New Time Scavenger Painting
19/August/2009
The wisest keeps something of the vision of a child. Though he may understand a thousand things that a child could not understand, he is always a beginner, close to the original meaning of life.
John Macy
Cruft’s Shop- Digital
This is a new painting from the Time Scavenger project that I’ve been working on, unfortunately in an all too occasional manner. It’s an illustration of the curiosity shop owned by the strange and mysterious Mr Cruft. The hero of the story, Artemis, has just gathered up enough courage to enter through the doorway, when...
He stumbled over his own feet and fell back against the door shutting it tight. The latch clicked. He slid down the wall to the floor his eyes glued on the figure of a man who loomed over him his hand reaching out to grab hold. It was an embalmed corpse, wrapped in natron scented linen. He recognized it immediately. Standing over Artemis, ready to pounce, was a six foot tall Egyptian mummy.
Links to text from the first two installments of the story are posted in the sidebar. Reader’s will notice that there are some minor differences in the details of the painting. Obviously, this is not an accurate rendition of an Egyptian mummy, for example. The reason is, that as a collaborative work in progress, some minor details are changing even although those changes have not been updated in the posted version of the text.
I started the piece, by combining some rough sketch ideas, with notations done in the small sketchbook I keep to log ideas in. Those sketches were scanned in, but instead of working up a tight pencil, as I usually do, it was straight to full color, quarter size, concept roughs. I wanted to keep a spontaneity that can sometimes be lost in a tight pencil stage. besides, I had a good idea of where I wanted to take this painting. The best of the painted concepts was then res’ed up, and used as a base for development of the final image.
Nearly all of the work was done using Corel Painter, with only minor tweaks handled in Photoshop, like the type on the window and the ceiling detail. The time traveler’s map applied to Cruft’s ceiling, was made up as a separate piece of art. That was then collapsed to a single layer and dropped into the main image. With the layer mode set to Soft Light, I then adjusted the opacity appropriately, to blend it into the scene.
John Macy
Cruft’s Shop- Digital
This is a new painting from the Time Scavenger project that I’ve been working on, unfortunately in an all too occasional manner. It’s an illustration of the curiosity shop owned by the strange and mysterious Mr Cruft. The hero of the story, Artemis, has just gathered up enough courage to enter through the doorway, when...
He stumbled over his own feet and fell back against the door shutting it tight. The latch clicked. He slid down the wall to the floor his eyes glued on the figure of a man who loomed over him his hand reaching out to grab hold. It was an embalmed corpse, wrapped in natron scented linen. He recognized it immediately. Standing over Artemis, ready to pounce, was a six foot tall Egyptian mummy.
Links to text from the first two installments of the story are posted in the sidebar. Reader’s will notice that there are some minor differences in the details of the painting. Obviously, this is not an accurate rendition of an Egyptian mummy, for example. The reason is, that as a collaborative work in progress, some minor details are changing even although those changes have not been updated in the posted version of the text.
I started the piece, by combining some rough sketch ideas, with notations done in the small sketchbook I keep to log ideas in. Those sketches were scanned in, but instead of working up a tight pencil, as I usually do, it was straight to full color, quarter size, concept roughs. I wanted to keep a spontaneity that can sometimes be lost in a tight pencil stage. besides, I had a good idea of where I wanted to take this painting. The best of the painted concepts was then res’ed up, and used as a base for development of the final image.
Nearly all of the work was done using Corel Painter, with only minor tweaks handled in Photoshop, like the type on the window and the ceiling detail. The time traveler’s map applied to Cruft’s ceiling, was made up as a separate piece of art. That was then collapsed to a single layer and dropped into the main image. With the layer mode set to Soft Light, I then adjusted the opacity appropriately, to blend it into the scene.