Tilt Shift

The Tilt Shift photography technique has the unique ability to fool the eye into seeing the real world as a dollhouse version of miniatures. See more examples and tutorial links here.

Here’s a tilt shift shot of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con small press area, taken by KimonoKitsy Studios. Look closely for our booth on the far right.

3-D Prints

Just posted in the Etsy shop, a starter collection of prints utilizing a 3-D effect. More fun than regular old 2-D, these print variations sport an extra punch of fun dimensionality! The 3 levels: Color layer on paper, Plexiglass middle topped by a transparent film layer of line art:

Three in the shop to date with more to follow soon: Time Machine (pictured above) Spirit Tiki and Rocket Tiki

Tiki Series

I recently began a series of Tiki images exploring a graphic, limited color approach. Some in the series tend to skirt the outside boundaries of a screen print type of look. I hope to pick up with this series soon to add more since they’re great fun to create. See the special “twofer” price on the series in the Etsy shop.

Steampunk Tales Cover Art

I was approached recently to create a cover for issue #3 of the popular Steampunk Tales collection of stories. Advertised as the first ever electronic pulp fiction magazine published exclusively on iPhone and iPod touch.

Borrowing from the flavor of one of the ongoing stories “The Mask of Tezcatlipoca” by G.D. Falksen, I worked up a tight sketch from some thumbnail explorations and included a font choice for the magazine title. Once approved, I proceeded to create the finish, using Corel’s Painter software. The pencil sketch was scanned and I started with black line work mixed with some scratchboard treatments around the face and grass. All the line work behind the figure was selected with the magic wand tool and I substituted the black with greens and browns to soften the background. Color was than added, below the line work layer and a floral texture was added to the vest. The final step was adding a variety of textures over the entire area with beige and sepia colors to “age” its look and dull down the colors. I used thin line strokes along the left “magazine spine,” the edges and the corners to emulate some dog ears and stress.

The Evolution of a Monkey

Here’s an simplified example of the steps I take to create one of my Steampunk Monkey Nation characters. I scan my pencil sketch and open in Painter. It’s used as a guide for creating the black and white line work with Painter’s Scratchboard tool. Color is applied to a lower layer which shows through the line work since it’s converted to a “Gel” composite layer (something similar to Photoshop’s Darken or Multiply layer attribute.)

Here’s a bit of background on Professor Horatio Sprocketnotch:

Scientist
Brilliant but quite mad mastermind behind of scores of scientific breakthroughs. These include: the creation of the Eye of Radical Hyperbaric Transcendence and Licorice Legs. Pictured holding his greatest creation, the inter-dimensional tsunami egg of destruction, which worked perfectly the first and only time it was activated.

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