The Ice Pixy

Incredibly fun piccy to do! Sorry, Julie, I hope you don't mind.

I came home from work today wanting to draw something and started a base sketch for something else, then started this and threw the other one away. Seeing as how I draw dragons/reptiles most often, I wanted to get a little break from the less-than-pretty things. I'm surprised at how fast I ended up getting this one done (about a few hours, give or take) Some pictures can take me a couple of days to complete, depending on the detail.

I got to do something with this drawing that I have been wanting to try for a long time: inking with a color other than black. I very much want to use this technique again. Other than that the color was pretty straightforward. I used the path tool to select the wings and used the gradiant tool (foreground color to transparent) The glow was achieved by using the Neon effect under the Filters>Alpha to Logo tabs, and for the sparklies I used the Sparks brush.

This character/persona belongs to TheIcePixy (aka Julie), NOT me.

archaeopteryx thingy

The coolest chicken evar. I needed something fun and quick to slap onto my commission info for if/when it ever gets set up, and he got the job. With this, I wanted to show off some of my skills, including something that was NOT a dragon, so please don't confuse him for one. He's a dinosaur.

Wait. Chicken. Male. Does not compute. Error, err-

This guy started out forest green with banana yellow, orange, red and turquoise wings. It was a combo that had me making this face :\ So thanks to the colorize option under the Color tab, I was able to fix that problem by turning his green to that nice maroon shade and the yellow to purple. Much easier to swallow. I also used the smudge feature fairly heavily in here to get the blending effect on the feathers and smooth out some of the deep shades of the skin. I opted not to mess too much with the lighting and shadowing, since I kind of like the flat color look for this. That's my excuse anyway.

Griselda

So I wanted to do this image partly to play with clouds. They turned out alright, but I need to work on some of my lighting.

I had a lot of fun here, especially because this was a good learning opportunity for me with different brush dynamics and line weights. I also discovered that coloring something that's white is more fun than I thought it would be. I like being able to incorporate so much color and still have it look good. The shadowing was a little difficult, but after convincing myself that it was okay to press harder with my tablet pen and get a darker shade, I think it came out good.

This character belongs to Sarah Thorup and is posted here with her permission. The blue scale detail is supposed to go across all of the white on her, but I was worried that trying to do that would make it look messy at the size I drew it, so I opted to do a partial thing where the blue would only be shown off at certain angles, kind of like a pearlescent effect.

EE cover original

The uncut image for the third book in the trilogy, Eternity's Edge. I was really pleased with how the color came out on this one, though I did have some difficulty in getting the wings to look right. I tried mirroring them and then didn't like how it looked, so I ended up altering different parts on each wing to try and may them look more individualistic.

This image is of the character Aphral. It may be a little harder to tell, but the view is actually of his back and the top of his head. The spot of color on the head was intended to be an opal, not an eye, and after some tinkering with the color, I had to select an oval region and fill it with a supernova effect. Originally, I had intended to leave the oval spot open in the white so that there was a hole - the center of the supernova in the background would have shown through and looked like the opal. It didn't quite work out that way, so I ended up doing two supernova's: one on the head and one in the background. Over all though, I think this one turned out like I wanted, particularly with the blur.

PoaH cover original

This is the uncut image I created for the second book in the Rebirth Trilogy, Path of a Hero. Same story here for starting as it was with the WoF cover: I did a sketch on paper and transfered it to the computer, then used the path tool in GIMP to go around and fill in portions with gray. I stuck with the same concept I used for the first cover, which was duplicating the layer twice and altering the color of layers 2 and 3, then using the blur feature and adding lighting effects.

Something I did differently here was to add an additional layer of colored detail (the green and silver swirls on the wings and body), something I did not do with the other two covers. I liked the figure very much in this image but the detail didn't seem nearly as snazzy as the first cover image, so I was trying to help spice it up. It didn't come out quite like I'd pictured it, but I still think it was alright. Unfortunately, the best parts of the detail, in my opinion, ended up getting sacrificed when it came time to crop the image down for the cover template.

This image is intended to be of the character Terezom, hence the gray color and robe. The ball of green light in his hand is supposed to look like a magic spell, which might be obvious. The theme I decided on for each of the three covers was the three Heroes; the cover of each book features the respective Hero that is introduced at that point in the story. I liked this theme and it worked out well for both the story and cover designs, as it gave me something to help bind the art of the three together so that they were more relevant to each other. I also enjoyed developing this style of art, even though it takes a while to complete with eyestrain involved. It allowed me a lot of space to play with the flow of lines in a 2D kind of way.

WoF cover original

I figured that to get things started with, I'd begin with something fun. This is a larger version of the image found on the front cover of Wings of Fate. I somehow didn't manage to save the entire image in its non-text form, but I did manage to retain this one. At some point I might like to go back and attempt to re-create the effects of color and detail seen in this one, as I still have the raw digital file for this (ie, the one without all the cool lighting and blurring effects)

What I did for this style of art was to first do a crude sketch on paper to get the gist of flow and form needed for the body, then scanned it in and went around using the path tool in GIMP (aka the pen tool in Photoshop) to select large portions and fill them in with a base color. After that I duplicated the layer twice and altered the color of each. I believe the colors I used for layers 2 and 3 were sky blue and black, since they contrasted nicely with the original navy blue. These two were then merged together and blurred using motion blur. The gold sun spot in the corner was easy, as it was one of the Gflares available as a default. The background of the image was done using the lighting effects option, and I really hope I can replicate this if I go back and redo this image to get the complete thing again. Did that make any sense??

This particular image took a murderously long time to do, mostly because I was still new to the idea of using multiple layers and hadn't learned how to group things yet, as well as the fact that I was being super detailed with the path tool. I think I had it zoomed up to 200 or 400 percent for the majority of the time I was working on it. Still, I have to admit that the final result was extremely satisfactory and I love looking at this image. It is intended to be a semblance of the character Kuma with his spirit flames moving around him, though in this image his eyes are white, not the customary red. I did this to help it better blend with the background and try to give it something of an ethereal look.

Edit: Rough sketch added for reference :)