Art by Ben Hartnett

 I’ve had a picture in mind for quite a while. It’s of a man walking uphill while dragging all sorts of heavy and painful things behind him. The picture is in colour, with heaps of detail including things which aren’t obvious at first, such as parts of the load pulling at the man’s skin and so on. I started sketching it, and it all seemed too hard! So I placed a sheet of A4 over my rough sketch on the lightbox, pulled out my Pentel brush pen (which I had no particular intention of using again), and came up with this simple, black and white little picture. I confess it was rather nice to keep loose and simple and get a result in minutes instead of hours. Both kinds of art have their satisfaction. I may do the ‘proper’ version of the idea one day but it doesn’t matter so much now.

This illustration has some slightly bolder colours than previous ones for Intense Titanium. The theme was seasonal change, and I attempted to come up with something which would be appropriate for both Spring and Autumn, since the company sells to both the northern and southern hemispheres. I happened to have a motorcyle-based movie dvd handy, which is partly why I sat the bride and groom on a big ol’ bike! The items above the couple are titanium cufflinks which were mentioned in the companion text (along with weddings, this being a popular time for them). The illustration was drawn on paper and coloured digitally. The bike was based loosely on a photo.

More art for Intense Titanium (see the previous post). In case you haven’t guessed, the theme for this one was Valentine’s Day. I used some photo reference for this  coloured pencil drawing, both for the rose and the ring (although I stylised the rose a bit). A look is still being developed for the art, and it will probably be a fairly organic process. Bolder colour work will be a probable next step. The picture is shown at the size it was used at.

This is an e-newsletter illustration for the Intense Titanium online jewellery store, announcing the arrival of several new ring types and a new pendant. The image above is shown at the size it was used in the newsletter. This one was all done in pencil, with the colours and contrast beefed up a bit digitally. I had some photo reference for the rings. I’ve done a couple of pics for the newsletter before (the schedule is about once a month), but did them digitally and in a less ‘intense’ style. I’d post them but the relevant hard drives are currently inaccessible…

It seems my pen drawing skills aren’t what they were back in my pre-animation days, but these exercises might still be interesting for artists who are exploring different methods (like I am). Finding models the right sizes looked to be a little tricky, so I dispensed with live reference for this one!

All were drawn on smooth, white A4 (the blue one was drawn on standard copy paper). The first picture was the rough I traced from for all the others (with the help of a lightbox). The second was drawn fairly quickly (and a bit lazily) with a Faber-Castell PITT brush pen (I’m not used to brush pens, but I can see some of their major potential). The third and fourth were done with Copic pens with the fixed-width, fine points most pens have. The last was drawn with a 0.7 2B mechanical pencil  (Faber-Castell) and a black coloured pencil (Faber-Castell Polychromos). The last also took the longest to draw, but I have an idea involving markers which may reduce drawing time…

My computer appears to have abandoned the notion of usefulness and has followed a path of self-destruction. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some odds and ends with other people’s computers until I sort out what to do with mine. With limited computer access I may actually get some stuff done to post, instead of trawling the Internet looking for awesome artists to admire!

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!

I did this portrait at the end of 2002. I forgot to add it earlier in the site, but adding the “Step by Step Art” section in the pages menu reminded me! You can see the drawing progressing from the photo references through to the final coloured pencil picture by following the menu or clicking here.

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.