Eyeless Ike / Nesting Ned

I'm going to try and start this one sometime this week:



One thing that always worries me is that I never know if the name and/or concept that I use is a repeat of an existing GPK. I mean there are thousands of these things, and it's hard for me to remember all the names and concepts. Hopefully this one is somewhat fresh!

GPK? More like GPFinished!

Here is the final card:


[click the image for a larger view]

Overall, I had a great time doing the card, and I learned a lot about painting in Photoshop. There are things that I don't like about the final card, as I'm sure there are things you don't care for either, but overall I'm very happy with this being my first attempt at painting something like this.

I've got quite a few more concepts for Garbage Pail Kids, and I think I might give this another stab in the next week or two. I'm excited to see how the next one turns out, now that I have the experience of this one to build on.

Afternoon GPK Update

Worked on my Garbage Pail Kid a bit more today:



As you can see, I added the white border around the edge of the card, rendered the cupboards, salt shaker, and wood grain on the table, blocked in the blender colors and added a nice little ducky wallpaper.

Hope you're enjoying these updates... come to think of it, this might be kind of boring!

GPK Starting To Shape Up

I've added in a few more things to my Garbage Pail kid, including his hat, name tag color, card number, GPK logo, and base table color. It's starting to finally look like a GPK card.



Comments... as always... are quite welcome.

EDIT: I went ahead and splashed some color on the background, just to see if the colors I had in mind work or not. I think they do. Next I tackle the blender. I may actually get this thing finished tomorrow!!!

John Pound Responded to Me!

So I sent this rough to John Pound who just happens to be one of the original and best-known Garbage Pail Kids artists. With John's permission, here is his response:

Hi Dave,

I like how it looks. It has a real nice feel--
Nice idea, name(s), drawing and use of color.

If you are wanting some feedback on painting, a few minor points:
I tend to paint (I use acrylics) with a fairly wide range from light to
shadow, to help sculpt the form. Like within the face flesh colors I
would do light areas, mid-tone areas (like you have), and shadow areas.
And I usually mix some half-step colors to blend those main colors. I
use a reddish-orange-brown for flesh shadows, a warmer color than the
gray-brown you show so far.

However, there is some nice relationship stuff going on between the
shapes and colors you are using, that my approach would tend to break up
into a too-busy patchwork of light and dark shapes.

Best, --John

I thought that was really nice of John to respond, as it is basically his style I'm trying to emulate (read: copy) with the Garbage Pail Kid I'm painting. It's almost like a young filmmaker getting a response from Spielberg, and was quite inspiring to say the least.



As you can see, I've added the hair on the kid, added more shading to the face, and started on the fish.

More tomorrow.

Finished Games

Here are the first batch of four games that I finished for the little side gig I have going. Again, these will be used in pulltab-style games found in bars and greasy spoons across the nation. The small icons below each main image are used as for the chips in the game.









Click on any of them to see a larger version.

Thanks for stopping by... I'm off to bed.

Oh, and since I was finishing these up tonight (as they are due tomorrow), I didn't get to the Garbage Pail Kid. I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

Tutorials!

I got a couple of emails from my art friends who had read my blog post from yesterday and the day before. In those posts, I said I was trying my best to emulate painting with Photoshop.

Turns out (as I fully expected) there are more than a few ways to accomplish this:

First of all, here is a really nice tutorial from the talented Chris Wahl. The idea of laying down a fully penciled drawing first and then scanning it in and blending it with color is one I would have never thought of, but as you can see, it works out quite well for him. Lot's of really nice full-color samples over on his blog his blog. After doing some digging last night, it looks as though this technique is used quite a bit by digital painters.

Another really nice tutorial on painting digital anatomy can be found over at this CG Society message board posting.

I started using this one last night on my Garbage Pail Kid, and it works really well. I mainly just dabbled with it for a few minutes, but it sure helped to achieve a painted look to the image. I had to work on another commissioned piece last night, but I'll screw around with it more tonight and try and post something tomorrow.

If anyone has any other nice tutorials like this which offer advice on painting in a digital sense, please post them in the comments section.

If I dig up more, I'll post them here.

EDIT: I just realized that the first tutorial I posted deals with Painter and not Photoshop. However, here is a great thread on painting in PS from over at ConceptArt.org.

Now with 100% more shirt goodness!

I worked on the shirt of my Garbage Pail Kid last night. One thing I'm having problems with is that everything is looking a bit too soft. The Garbage Pail Kids are created using traditional paints, such as acrylics, and I just can't find a combination of WACOM tablet and Photoshop brush that comes close to emulating those brush strokes.



I'm having a great deal of fun creating this guy though, so I do plan on doing more. I'm hoping that as I work in this style, I'll begin to pick up tricks and tips to make it look a bit more like the originals.

Garbage Pail Kids

As I posted in one of my previous entries, I thought it would be fun to try and paint my own Garbage Pail Kid. Most people remember these as the little gross sticker cards from the 80s that were a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids.



I was always a huge fan of the cards as a youngster, and would pester my Mom to the ends of the earth to buy me "just one more pack" each time we went to a 7-Eleven, or gas station, or anywhere for that matter ("They don't sell Garbage Pail Kids at Denny's, Boy!")

As I got older and began to dabble in art, Garbage Pail Kids continued to hold their appeal to me. I began to appreciate the technical merit of paintings by John Pound, Tom Bunk and Jay Lynch. Sure these guys were painting poop and pee and vomit, but they did it really well!

Just a few years back, Topps began releasing Garbage Pail Kids again, and if you haven't seen them yet, you really should. Many of the original artists from the 80s continue to work on the new sets, and some of the cards are quite funny. Sure it's toilet humor in every sense of the term, but you can't help but giggle at some of them.

I still collect the cards to this day, and though I'm huge into sports and lifting weights and such, those cards definitely help me to release my "inner nerd." So when I heard that the new series was coming out this month, I got inspired to paint my own. Having just received a new WACOM as a birthday gift from my wife, I figured I'd give it a go.

As you can see, the arms and head are now mostly finished, though they need a bit more shading and highlights.



I'll post updates as I have them, but to all of you artists out there, you really should go dig a few of these cards up and study them. Believe it or not, you really can learn something from a painting of a kid playing with his own turds.

Shore Thing

Here is the latest piece for my freelance art gig. This one is called "Shore Thing."



I wouldn't normally use colors that are quite this saturated, but with these being games that hang on walls in bars, the client has asked that the colors be nice and bright.

New Wacom

Got a new Wacom for my Birthday, so I thought I'd try digitally painting something. With the new Garbage Pail Kids set about to be released, I got inspired to try and create an original Kid of my own.



Let me know what you think. I'll post updates as I have them.

All That Glitters

For those of you who don't know, I have been tapped to create some artwork for pulltab games that you find in bars and restaurants. This is the first one, for a game called "All That Glitters."



The large yellow section is where the winning dollar amounts will be listed for successfully getting the correct combination of icons.

I love this job so far, as they just give me a title of a game, and let me do whatever I want with the artwork. I've got four more to do after this one, so I'll make sure to post those as well.