Art by Ben Hartnett

It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn an aeroplane! I felt like doing some random painting so I sat down with Twistedbrush Open Studio and this is what turned up. The aircraft isn’t any particular type, although the Sea Fury and Spitfire came to mind while painting. It took maybe two hours to do.

This is my new profile picture for Threadless.com, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s sharper, brighter, and more eye-catching than my previous attempt. I also had a much larger version to post here but there was I problem: I painted it in the free version of Twistedbrush (Twistedbrush Pro Studio). It has an odd saving system which seems to make it very easy to lose a lot of work, as I discovered; I scaled the picture down and couldn’t undo, plus it apparently wrote over the file I had saved in case of this event. In hindsight, my foresight was wasted.

Twistedbrush also appears to lack the ability to select part of a layer and move it, which I wanted for an eye adjustment. Plus, while it can save in .psd format, it doesn’t seem to save layers in .psd. There’s more but these are the main problems so far. This is all unfortunate since I really like the software. The brushes feel nice, the interface feels accessible, and there are some cool ideas in how different things are implemented. I think I’ll see if the negatives have been corrected in the demo of the full version. There’s still lots of potential here.

I recently joined threadless.com and had to come up with a profile picture. My first effort was a response to a challenge by a friendly welcomer and was fun but I decided to change it. The above picture of a rusting brain was painted in the free version of Twistedbrush with a Graphire 3.

More for the mighty jewellery store! This pic simply introduces two new titanium rings in the range. I did this one in the free version of Twistedbrush, with a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet. I didn’t use a pencil sketch this time.

This little project is unique in my art history, and will seem dumb to real computer game artists! I made some free cliff textures based on rock photos for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002/2004, taking far too long to do so! The results have been downloaded a few thousand times from a number of sites (including Avsim, Aussim, FSField, FSPlanet, FSDome, Simviation and others). I’m a star!

My textures (with some colour tweaks) even ended up in a project called “Vista Australis” (”VOZ”), and I became the smallest contributor to a major freeware success as a result. They claim an ‘installed base’ of over 350, 000 users! They’ve since left my textures behind in order to develop a new, much-improved payware version of their product called “Full Terrain Experience” (which I hope to enjoy one day) but my experience still gives me a buzz, as silly as that may be!

Digital photo mutation.

Original photo.

This photo was taken of a friend by a friend. The photographer also did a nice conversion to black and white for me, after which I attempted to make the subject even uglier than he is. That’s two horror-themed photo mutations I’ve done so far and I’m not even a horror fan!

In stages from late 2007 to the first few months of 2008, I worked on some art for a Bluetooth ‘phone game called “Click Tac Toe”, a clever cross between Tic Tac Toe and Battleship. You can actually try the game for free; in fact, I believe it’s totally free for a limited time. I’ve worked for this chap once before (see here) and both experiences were very positive. For more notes, see the comments.

“Safe Landing” was put together as an entry for the International Christian Comics Competition 2. It was made digitally in Photoshop (mostly Photoshop Elements) with a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet and pen. I got third place in the professional section, which was pretty cool! Another Aussie got second. “Safe Landing” got printed in colour in the competition book, along with my other entry “I Love My Cat”. I’ve edited “Safe Landing” slightly to make it more legible on the computer screen.

Edited photo

Original band photo

Another crazy photo edit in Photoshop. It took a while but it was just plain fun! I basically only use the clone/rubber stamp tool and the plain brush tool to do this sort of this thing, so any reasonable free paint software would be good enough. I probably did this with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2, which came with my Graphire3 digital pen and tablet.

Horrorble photo mutation

Detail

Original photo

I do like uglifying people. This edit was done in Photoshop.