Tonight I started on a project for my wife and her two sisters. They run a blog called wabisabi mama that’s all about being a mothers and celebrating their Japanese heritage. They’re redesigning the blog and they asked me to illustrate a couple of Kokeshi doll versions of themselves to go in the new header.

I started with these quick sketches.

Here’s the full video:

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

And here’s the still-in-process artwork. They asked me to put them into Kimonos instead of temporary clothing. I’ve still got to add one kokeshi and their kokeshi children.

You can download the PSD for you perusal here.

Had a ton of fun doing some digital painting tonight for the artcast. I demoed my custom brush set and did a digital painting of Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender.

Here’s the full video:

And here is the final piece:

If you’re interested, you can still get the custom brushes by signing up the Whistling Cloud Newsletter in the sidebar.

The monitor mount that I use for my Cintiq is a combination of these two mounts:

Boo hoo. I forgot to record last Monday’s Artcast. Fortunately, I can still show you what I did. This is a continuation of the painting I started here.

Adding more texture and tone to the face. Working out the eyes.

Adding in a background. The wallpaper pattern is a custom brush I built then varied its alignment and duplicated it across the background.

Adding noise and texture to the background. The texture is a hi-res custom brush.

Adding a flame to the background and some color variation on the wall. Also painting in some reflected light on the suit

The finishing touch.

Voila! Apologies for not recording this. I’m going to be doing a whole different approach to coloring at the Artcast Network screening room, tomorrow night at 9 pm EST. Hopefully that’ll make up for it.

See you there!

Doing a little bit of digital painting for the artcast today.  You can see the full 2 hour painting here:

Or see the condensed progress below.

The original sketch.

Flating in the colors.

Adding line work.

Adding gradients to the shapes.

Painting in shadows.

Adding texture.

Still a bit more work to do to finish this up. Tune in next week to see the completed piece.

Stuff mentioned in the show:

Adobe Photoshop Custom Brush Techniques with David Levy

Practical Light and Color.

Hans Bacher Here’s his blog. Contact him and see if he can tell you where you can buy his brush library. There’s some great stuff in there.