Thursday 7 May 2009

New blog banner at Migrations!

The past several weeks I've been working on a new blog banner commission for blogger-scientist-bird-enthusiast Dan Rhoads of Migrations.

It's complete! Check it out over at Dan's blog, and I encourage you to leave comments there.

I'll see if I can whip up a 'making of" post for Art Monday. Most fun: the olive branches and the red knot's wingtips. Thanks Dan! Great to work with you!

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

5 comments:

traumador said...

congrats on getting it done!

looks very nice. i like the first person prespective the hand brushing the foilage away gives it.

here's to your next adventure in art!

Sean Craven said...

Looking good, dude. I notice a touch of high contrast on the waves; was that done using digital or conventional media?

Glendon Mellow said...

Thanks guys!

I originally painted the sky and waves in oils, but when I scanned them, the wet oils stuck to the scanner and left a kind of grey shadow in those places.

So, using the smudge tool and digital paint on low opacity, I went to work with my Intuos3. So to answer you Sean, it's kind of both.

How could you tell? What did you mean by high contrast?

Sean Craven said...

Hmmm... perhaps high contrast isn't the phrase I was looking for.

But there's a particular crispness of image that you can get with Photoshop that is strongly reminiscent of photography. When I see that 'photographic' look in an obviously hand-drawn image, I tend to assume that Photoshop or some similar program has been at work.

The way the waves twinkle was the tipoff. Tell you the truth, keeping this effect under conscious control is something I try and do in my own work.

Man, have I developed a ridiculous skill set or what? "Will recognize use of photo retouching software in hand drawn images for food."

Glendon Mellow said...

Really? The waves twinkle?

I can see how the smoothness of the smudging smooshed the canvas texture is apparent, but most of the waves did begin in oil. Some low opacity green was added to punch the green water patch back up to how it looks to my eye in the oil.

But of course for fun and laughs, you should put your talent in recognizing digital messing around to use while reading this blog: Photoshop Disasters.

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