Dennis Jones
eclectic artwork & other random things
Little Red Robbing Hood
Another one of the animals I came up with for the board game I’m working on. There will be four little teams of varmints with three characters on each team. I decided there should be a small, medium and large creature on each team. Here is one of the small animals I came up with.
Frequent Fryer Flier
Here is another one of the characters I came up with for the board game I’m working on. Kind of a flying chicken I guess…
Green Jumper
I am currently working on a really fun project. It is a boxed board game and part of the project calls for me to developing twelve wacky looking animals. My client has graciously said that I could share some of this work here on my blog, so here is one I just finished up.
Fool Proof
Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
A Really Quick Dog Video
Here’s another simple technique you might want to try. Find a nice background image, put it underneath your pencil drawing and then paint on top of it…
Flying The Coop
This is for my friends on YouTube who continue to send me kind letters asking what my work process is.
This picture started out as a doodle in my sketchbook. I scanned it into Photoshop, (CS6), made it a multiply layer and began blocking in color on a normal layer underneath. When I get the mid and darker values established, I create a normal layer above the line art and put in the lighter values. At the very end I add just a little black line but not too much… too much black will kill the picture. I merge all the layers together, then create a green layer underneath the art. I erase everything I dont want on the art. As I do this, the green layer underneath helps me to see what I am doing. My image is cut out and now I need a background. I type into Google “blue sky” and find some clouds which I drop into the background. I add just a bit of glow around my figure to separate him from the background and I’m done.
Crowd Control
Color can be a tricky thing to work with. Lots of out of control color can confuse what you are trying to achieve in an illustration. This is a simple technique to keep order when you have a lot going on in a picture. Render the background in a monotone and only use color on what you want the viewer to focus in on. It pretty much works every time.
Almost Too Fabulous For Words
The National Tackle Football League starts this Wednesday night and being the procrastinators we Jones’s are, the draft for the Annual Jones Family Fantasy Football League will be held on Tuesday, the night before. This season is even more exciting as the winner gets this fabulous, hand crafted with goodness, AWFFL TROPHY! The victor can proudly proclaim all year long that yes, I am indeed a winner… and yes, the football on the trophy does have golden feet.
A Day In The Life
A job came in on Friday, I opened it on Monday and it was 50 spot illustrations due in one week. Fifty of anything takes forever, so I got busy, and then the phone rang. It’s the music leader at my church. The bass player that was supposed to play this Sunday is out because of an emergency, can I fill in for him this Sunday? I said sure…
Now I have 50 spot illustrations AND five new songs to learn before Sunday. I download the church songs and try to drag them into iTunes, but I accidentally drag them into Photoshop instead. I figure Photoshop will not open mp3’s but much to my surprise the mp3’s open and I see something I have never seen in Photoshop before… some sort of a video editing interface.
I know I have 50 illustrations due in a week and 5 songs to learn by Sunday, but I drop everything, grab a stop motion puppet I’ve been working on, shoot some really bad footage with my iPhone and start playing with the Photoshop video editor because having the ability to edit video in a program that I actually know how to work is pretty darn awesome.
I don’t know if I will be able to make the 50 spot illustration deadline or if I will torpedo the band on Sunday because I don’t know how to play the songs, but at least I figured out how to make videos in Photoshop this week!
An After Effects Experiment
I have a ton Adobe programs, but the only one I ever use is Photoshop (which is pretty ridiculous because these programs are awesome) but I don’t know how to run any of them. Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to teach myself InDesign, Media Encoder and Premiere Pro. Tonight I was fiddling around with After Effects and came up with this little video. The program itself doesn’t seem to be very intuitive, but it will really do some neat tricks. All I was trying to do on this experimental video is see if I could insert some music into a clip… and I did it!
Law And Order
Curiosity killed the cat… but for a while I was a suspect…
Brother Thomas
Steve Leeper asked several of his artistic minded friends to send in a picture of the main character from his upcoming stop-motion animated film. Those images are just now starting to roll in and this was my take on Brother Thomas. You can see the other artists interpretations in the Brother Thomas Artist Gallery.
No Bull
Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter. -Dave Barry
Sailor Suit
A character development sketch.
Mousetrap
The early bird might get the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.
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Dennis Jones 