Beetle Week Day 2: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro

Welcome to Day 2 of Beetle Week!

Earlier this year I was commissioned by entomologist and insect photographer Morgan Jackson of Biodiversity in Focus to contribute to a soon-to-be-published, honest-to-gosh dead-tree book about jewel beetles in Ontario. The result? My first series of scientific illustrations, instead of the off-kilter, surreal science paintings I'm known for. 

Today: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro

Technical specs: 

• Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet
• ArtRage Studio Pro
• Photoshop Elements 6

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When tackling a new illustration subject for the first time, I like to begin with mechanical pencil and bristol paper. They're my comfort zone. After that though, I have decisions to make. In my undergraduate degree, I worked mainly in oil paint. Since then, I sometimes find it more useful to paint digitally, especially for a project like these beetles. Adjustments and corrections to ensure scientific accuracy are much easier with digital media than with traditional paints.

I've tried a number of digital painting programs, and by far my favourite is ArtRage. If you're not familiar, it's a digital painting program with versions available for PC, Mac, iPad and the iPhone. Each one is relatively affordable (under $100 for the PC version, compared to several hundred for Photoshop).

The main attraction for me with this program has always been the interface. Instead of drop-down menus, ArtRage includes all the important tools right on the screen in two quarter-circles in the corners:

Screenshot showing the interface, from my original test of some of ArtRage Studio Pro's tools. Click to enlarge. 

On the left, all your tools: oil and watercolour brushes, inking pens, pencils, erasers and host of other tools from technical to goofy. On the right, the colours, allowing you to adjust tones and how metallic the paint appears. These two palettes, tools and colours, mean everything to me as a classically-taught painter. I feel just like I'm dipping into my palette or brush box.

In ArtRage you can control the paper or canvas surface (or blackboard, or sandpaper or...) and the digital paint handles differently on each type. The big advance in Studio Pro (also known as ArtRage 3) over the previous 2.5 version is, in my opinion, the amazingly realistic watercolours.

I planned to use watercolours for the beetles early on. It can give the work the feel of old naturalist's studies. However, as the project went on, I realized that more than watercolour would be needed to bring out the richness of texture and metallic colour on some of these little animals.

Here's a look at Xenorhipus:

Xenorhipus, one of the more colourful jewel beetles for this commission. © Glendon Mellow

This painting required a lot of stippling.  The Intuos 3 graphics tablet has 1024 levels of pressure, so you can achieve some subtlety of colour depending on how hard you press.  It's one of the main features of working on a desktop that remains superior to the iPad version.

Here's an up-close look:

Up close, closer than I look while actually painting, you can see metallic green pain near the top swathed in more liquid greens. The little greyish tadpole strokes in the bottom half show how varying pressure even in a single stroke can add to the detail. 

A few of the beetles were shiny brown shades, others were multiple bright metallic shades. Another nice feature in ArtRage is you can store and name specific palettes.  Here's one of mine, for Trachys:

Custom colour palette for Trachys, the most brilliant of the subjects. You can see the point of grey chosen on the colour palette at right that I've listed as "grey dots". I found that often, the colours I chose needed to be more brilliant than the ones in the photo references to "read" similarly to the eye. 

I also saved a custom brush that I found was useful for fine detail, hairs and lines on a number of the beetles. Here's a sample of a few light-colour brushstrokes on a dark ground from the painting for Texania:

Custom brush menu. You can save multiple menus, and make them available to more than one file. I've placed some brush strokes on the white area beneath the menu so you can see what they look like without the rest of the bug's head.

If you'd like to learn how to save your own custom tools, I made a short video tutorial last year:



ArtRage is powerful for painting, but sometimes a little less perfect for editing. A couple of the beetles had a kind of "squashed banana" look to them as a result of me trying to inject more dynamic poses and bending them where they don't bend. When I went in to fix them, I used Photoshop Elements 6, the eraser, free transform and the clone tool.

Here's examples of the bent beetle Paragrilus (left), and unbent (right).

Paragrilus, in a dynamic, twisty, squashed-banana pose on the left, and fixed using Photoshop on the right.

