GOTA: Everlasting 2.0 Album Art

I decided recently that I really hated the artwork I made for my "Everlasting" album and my roommate JP who has worked with me on my music before inspired me with artwork from one of his own EPs to just go ahead and whip up something completely new for it. Here I'll show you how I went from a new canvas to the finished product.

1. I started out with just a basic sketch of a coyote drawn in Sai, it looks like a wolf but either way it works.

2. I added an image of the Andromeda Galaxy just to give it a spacey feel... or something like that. There's actually 2 layers, one is desaturated, the second is colorized teal with a reveal all layer mask and a gradient applied to it.

3. & 4. LOTS of layering with grunge textures and stock images of old school maps.

5. Splatter Brushes

6. Cloud Brushes

7. Stock images thrown in of engine diagrams, sprockets and a compass rose, inverted then set to screen in the blend mode.

8. The final product. The font I used for Everlasting is called Jersey Stories!, you can get it from Dafont.com and the GOTA logo (hard to notice I know, I wanted it like that) is just the orignal logo designed with the Aristotle Punk font.

And there you have it, album art.

PAINTY EDGE WIP

I've finally gotten around to trying my hand at a painterly style again, this time with better results than the first time I tried. This little doodle was mostly Sai and PS CS4 but I just got Art Rage so once I start getting commissions for them I'll maybe give Art Rage a shot. I just wanted to post a WIP of some sort since it's been a while. I completely forgot I did this in only 3 layers, though I deleted the initial sketch layer because I'm so cool like that. :V

INKS

COLOR/PAINTING/IDK WHAT TO CALL THIS

FINAL/BACKGROUND

Sooooo there you have it, it looks pretty simple with only 3 layers but I think I spent hmmmm, probably 4 hours on this or something. Getting digital painting down is definitely not easy but the outcome is worth the work.

Watercolor Brushes Revived!

Finally got a new WORKING link up (thanks to Moreck for hooking me up with my own resources) of my watercolor Photoshop brushes. Packs I through IV condensed into a masterpack. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD

Uhhhhh, changing the blog to E|D but I think I'm going to keep the resources as DIDY. IDK.

2009 is so last year, time for a new blog.

Considering I'm making Edge|Destroys my little name brand thing or whatever you'd call it, I figured it was time to give the blogspot a tiny revamp. New banner, new URL, same art.

If for WHATEVER REASON you have this bookmarked I suggest you change the bookmark to the new url, obviously edgedestroys.blogspot.com.

Rest in peace DIDY, you were cool, ...actually you still are. Hmmmmm. Nah, I'll stick with E|D.

Skin Deep, Fur Deep, BIG DIFF.

Getting close to having my minimum of 15 shirts designed before throwing my ad up on FA. I'm a bit tapped on ideas but today was a good day! I managed to finally get my "wolf in sheep's fursuit" idea done in as little cliche/corny a manner possible. I finally got a shirt designed for my music project, Gears Of The Apparatus too, so over all I'm happy.

In other news, I'll be a very happy person if I never hear Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" again for the rest of my life.

CHECK IT

polaroids polaroids polaroids

I don't know if its from Mitchell Davis or what but lately I've had a fixation on designs based on 600 series polaroid photos. There's a new shirt design up with them and I'm doing polaroid based badges too. Speaking of shirts I'm going to finally be asking Dragoneer about getting on of my E|D banners up. I've got one design left in my head at least for now before my bank gets my money to my paypal and I note him about the banner. Unfortunately I'm falling short of the 15-20 designs I wanted to have up before the banner went up but I'll be sure to keep designing so long as art block doesn't get in my way.

SHAZAM

Man oh man I'm getting work done on something for once. Inside joke between my roommates and I (unrelated to the band) turned out to be one of the best ideas I've had in a while. It's not narcissism if I want to buy my own stuff is it?

Also, got a mini banner done too, just in case the WHOPPING 16 frames of the first one ends up being too many for FA to handle.

Check it out here.

Nine shirts made so far, we'll see what else I can pump out of my head. I've got a few ideas though I'm not sure I know how to properly make them happen yet. Hoping to have at least 15-20 shirts designed before I get my banners up.

In the event you haven't seen my redbubble account (no idea how you'd manage that, I'm tweeting about it like madness) check that out here.

EdgeDestroys Pt II

got a 2nd shirt design together and a banner too. not sure when I'll spare the money to have dragoneer throw it up but it's pretty bannon-esque and that means it's ballin. let's hope I don't run dry on shirt ideas...

check out the animated banner here.

