekly live chat where they talk about the previous week working as fantasy artists. They talk about what they are working on, the ups, the downs, they answer questions, and for some reason on their December 23rd live cast... they had me on as a guest! RAWR!
If you would like check out more you can see them over on youtube or on Pete's Google+ page. They are up to 7 episodes and in the most recent episode they invite on Sean Andrew Murray as a special guest. I strongly encourage you to check it out! I have known Pete and Sam for a number of years now and can't speak highly enough of them as people, artists, and businessmen.
That is all for another exciting week on the blog, see you back here on Monday! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
Want to learn ALL my secrets? Want to see how I go about making a painting from start to finish? Want to hear me rant for an hour and a half like a crazy person as I narrate and discuss my painting process? Then you NEED to pick up the December issue of ImageFX (#102)! That's right, in issue 102 of ImageFX I have a 4 page tutorial focusing the creation of a battling pair of monsters... did I say monster?! Yes I did, and here they are...
If words and pictures on paper are not enough for you, there is also a ton of supporting files, brushes, and a video containing a screen capture of my painting process available as well! As previously promised above, I ramble and rant like a crazy person throughout the entire video! YAYS! That aside, you do get see just how I create a painting from start to finish. When you are the newsstand be sure to keep an eye out for this lovely cover...
The December (#102) issue of ImageFX
BUY IT NOW! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!?
My copy of ImagineFX #102 arrived over the weekend and it was definitely an unexpected surprise. I am not sure this issue is even out in the US yet. To give you a sneak peek of what you can expect from me in issue 102 here are some poor scans of my article...
To get the entire experience as well as the rest of the magazine full of other GREAT article and information I strongly suggest you picking up a copy as soon as possible. For those who just can't wait to experience me ranting and raving, here is the accompanying youtube video that goes along with this tutorial, now you too will know all my secrets...
That is all for another exciting Monday on the blog, see you back here on Wednesday! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
I have for you today two time lapse screen capture videos that I recently put together. I needed to do a lengthy screen capture of myself working for a project and I figured a couple small tests would be in order. If I had know taking screen captures of myself working was so easy I would have done this long ago. For these tests I picked two alien portraits that were in need of inking and worked them up with some digital ink. Eventually, these two pieces will get some color, maybe I will record that as well at a later date. For now I have these two videos to share...
It has only taken me over a year to make another time lapse video of myself working. Hopefully now that I know how easy it is to record myself working digitally there will be more of these. Still trying to figure out how best to record myself while drawing traditionally... one of these days I will get it right...
That is all for another exciting Monday, see you back here tomorrow for a very special extra blog monster... and some big news! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
Friend and fellow artist Justin Peterson recently posted a time lapse video of him drawing on a cover of one of his trade paperbacks. I thought that it looked a fun and interesting way to share his process with everyone and was instantly interested in doing one too. I was able to get some time together over the weekend to do a test to see how it would turn out and what it would involve to make time lapse videos of my drawings. This is how that test turned out...
This video is 21 minutes of drawing time sped up 850%. I started with a light sketch to map out placement and to make the video more interesting. The creature is a Sahrvin, a demon I designed for the 5th season of Angel which I will be sharing with you in its entirety on Friday.
I am really happy with how this turned out and how easy it will be to make more of them. Due to file size limitations I will most likely have to record in 30 minute blocks and then move them from my phone to the computer and begin again. Once Gen Con is behind me I hope to be able to record an entire drawing start to finish. I hope you find this as interesting as I do, it has definitely given me some insight on how I draw! I can't wait to do more of these!
That is all for another exciting Wednesday on the blog, see you back here on Friday for more of the Sahrvin demon! Until then...
For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com