There are selection tools in ArtRage Studio Pro, as well as some tools called templates that can be used and I suspect could have done the job in fixing Paragrilus's tilted back, above. I'll have to experiment some more. In this case, I went with tools I already knew to make the correction, and ArtRage allows you to save files in Photoshop's .psd format, even keeping layers intact.

Have any other scientific illustrators tried using ArtRage to do their work?  I'd be curious to see other examples or get feedback on this project. I would certainly use it again, perhaps even with digital pencils as I become more comfortable with them.

Questions, comments and opinions encouraged below!

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Check out the rest of Beetle Week!

• Day 1: The Challenge of Scientific Illustration
• Day 2: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro
• Day 3: Being a Freelancing Dad
• Day 4: Animated Painting of Trachys
• Day 5: The Exhibit

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
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Forgotten art for a late night.

Taking apart a room due to some slight water damage. Listening to Stromkern (thanks Stephanie!) and Wolfsheim. Here's some of my slate pieces from my final school project scanned and converted to black and white. I almost put this image in my latest print collection, and then skipped it and forgot about it.

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Icky and Ickier

The other day I threw this old oil painting of mine, called Pupating, into a standard Photoshop filter called plastic wrap or plastic bag or something. 

Using basic Photoshop filters can be considered a bit of an icky cheat in some illustration circles. Still; I think it adds something, don't you?

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Trilobite Boy and his fans - WIP

Here's a work-in-progress for the Trilobite Boy comic series.  Our hero signing autographs for his tweeny fans. 

I was hoping to do a daily 30 minute sketch to tell the Trilobite Boy story, and so far that hasn't happened. I've been under considerable stress while looking for a new regular source of income - so now I'm hoping to do at least three of these a week.

Originally the idea was to do each in 30 minutes and practice getting smarter and faster painting digitally. The one above is taking longer while I mess with gradations and the selection brush in Photoshop Elements 6, and I'm okay with that. The point is to keep challenging myself on a regular basis while making a backbone of story images for Trilobite Boy - I don't have to follow a slavish self-imposed schedule. Above was 30 minutes, not including the pencil drawing.

You can follow the adventures of Trilobite Boy at trilobiteboy.tumblr.com - currently, he's skateboarding to the Royal Ontario Museum, and passing by Toronto's famous Crinoid Tower.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

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Pink Parasaurolophus

It's done!  My Pink Parasaurolophus submission for Art Evolved's Pink Dinosaur charity drive.  

 

The drive is going great, and there's over 100 pink dinosaur submissions so far!  It's not to late to submit one: we're going to the end of October.

You can see a higher-res image of my pink duckbill in my DeviantArt gallery or my print shop. I have a couple of posts with sketches you can find here.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Pink Parasaurolophus Painting Progress

Mentioned in yesterday's important post.

Pencil drawing.

Click to hugeify.

Progress so far.  

Click to enlargetate.

Just laying in basic colours and a background.  

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Tips for web-ready images

I originally posted this over on SONSI, where I practice my webmaster skills.  I thought it might be useful to some Flying Trilobite readers.

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Recently I was asked,

“Could you help me with understanding how to format my photos for upload and how to add the transparent © symbol? (see below) If these are questions that many have already asked, maybe a FAQ on the site would be a good idea?”

We discussed it, and I thought I’d share my quick tips here and the whole intertubes.

If you use software like Photoshop or Gimp to alter the size of your files, aim to make them 100kb or less in size.  (Most of mine fall into the 75kb range).  There’s generally three things that affect file size: colour, dimensions of the image and quality of the image.

Colour: Typically, you are not going to want to reduce your colour range, unless it’s a colour scan of a black and white image.  So let’s leave that alone.

Dimensions of the image: you can often find ways to alter this (keep your proportions the same) under names like”canvas size” or just look for how many pixels wide and high the image is.  Typically, I tend to make things somewhere around 500-800 pixels on the larger side.  Most people don’t want to click to enlarge an image and have it expand to be bigger than their monitor.

Quality of the image: This is a dodgy one, since most of us want everything crystal-clear.  However, jpeg files can be compressed quite well without losing a lot of resolution, at least for posting online.  Not good for submitting to a magazine or for getting prints, but online it’s great.  In Photoshop, use the “save for web” feature (you can monkey with canvas size there too).  In Gimp, you get the option when you save the Gimp file as a jpeg.