REDBUBBLE//EDGE CLOTHING??

So how bout it? Furry clothes with class and sass yeah?

Today I'm launching a redbubble account, I'm gonna finally do some clothing design which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. A lot will obviously be inspired by the metal scene and a lot will obviously be furry but we'll see what all I pump out. Get excited.

http://www.redbubble.com/people/edgedestroys

Ion Dissonance WIP

The blogger always uploads pictures in an order that confuses me and I'm too lazy to fix it so just deal with it I guess. One of my favorite things I've drawn EVER, I actually showed a lot of improvement in anatomy and shading in this so I'm hella proud of it. Anyways the breakdown.

Check it, inks+lines. Right after this it's pretty obvious I just threw a watercolor brush in then set a splatter brush on the eraser and boosh, fancy background things. WHATEVS.

I thought it'd be pretty cool to show just the shading layer for some reason. I did this for the most part in Paint Tool Sai (like everything else) so the shading is done with the marker and pen tools.

Lines... Yup. They sure are.

The initial sketch from my sketchbook. I added some more pencil work to it later in regular .3 lead but I was too lazy to scan again. The scanner ATE this anyways.

Final piece. Most of this as I said is Sai, all I used photoshop for was the splattery brush crap in the back and adding the border/text/and my fancy new watermark.

That's all for today kiddos. Just posting to stem any fears that I might be dead. Or disappoint those hoping for it. :D

WHERE HAVE I BEEN

blah blah blah

long story short, I moved from Jacksonville to Plant City with some rad hombres.

Working on art and music blah blah blah, here have a wallpaper of the art for my next album I'll be working on.

GRUNGE TEXTURE MASTER PACK VOLS 1-4

DOWNLOAD

Sorry for the massive delay in updates, I've been busy visiting Ben, trying to catch up with commissions and all that jazz. Anyways it's been brought to my attention that all my texture downloads expired on media fire so here's a download of all 4 volumes, this time I actually made a mediafire account before uploading so hopefully the downloads won't expire at least not as soon.

The Second Coming:The Beginning Of The End

Not really an art post but more a personal one. My 8 day visit to see my boyfriend is coming to a close. I leave tomorrow night which sucks but that's part of being in a long distance relationship. The sooner I get back to Florida the sooner I can get back to finding a job and save to move up with/near him instead of messing with flying back and forth.

In ART related news, thanks to my boyfriend, I'm going to be installing Adobe Flash, InDesign and upgrading Photoshop CS3 to CS4. Not really necessities but they'll be nice to have. I just installed Lightroom 2 so I should be set with Adobe stuff for now: Ps, Ai, Id, Fl CS4 and Lr2.

Commissions will be coming up soon I promise, after the current batch I've got quite a few to post on here.

H814//The Second Coming!

SO YEAH, It's totally not obvious I'm a fan of Mark Riddick.

Anyways yeah, just a shirt design I threw together in photoshop. I've been wanting to do my own clothing company for some time, I'm not sure where to begin or what to do other than make designs until I know what else to do, so here's where I'm starting. The name H814 Clothing (HATE ONE FOUR if you didn't get that adurrrrrr) is basically a mixture of me respecting my roots and pretending I'm a clever badass. 814 is my hometown's area code and I just threw the H on there to be cool. :V

Anyways that crap aside check it. 24 hours from now, I'll have been through all the airport shit and I'll be with my boyfriend! After 5 months of not seeing him you can only imagine how pumped I am to see him. :)

WE'RE MOVING FORWARD

So I've been letting DIDY stagnate a bit, about time I post again. I haven't got much to post that I really feel like posting. I think I'll post a WIP of the above wallpaper soon but yeah. I've been working on my anatomy and hopefully will be buying "Anatomy For The Artist" to help me stop sucking at figures and you know, ANATOMY. I might post the resulting sketches. Anyways yeah. Just an "I'M NOT DEAD GUYS" kinda post.

In other news in a few days (monday the 20th to be exact) I'll be leaving FL for 8 days to see my boyfriend who somehow manages to be the inspiration for a good part of the crap I post on here, or at least my FA.

Awwwww just look at that face.

PILOT SEQUENCE

So I've been inspired mostly due to Attack Attack!, DJ Hydroice and Renard to make some TECHNO. YEAH, TECHNO. Don't be alarmed though! I already made album art even though I have yet to make songs and I made sure there was plenty of deathcore in it. Techno or not it's not my style to have anything else. And yes I know there's already the band "Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus" but I just randomly thought of this and it sounded like a badass name for a techno project so whatever.

