“WEST OF OZ 8 : ROCKET TOWN” – Variations

“WEST OF OZ 8 : ROCKET TOWN”

And here it goes another brand new one. All painted with Clip Studio Paint as usual as I totally left Photoshop behind for good.

Click on the image below to see the making of for this one.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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“WEST OF OZ : PIC 8 – ROCKET TOWN” Making of.

So here´s the complete step by step making of for this brand new one. This is actually a good example of one of my ideas change overtime during the making of an image and why I don´t plan anything in advance as it would be a waste of time in my worklow anyhow. 😉
The initial idea was to place some sort of fairy tale village against an epic crashed spaceship but then that got a bit abstract at some point. Then I thought about placing a character reading an Oz book, but then again my pics are not about characters but about environments . So finally I got the idea of the rocketship. It gave the perfect retro style I was searching for and at the same time it helped to give scale to the whole background.
Here it goes, from start to finish.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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SKETCH : “West of Oz ” – Pic 8 : Work in Progress – Phase I

Just another pic for myself I´m working on. I´m in the middle of another complex children book commission, of which as it tends to be, I cannot show anything on my pages yet  because contractual reasons and so I need to have something to keep posting on this blog.
I started this pic yesterday without a single idea in mind as usual and so let´s see where this one goes or even if I get to complete it.

TO BE CONTINUED…
These were just the initial steps and so this might even change completely in the next stages. I´m just letting my imagination go and have no idea of what I will be painting or adding next to this one either.
Fun stuff.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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“DESIGNING EARTH WORLD” : Winner at the Huion 2018 Scifi Art contest. Just in time as I was really in need of a new tablet. :)

“DESIGNING EARTH WORLD” : Winner at the Huion 2018 Scifi Art contest.
Just in time as I was really in need of a new tablet. 🙂

The last time I´ve entered a competition or an art contest was probably more than 25 years ago, even before I started to take this illustration thing more serious.
So to my surprise I found myself participating in one just last month.
An online friend of mine told me about this contest on the same week when I had a problem here at my studio and lost my Huion tablet for good, so when I noticed that Huion was now offering as first prize a new PRO version of the model I owned and lostthat very same week I thought, why not ?…
As I was in need of a new tablet, well… I sent in three pics mostly for fun.
The results came out yesterday and it seems I got the first prize.
Cool. I really needed that.

My idea behind this pic was simply to keep it as further away from the standard “concept art” (for videogames) or “super hero / mech ” stuff as I could and so I went with a storytelling approach while at the same time always having in mind the potential to create an image that could also used as a marketing tool for the Huion brand.

The world is filled with thousands of artpieces that showcase mostly the same things, space battles, mech warriors, super hero stuff and all that and my idea of scifi is not about that at all. What I love to depict in fantasy or scifi are not action scenes, characters, monsters or comic type stuff but scenes about the daily life of the creatures that live on these scifi fantasy imaginary worlds.

In this case I was listening to an old Art Bell radio show about alien abductions and I thought that it would be a good idea to depict the Earth being designed by Grey Aliens showcasing the Huion brand while at the same time retaining my storybook visual style so I could distance myself from all the more standard artwork in the competition as there were a few good pieces there in technique but not many of them had the Huion brand on their mind as part of what they were narrating visually.
And so, I took advantage of my experience in creating visual stories, attached that to the Grey concept + the need to sell the Huion brand and make it a central piece of the illustration and I created this: “Designing Earth World” focused not only on the scifi aspect of things but on the actual use of Huion products.
I must have connected to someone out there because I won.

Actually I´ve been a big Huion fan since I started to use their product several years ago. At the time I was looking for a good Wacom alternative and came across Huion GT-220 one day. I took a chance , bought the thing and I was extremely surprised with its quality level when compared to what a similar and way more expensive Wacom tablet could do.
99% of all my work in the last few years have all been done with my old Huion GT 220 and so I´m more than happy to now get the chance to continue my illustrations with their new GT 221 PRO and can hardly wait to get that hardware on my hands.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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SKETCH : “West of Oz ” – Pic 7 : Work in Progress – Phase III – THIS IS NOT WORKING… grrr….

Well, I think I´m going to put this pic on halt and give it some pause. It seems I cannot find the right approach for this one. No matter what I try this scene keeps lacking imagination and I´m not happy about it.
As you can see from these changes when compared to what I was doing in Part I and Part II of this pic I´m going all over the place with this but I don´t seem to get it working.