I’ve mentioned Gimp a couple of times – it’s a decent, FREE alternative to Photoshop that can do (kinda-almost) everything Photoshop Elements can.  There’s no insidious pop-ups or programming.  It just works really well.   (I do not work for them or receive any cool kickbacks.)   You can find it here. http://www.gimp.org/

To put a copyright symbol on your work, go into the text tool on software like Photoshop, Gimp or many others and hold down ALT and type 0169 .  Let go of ALT and the © should appear.  Or you can cut-and-paste it from this post.

Anyone have any other quick tips?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Art Monday: Bumper Sticker Style

Made from my playing around with my tattoo design. I might work up a variant of these to put in the print shop. Something about colour gradients on black reminds me of summer:  waveboarding, cycling the boardwalk, tattoos and teen posturing.

Maybe the green needs to be more of a bright lime to go with the others.

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Tips on web-ready images

One of the Southern Ontario Nature & Science Illustrators' members asked for a few tips on making images web-ready, and putting the little © copyright symbol on things.

Head over to the SONSI site for some of my quick tips.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Caffeine tattoo commission for Scicurious

A few months back, blogger Scicurious of Neurotopia asked me about designing a tattoo to celebrate her PhD. Sci was specific on the subject matter: caffeine! She knew she wanted something one-of-a-kind, black-line, and possibly tribal.

Most of the commissions I've ever had have been through people online as opposed to people in my own community. While this is the first pseudonym-anonymous blogger I've worked for, I wasn't concerned. Besides the fact we've met in person, you can tell a lot of things about bloggers from their writing, and the way they're held in the blogging community. I expected this commission to be a lot of fun - and it was.

The designs went through a lot of versions. Here's a look at some of them. Click to enlarge.

These are from the first few sketches. I called the top one 'droplets' and the bottom one 'scanner' : For a design like this one below, I was basically trying out a variety of lines and shapes to see if any struck a chord with Scicurious: I went for something a bit Tim Burton-esque here, and ended up with something with a hint of Celtic knotwork. I really like this type of line. But maybe for a different molecule. The development of the droplets idea. A more jewellery-like design. Playing with the bonds and chemicals. On many of these, I had the chemical diagrams a bit off, but Sci knows her stuff, and made revisions easy. Droplets develops more. Sci asks for the nitrogens to resemble "n's" since there's a hint of an "o" in the oxygens. The nitrogens were tough to pin down! To make sure we weren't missing something from an earlier iteration, I sent Scicurious this batch of nitrogen designs, with some new ones on the right. By this point, we'd pretty much pinned down the rest of the tattoo, and I'd switched from pencil to Photoshop to make the swapping of the nitrogens easier. The doodles on the left are done with my Intuos 3 tablet in Photoshop. I was feeling stuck, and the loose drawings helped me get back into the design. Just throwing things at it, to see what worked. I sent the image to Sci and whaddaya know? She loved one of the doodles! And here's the final! Congratulations on your PhD, Dr. Scicurious! And thanks for a terrific collaboration-commission!

(Links to the final at Scicurious's Neurotopia and Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium.)

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Interested in your own one-of-a-kind science tattoo?
Send me an email at theflyingtrilobite [at] gmail [dot] com.

Another peek : Invasive Species paintings

Part of the assignment is to Photoshop the large paintings into a background. Admittedly, I didn't give that a lot of thought the first time around. In critique class last week, it was suggested I try the tree upside down for a more otherworld look, and have the paintings hanging from ropes. I used a different photo of Trinity-Bellwoods park for this version.


I'm happy with how a low-opacity paint bucket layer using a colour lifted from the sky unified the atmosphere.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Art Monday: the face in the water

Lately, I am feeling like some of my art is rushing headlong down a certain track. There's a face in the water, expecting to drag me down.

One of the best things going back to school has brought to me, is a renewed playfulness with my materials. Whether it's painting mediums, wood panels, ink, digital manipulation, I need to just enjoy myself more. One of my favourite artists, Jon Foster described in his book, r/evolution, that painting can be like "playing with colorful goop".(p56) I need to play with a wider variety of goops.

