Very Merry Unbirthday Part 1

I haven’t done a large scale painting for quite some time and I’ve been itching to do one. I toyed around with the idea of doing one based on a drawing I did based on Plan 9 From Outer Space, but I abandoned that plan. I’ve noticed than any artwork I do based on Disney properties gets a lot more attention than anything else I do, so I decided to do something from Alice in Wonderland.

I watched the movie again and grabbed a bunch of screen caps as I went to decide what scene I wanted to paint. I decided on the Tea Party scene because there was a lot of great color and I liked the look of the characters. I liked the part where the Hatter and the Hare are hitting the high note in their song and the glasses are clanging together and tea is flying everywhere. One of the screen caps I grabbed was a shot looking down the table through all the weird looking tea pots at the main characters, I thought with a few changes this would make a good painting.

 

For my first rough sketch I changed a few things around. I moved up a lot closer to the characters so they would be more prominent in the final piece. I also changed the chairs the two of them were sitting in to ones that Alice was sitting in earlier. I just thought they were more interesting looking chairs. I also added a couple of lanterns and more defined shrubbery to the background.

I then went and did a much more detailed sketch of the scene. I added the stack of tea cups beside the Mad Hatter and moved the teapot with the mouse in it to the foreground.

The next step is pretty simple. I scan the line work and then use photoshop to block out all the flat colors.

Once the flats are laid you can go in and start to shade the piece. I added some glow to the lanterns, I like how it looks here but I’m not sure if I will be able to reproduce the effect with a paintbrush. One of these days I should look into getting an airbrush. I like how the sky turned out.

The next step is to re-sketch out the line art onto a canvas.  The canvas I picked up is 16 x 20. So I resized the artwork to 1600 x 2000 pixels in photoshop and got out my ruler and made a connect the dots version of the image on the canvas. I’m sure there are easier ways to do this, I’ve heard some people project the image onto the canvas and trace it. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to do the same.

This is the end of part one. Once I get some more work done on the painting I’ll put up another post.

Oderus Urungus

I saw Gwar in concert back in 1994. They had lost some of their costumes along the way so that night Oderus, Slymentsra and Jizmac performed as humans. I never got a chance to see them again, I wish I had.

Captain Shemp

I've been trying to get better a realistic painting, and I really like antique oil portraits, so I decided to do this. Shemp used to bill himself as "the ugliest man in hollywood" so I thought he would be a fun subject.

Acrylic on canvas 16 x 20

Captain Hook

I did this one a little while ago. Its acrylic on canvas 12 x 16. I found a photo of a Captain Hook statue on eBay and based the painting off of that. I'm really happy with how it turned out, portraits of cartoon characters are quickly becoming my specialty.

Krang

I’d like to say I was still a kid when I started watching the Ninja Turtles cartoon, but the truth is it was probably my early teens. I started watching the cartoon and reading the comics based on the cartoon before I discovered the original Eastman and Laird comics. The Eastman and Laird books are vastly superior comics but I did enjoy how wacky the cartoon was.

And while Shredder and the Foot Soldiers were kind of cool and bad-assed villains, I always thought that Krang was just ridiculous. A little pink blob living inside a fat, bald and ugly robot. And while part of me thinks they could have at least tried to make Krang’s mechanical body look cool, I kinda like that they didn’t.

My original sketch of Krang turned out well. I wanted to make him look a little meaner than I remembered him looking and I added a fink style tongue just to spice it up a bit.

Colors were pretty easy, just lifted straight from the old cartoon.

This is the painted version. It’s Acrylic on canvas 12 x 16. It looks a bit better in person, one of these days I’m gonna have to get a better camera than the shitty point and click one I have now. I like it but I much prefer the photoshop colored version above. 

The full sized version can be seen on my deviant art page.

http://vonblood.deviantart.com/art/Krang-442369721

Uncle Deadly

All right, lets get this started.
I remember watching the Muppet Show when I was a kid, but I don't remember seeing the Uncle Deadly character until I watched the show again years later.

I based this sketch off of an action figure of the character.

It tuned out pretty good so I scanned it in and colored it in photoshop.

I like drawing Muppet characters, maybe I'll do some more before too long.