INNOCENTS COVER TAKE 2 part 2:Linework

So I'm an idiot.

How do we know this? Well my deadline is tighter than a fish's ass and I'm out playing poker with the boys til midnight. Been ages since I played poker and I kicked some ass (if I might say so myself. Texas hold em for anyone who asks. First time I played it. It rocks!). So I'm home at 12am wondering what they're going to say. I've chucked all my eggs in one basket.

They loved it!

The crazy textures, the ying yang symbol merged with the Japanese flag. The seeming splashes (actually maps of Japan). The Harajuku girls all down the side with their names in Japanese.

Thank god!

Ok. Finished email. Had something to eat... Logged my Everquest 2 character to check my broker (made another plat! yay!) 1am.

Bollocks.

Now I normally prefer to work from my own photos. I love photo reference. Models create something unique to each of my pieces of work. An unusual pose or balance to the body. But it's 1am on a friday night and if I call in a favour from a model the earliest would be saturday afternoon sometime. Waaay too late.

So I start trawling my emergency archives. Old photos I've taken. Images I've captured off the web and stuff I've scanned in from magazines (no, I haven't gone the Paul Jenkins route and claimed porn as a tax deduction). I cobble together a figure from about four different images and off I go. It's 4:15am when I get an email from David. He's affirming a brief I got for a Mazda RX8/Top Cow ad that I have to have done by monday (oh yeah did I mention I knew about this too, and I was still out with the boys playing poker? Like I said. Idiot.)

I ask him if he's going to be on and email him the linework. He gives me the thumbs up and I continue to do some finishing touches. In bed by 5:30am read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson til I hit the light at 6am.

12pm cup of joe in hand I'm sitting in front of the computer again. I take a look at the linework, flip it a couple of times to see that I'm happy and proceed to work on my render layers. Now for those who don't know, I work ENTIRELY digitally. No paper no pen. I was joking the other day that when I was doing convention sketches at Supanova I had to relearn how to use a pencil again! Once I finish my linework layer I create two more layers, one at 50% opacity and the next at 20% opacity. I then draw the darker rendering in the 50% layer and the lighter rendering in the 20% layer. The effect is something that gives me a degree of control over the colouring. It also allows me to do soft rendering which is perfect for women. Solid black rendering can be too harsh.

All done I upload this to the ftp server for Annette. Time: 3pm.

I have 3 hours to clean my place up before all the guys come round for a dvd night.

What the hell? Yeah. I'm an idiot.