This year, I begin to feel I have painted myself into a self-imposed corner. The last two years, I have done a new painting for Darwin Day, and for each of my blogiversaries I have re-done my shale-painting blog banner. I have a list of "Need to finish" concepts a mile long.

This year I plan to break free of these self-constraints.

By the same token, I want to expect more of myself in terms of output. It's a daunting thing to consider: I am working full-time, in school part-time, doing freelance, looking for more freelance, blogging the journey and finding valuable time with my wife and family. I need to find the time to create art within all these responsibilities. I need to draw or paint every day. Every. Day.

I need to see a different face when I look in the water.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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ScienceOnline2010: Push it til it breaks

(Today, a guest post by my ScienceOnline2010 session co-leader, Felice Frankel!)The process of coming up with a visual metaphor to explain to someone a particular scientific concept can be quite effective, not only for your readers, but for you –– the process can help to clarify the concept in your own mind. In addition, a discussion about the limitations of that metaphor can be just as clarifying (and fun!). We are incorporating this idea in our NSF-funded Picturing to Learn program.

For years, I have wanted to create an online library of metaphors to communicate complicated science concepts and to engage whoever was interested in why and where those metaphors fall apart. We should do it. Who wants to be part of it?

Here a just a few examples from George Whitesides' and my new book No Small Matter, Science on the Nanoscale.

Quantum Apple

...an attempt to depict the counter intuitiveness of quantum mechanics. Not necessarily a deep portrayal to be sure. I just wanted the reader to get a handle about the idea that QM is NOT like the world as we "see" it.

Writing with Light

How some devices are made using "photolithography".

Graduation Chairs

...so much of what we see is dependent upon where our heads are at, at the time we see it. Coincidentally, while I was working with researchers at MIT imaging samples showing "templated self-assembly" of block co-polymers (another example with which you are more familiar would be DNA replication), the facilities folks were setting up chairs for parents which were meant as "guides" or "templates", where to sit during graduation. Again, nothing that profound but perhaps interesting enough to get some feedback. I decided to post the image and ask people to write to me and suggest what they see in the metaphor. The responses were all over the place:

"... an illustration of orbitals and similar constraints on electrons in an atom."

"The image reminds me of columns (or rows :D) of ICs"

"...circuit on the motherboard of a computer."

"...gravestone markers in a cemetery."

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We'll see you at ScienceOnline2010!
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Today's images Copyright by Felice Frankel.

Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Art Monday: Mountain Discovery

Mountain Discovery
"We're gonna need another Order of trilobites!"

Created for the January time capsule gallery at Art Evolved. This time the theme was a paleo-environment. I tried to make the fossil itself an environment. And to put Isotelus to shame.

This is the first complete fully digital painting I have displayed: most of my digital work involves enhancing my oil paintings, or digital roughs. I feel I still have a lot to learn before I am satisfied with my skill set, though my friend, artist Chris Zenga, suggested I may be uncomfortable with this since most of my work is quite a bit darker than this.

Michelle likes it, and would like to see me produce more landscapes

This was created using mainly ArtRage 2.5, a bit of Photoshop Elements 6 and my Intuos 3 tablet.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Art Evolved gallery sneak peek

The newest Art Evolved time capsule gallery launches today! The theme is palaeo-environments. Here's a sketch of the painting I made for it, done in ArtRage totally digitally. Convincing pencil, eh?It's called Mountain Discovery. Click-y to enlarge-y.

Go to Art Evolved to see the finished piece, fully digital, created using ArtRage with a few last-minute Photoshop tweaks.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: Science Checkmate

A couple of days ago, I used Photoshop to edit my painting, Science Chess Accommodating Religion. I want to try changing the relationships of the pieces, and making the image more graphic and cartoony so it could appear on a t-shirt. I am thinking about captioning it "Science Checkmate".

Michael Barton, of The Dispersal of Darwin suggested placing the pieces around the fallen bishop. Great Idea, Michael! It changes the way they appear utterly. Finally, I will need to punch up the whites and reds so it can be printed on fabric with more vibrant and clear colour.
I have to say, I'm working with Photoshop Elements these days, a program that came in in the box with my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. I didn't use it on my old computer, but Elements (so far) appears to be superior to me old Photoshop CS. The selection brush is one of the coolest things ever. I thought it was just for tracing and it took a moment after selecting the outline of the Mendel piece to realize it simply expands the selection field to wherever you've brushed! It was a magic moment.