Now it´s starting to get too much inspiration from Falkor from The Neverending Story and so I decided to “quit” on this for a while.
At least until I can find something in this idea which will allow me to input some serious imagination into the piece.
Right now I could take this as it is and clean it up well enought to have a really nice illustration at the end, but the imagination would still be missing from this. I don´t know what do I want to do with the character and even worse I have no idea what to do with the landscape …

Many people think that illustrators only create finished pics that look good so this is a good opportunity for me to show that many times we do A LOT of stuff that simply does not seem to work. The trick is to keep doing it until we get a good idea. Leave a failed atempt to rest for a while and then come back to it later and that is what I am going to do right now. So for now this illustration is on pause.
Also I need to focus on a complex commissioned children book I need to do rigth now and that is maybe why my mind is not into this illustration rigth now.
Anyway, I wanted to show you how a failed illustration looks like. 😉

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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“GAMBYS” – The Children Book : Work in Progress

“GAMBYS” – The Children Book : Work in Progress

For years I´ve thinking of creating a childrens book based on the original characters I did for the original “GAMBYS” game; which 25 years ago was the first professional produced video game for PCs ever conceived in Portugal.
Because it was a game oriented  for ecology it always had the potencial for its characters to be the protagonists of stories of their own and so a childrens book was always been in the back of my mind.
So what you see here are my initial tests for my personal children book project based on my Gambys characters. I´m not sure yet how this will develop so let´s see where this will take me.

For now these are just a test to see if I can modernize my old style. I have this first book alreadt structured and so I will be working on this in between commissions for the next months to come I´m sure.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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SKETCH : “West of Oz – Midnight Harbour” – Pic 7 : Work in Progress – Phase II

Still trying to figure out what this one will become. I had an initial idea but I´m trying to experiment with some different stuff at this stage still. I like the dog creature but I´m not exactly sure what I want to do with the landscape yet…
At this stage I wanted to make the lighthouse less traditional and more fantasy and also I thought it was becoming too dominant. I still need to find the right balance and direction for this pic.

At this point this seems to be going into some kind of scifi direction with a space ark or space world so I need to bring it back to a more fantasy setting tomorrow.
Stay tuned. Check Part I to see the begining of this one.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

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SKETCH : “West of Oz – Midnight Harbour” – Pic 7 : Work in Progress – Phase I

Continuing to create these pics to relax between commissioned illustration work, here´s the first steps for yet another West of Oz pic of mine which I just started.
Work in progress. Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

To be continued tomorrow.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

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Goodbye Photoshop, Hello Clip Studio Paint : “West of Oz – South of Fantasia” – Sixth Clip Studio painting.

And here it goes. Here´s the final illustration I´ve been working on the last few days just to relax between another book project I´m doing right now and which has nothing to do with this image now. 🙂
I need to paint this images of my own universes just for fun or I would spend all my life just illustrating other peoples dream visions, so I try to always have a little time to do my own personal work and create the universes that I like.
This is starting to become a series of paintings so here goes another: “West of Oz : South of Fantasia”. Inspired of course by The Wizard of Oz and by The Neverending Story.

The only idea I had for this image before starting was that I wanted to show the signs point to OZ and Fantasia and that I wanted to do some sort of creature on a field. Other than that I´m as surprised as to what this image turned out to be as all of you are. Otherwise I would be bored to death just trying to paint an already planned illustration.

Here´s the complete making of with all the images now in one place as the other posts I did about the work in progress now are scattered about this blog in between other stuff and people always like to see how I do my paintings.
Making of:

The end result.

By the way it´s very important to mirror your painting while you´re doing it because it helps you notice things to fix and also as in this case you might find out that an oposite angle is after all the right one to tell the story you want to tell all along.

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After more than 15 years using Photoshop for most of my original illustration/concept-art work stuff, I´m replacing it with Clip Studio Paint ( also known as Manga Studio in Japan ).
It can do most of the things I did with Photoshop when it comes to creating a painting, the layers work the same way, etc, but it comes with some really cool pre-made brushes that I love to use. Also it has some great comic creation features which are outstanding.

Don´t let the name of the software fool you, it is not a clipart creation tool but a fully developed software for painting and illustration. Thing of a cross between the classic Painter with plenty of the Photoshop advantages mixed in and you get Clip Studio Paint.
It is known as Manga Studio in Japan but the name is also not very good there too because people may think this is just something to create Manga, which again, it is not.
I have no idea why somebody didn´t give this amazing full illustration creative painting tool a really good name that reflects the true nature of what it can do but for now we´re stuck with “Clip Studio Paint” which must be the most awful and misleading name someone ever gave to an amazing painting sofware.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

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SKETCH : “West of Oz” – Pic 6 : Work in Progress Phase IV

Almost done. At this point I got inspired by the magic forest from the movie “LEGEND” and as usual by the Neverending Story book and movie.
Here´s the final steps for this pic which I now call “West of OZ : South of Fantasia”. 😉

Click to see Phase I and Phase II and Phase III

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

***

luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

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