Super J

Relax... let Super Jesus take care of your worries

Bullok

Commission from a 3-year old :)

This is a little boy asking me to paint him a poster of his favourite superheroes:

"Nel? Can I please have Batman and WonderWoman and Hulk and Superman and Batman. And Spider-man. Thanks Nel"

Preliminary sketch:

Toying with the idea of the superheroes taking a selfie. I have WonderWoman at the top in the middle as an overseeing figure, with Hulk in top left, Superman and Spider-man flanking little Finn, and Batman taking the photo on the right. 

First composition

After I found the photo of Finn sitting on dad's shoulders I changed the composition and decided to make Finn's dad Hulk. It naturally follows that his mom is WonderWoman, but clearly I hadn't found the right positioning for her yet. I still like Spider-man and Superman flanking the boy, as they are the most well-known heroes with the brighter colours.

Moving onto new and exciting bits

Put the flag to rest for now, after my disastrous attempts with a different Wacom tablet set-up:

I'm so impatient. I had the time to work on this after a long absence, and I got bored in the first 10 minutes. But, instead of giving up altogether, I decided it was time for the buildings in the background. And yes, here I used vector shapes and gradient fills to create the base. I figured that it's pointless trying to draw a straight line by hand on a computer. Mike and Leo would agree, I'm sure :)

Now I'm excited all over again!

Pizza Express birthday email

Ok so this is not something I've made / am making, but it is highly relevant to all the many hours I've spent in my digital life trying to get HTML emails to display properly. I just got this from Pizza Express - my birthday is coming up soon, and they sent me a happy birthday email. When I opened it, it looked like this:

Cute enough,but then I clicked 'display images' out of habit, and instantly realised that the image above was built using tables, with the image to be loaded cut up into a thousand little pieces to fit into the layout. As someone who has worked exhaustively with tables, I know that the cute pixel image above probably took wayyyy longer than the email with images:

which, incidentally, also has my name on it :) I like it, it makes me happy, and I will probably go to Pizza Express for my birthday...

Highly frustrating

Downtime in a new office, so it's back to New York. Started where I left off on the bottom right bit of detail, but soon got very tired of it and was just messing it up, so I moved to a new section. In this office the computers are set up with minimum flexibility to avoid virus downloads and other illegal software and add-ons being installed and clogging up the machines. This means I can't install new tablet driver software, which means my Wacom is functioning like a mouse. A designer I know from a few years ago used to find it odd that I have my pen mapped to the screen, and couldn't work in it. ASfter attempting to fill in some time here painting NYC, I absolutely cannot understand how he works with it in mouse mode. I've hit Undo so many times I might as well be working backwards, because the point of reference keeps shifting, so it's not like painting IRL anymore.

Giving up now, although it was nice to be painting Times Square now that I've been there :)

Working it

So I don't get a lot of time to work on this, in between freelancing and all my other projects, but when I can I try to really devote some detail-time, rather than just rushing through it... I'm getting there, but I'm doing a lot of re-working.