I'll post the final cartoony image and t-shirt another day, once it's in the repro shop.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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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.
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Art Monday: making of "Introducing Sara Chasm"

Yesterday saw the debut of ART Evolved: Life's Time Capsule, a new paleo-art blog with a whole crew of regular artists. When Craig Dylke approached me about it, I let out a heavy sigh. My commissioned work has been increasingly busy -for which I am continually excited- so could I really contribute to an ongoing group blog?

I just had to. Too exciting, and a lot of my favourite bloggers are present. Now, after the champagne has been smashed against the prow of our Ceratopsian Gallery, I couldn't be happier.

For my contribution, Introducing Sara Chasm, I knew I wanted to do something a little left of scientific illustration. Okay, far off to the side.

I began by scribbling this sketch in my Moleskine on my walk to work one morning.
It's important to carry around a small sketchbook for capturing those ideas in the moment: when you wake up, when meeting a friend for coffee, after a shower or walking outdoors.

Using my trusty .3mm pencil, I made a more refined sketch. The photo reference is of a real person. I mulled over having Sara's t-shirt read ,"Canadian Grrls Rock", or maybe "Alberta girlz kick ass". Those also would have been good wall tags.For a while, Sara was going to be a hipster-photo-blogger of the kind that dwells on West Queen West here in Toronto, but the spray painted tag added a lot of colour. I drew that using my favourite india ink-brush pen, and erased all the pencilly-bits. A thick black pen (I use Faber-Castell's Pitt pens) like this can be great for quickly dropping in digital paint in Photoshop.I created the background using some rocks I scanned for texture, and embossed them to go with the light direction. With a digital hard brush I spattered paint in yellow-greens. Then, I added a medium-opacity white stucco to the wall.The oil painting. Completed in about 6 hours while listening to M.I.A., Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails and the new Lily Allen cd. I arrived at her name by thinking about Sara from ceratopsian, Chasm from chasmosaurus, and together they both sound a bit like sarcasm.After scanning the wet oil painting, there had to be a lot of clean-up. Using levels, I colour-corrected the blacks and whites. I tried to erase and blur the edges a bit to help it blend into the background.Finally, a bit of lighting to set the mood off. Click to enlarge the final product!
What do you think? I think Ms. Chasm looks a bit more 2-dimensional than originally intended, but the final product has a bit of an anime-feeling I don't see in my work. Will we see Sara Chasm again?

Make sure to check out the other images in the Art Evolved ceratopsian gallery, and leave comments!

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Merry Darwin Evening!

Liveblogging a new painting has taught me some things:

-It is possible to tire from the taste of amaretto-flavoured coffee (!)
-Don't start until you have a kick-ass drawing already complete, scans & paintable prints ready
-Stop reading other Darwin Day posts when trying to paint
-Twitter is all aboot being an amazing tool
-There is no such thing as a small enough brush for an 8.5x11" painting
-As prodigious and exemplary as his work was, even Mr. Darwin must have slept sometimes.

Perhaps I should have simply tinted the drawing in Photoshop and called it a night?

I will soldier on over the weekend, and post a follow-up for Art Monday at the latest. Thanks to everyone for support today and all the entertaining and informative things I never knew about our Charlie.

This ain't done.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: mucking around

Continuing to muck around with my blog banner since re-decorating The Flying Trilobite's bloggy aesthetics. Here's a look at where it's been.

The original overall look.

Blog banner year one.

Year two.

Taking advantage of the new white background, here was a pixelly version I removed after about a week.And where we are now. This feels more painterly and blends better than the hard edges.

I have plans to post a completely new banner in time for my second blogiversary in March. The shale is ready, I've been sketching and I've got a design ticking in my head.

Blog banner design is something I enjoy, and I have done some freelance for other bloggers. I've found it to be pretty rewarding to try and capture a blogger's "voice" in a 700x250 pixel space.

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Here's a making of The Meming of Life, and commentary by the blogger.
Here's the making of Of Two Minds.
And the making of Retrospectacle.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
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