Blog

Boudica’s Gambit: A Debriefing

If you’re an artist and want to understand my process before AI replaces us all and makes this redundant- then this post may be of interest to you. Everyone is welcome of course, but frankly, this is mainly here for my own benefit. You’d be surprised how much you forget once a project is completed!

I started this picture with the notion that it would be cartoonier than my other work, and therefore simpler. I’d pay homage to those “Manga-looking” JRPG games I loved as a teen and try to capture that style. There might be an element of that in final result, but ultimately it’s my usual obsessive approach that won out.

Perhaps because I thought it would be simpler, and because I was excited to just get stuck in- I launched into the picture with a pretty underdeveloped thumbnail sketch. I was confident I could work it all out as I went. That’s the beauty of personal work after all!

After choosing my loose compositional idea I began to explore ideas for the individual characters.

A backstory to the world began to develop- an idea that included cold war Berlin- a city divided by opposing powers, but this time being a Celtic inspired city occupied by a more advanced magi-tech Roman empire.

When I started this picture I wasn’t totally comfortable with my ability to pull off a big complex city scene and wanted to really challenge myself to produce something ambitious. I also wanted to incorporate some Celtic elements into the design, and spent some time gathering references of Crannogs stone circles and hill forts.

This picture progressed over the course of two-and-a-bit years, and was juggled between Photoshop, Krita and Procreate, PC and iPad. I started thinking about this in late 2019, and finally wrapped it up in mid December this year (2022). As I worked on it I saved out the latest iteration to record the progress. Later in the process I started setting each new image as my desktop background as motivation to keep the image progressing. I ended up with 47 iterations:

The progress video

A few key take-aways for me from this project:

  • Keep your perspective grid on a layer inside the file itself, so when you pass the file from program to program it stays there.
  • Make notes or a reference model to keep track of the light sources. You forget what they are after a while.
  • Krita tops photoshop for painting. Photoshop makes everything harder than it needs to be with it’s archaic brush engine.
  • The start and end of a painting is super fun. You’ve just got to push over that middle hump!

Boudica’s Gambit

Boudica’s gambit

led by Bran- Boudica’s little posse of rebels fight their way along the top of the speeding train towards the carriage that they believe is carrying an experimental super weapon. Rigby- explosives primed in her satchel- fires off shell after shell, while Cerise shields the party with white magic. Bran and his faithful bodyguard Cynebald take the lead while Sartorio primes a powerful offensive spell.

Little do they realise that they’re about to fall straight into the devious governor’s trap…

This picture is my tribute to the ps1 era final fantasy games and other games I loved in days gone by. The working title for this was “Midgar”. Of course I’ve mixed in a few of my own ideas and influences. A little bit of Celts vs Romans, a little bit of cold war Berlin, and a touch of Tokyo streets. As is often the case, this took way longer than expected.

Here’s how it progressed:

Lessons from Inktober 2021

Last October I managed to achieve something I’d been wanting to do for quite some time- a new picture uploaded (to instagram) every single day for a whole month.

I was a little scared to commit initially and threw some already completed artwork at it for a while before realising that I was going to have to pick up the pace and draw lots of new stuff.

Then I started doing-up partially completed sketches to keep the numbers up.

I also re-drew some artwork from my childhood, which was a huge boost of inspiration for me. It’s interesting to look back at that work and see the design choices that dominated. Lots of belts- final fantasy perhaps? Lots of Dragon ball Z-style suits with fabric sashes around the waist.

Eventually I ran out of candidates for pictures to finish and was forced to draw completely new stuff.

The result of all this hard work was …to lose a lot of followers on Instagram.

Looking back at the work its clear that the quality suffered towards the end. I was under a fair bit of time pressure and it shows. There was probably also a lack of consistency- something I’ve always suffered from perhaps, but I hate seeing artists make the same piece over and over. I like to tackle new stuff!

Not that I’m overly concerned with instagram followers. Social media is well documented to be a totally bonkers minefield. Early in 2021 I’d seen my follower count shoot up from about 100 to nearly 600- all while I stood back in bemused interest and did absolutely nothing. I hadn’t uploaded anything in months, and yet up and up it went.

So when the count stopped at 597 I couldn’t help but think that a little burst of uploads might push over that arbitrary line, like that mattered, and having a go at inktober might be the perfect time to do so. Well, that shows what I know, eh?

While it may have been a disaster from a self-promotion point of view, from a personal perspective I feel very glad to have done it. There’s a lot of value in consistently doing something every day. I also felt like I was really learning for a change. It’s hard not to refine when you’re tackling the same sort of thing over and over in such a short space of time.

Norseman vs the Wyrm

Here’s a recent piece of artwork done for Xp-Pen, who earlier this year were nice enough to send me a shiny new graphics tablet to try. The XP-Pen Artist 22 (2nd generation)

In short- my review was very favourable- but if you’re interested in learning more you can read the full thing here: An artist’s Review: XP-Pen Artist 22 (2nd generation)

Also if you’re interested in the technical details purchasing one, the links are below:

Xp Pen store: https://www.storexppen.com/

Product Details https://www.xp-pen.com/product/855.html

Rella Pensword and the Red Notebooks

Here’s some cover artwork I’ve been keeping up my sleeve for a while now:

This is front cover artwork for “The Wondercurrent”, which is the first book in the “Rella Pensword and the Red Notebooks” series. I was rather pleased with how it came out!

And this is the full cover for the recently released “The unfinished City”. This one was quite a challenge- albeit a pleasurable challenge.

You can learn more and purchase both of the books over on Amazon if you’re interested:

Here’s book 1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B081MWXJ7X?

And here’s book 2: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09CWV5F5Y?