Towards the end I was like whoa... this doesn't really look like furry techno at all. So I added bloody paw prints on the skull and in the background haha, I really didn't know what to do to add that extra furry element to it. Hopefully this will be a reminder to finish a progect for once though I doubt it. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing with Fruity Loops and Z3ta+...

A Knight In Shining Amore WIP

My boyfriend has almost always been the only thing on my mind but more so now than ever before. He's really the only thing I can think about lately. So here we have more Storm+Edge art with a Conditions title.

LINES.

COLORS.

For this I tried experimenting with a painting style similar to Taoren's paint-on-the-same-layer-as-your-lines style though I didn't realize until I was done I made the lines too thin and it really didn't work. Fortunately I knew I'd probably mess it up so I made a second line layer on top of the first before I started painting. Good thing I did. When I switched the topmost line layer off I had brushed most of the facial details away haha. This is only 600x1005 px so I guess I can't be surprised everything kind of blended together at such a small size but whatever. I covered my tracks that time.

BACKGROUND.

I dunno why I've been using teal so much lately, it's just a nice tranquil color. It's probably my favorite color right now.

TEXTURE AND LIGHT.

Once again I've used the whispy light and such in this. I'm not really sure. The first time I did it in the original Illuminati I was just doing it because it looked cool, now I think I'm doing it to symbolize our hearts/spirits/etc, not really sure but whatever I do it for it looks cool.

TEXT

I decided to make matching badges out of this for us to wear to whatever our first con together is. Obviously as is it's just one badge but it'll be cut in half once I print it and then you put them together to make the complete picture. Cute I guess or whatever. For those of you wondering the font I used is Aristotle Punk, you can get it for free from dafont.com.

For my boyfriend, as is everything I do.

Goodbye Good Name

Just some more conditions/depression inspired art. Boy I just am not the happy camper lately am I?

Illuminati

So yeah. I guess this one is kinda a bit of vent art. I was supposed to move in with my boyfriend next week but due to our roommate being irresponsible or something... I don't even really know yet, he doesn't have his part of the rent and my boyfriend's mom doesn't want to wait for him to get his act together so I really don't know when I'll see my boyfriend again. Ugh. Just a little post-apocalyptic depression vent art here.

LINES.

Nothing special. THE HANDS. DAMN THE HANDS. I Just kinda finally settled on them being like that after 30 minutes of trying to make them look right.

LINES AND BACKGROUND.

I actually did the background first and put the lines over them but I figured it'd be better to show the lines on their own first.

COLORS.

LIGHT.

The shiny balls of light and all that are actually on 3 separate layers but why not just add them all at once here. It saves some of my space on here for more pictures. :B

TEXTURE.

BIG SURPRISE, I USED TEXTURE.

What's new haha.

So yeah. There you have it. The piece is named after the song of the same title by Conditions. Go to their myspace and check it out, they're an awesome band.

Some dreams just take longer to come true.

ICON TUTORIAL... THING

I figured I'd just show you a quick progression of an icon commission so you can see how I make them. Just so you know I do all my stuff (or at least this icon, just to cover my tracks if my line art in Photoshop stops sucking and I go back to that later after I post this) in Paint Tool Sai.

STEP ONE: SKETCH.

I actually don't have a picture of this since after I draw the inks/line art, I delete the sketch layer but basically just imagine a crappy version of the ink layer in a lighter color and that's about it.

STEP TWO: INKS.

Self explanatory, just the clean line art drawn over the sketch.

STEP THREE: COLORS.

I'M PRETTY SURE YOU DON'T NEED AN EXPLANATION FOR THIS ONE.

.

STEP FOUR: BACKGROUND.

Typically I use a flat single color for my backgrounds but once in a while I'll switch it up and add other colors or shades just to make it a bit less boring

STEP FIVE: TEXTURE.

Since I started adding texture to my stuff I just can't work without it now, when I add texture then make the layer with it hidden the work just looks so bland. Then again I usually only add texture (at least at a high opacity) to stuff I don't do a ridiculous amount of shading on. If you haven't noticed yet, up until now I create the new layers for color and background under each other, just to make sure things stay clean. Texture I always make the top-most layer and set the blend mode on multiply. If the image I use for the texture has an area that's too dark and messes with the overall appearance of the work, I set my eraser on a very low opacity, with soft edges and a fairly large size and try to lighten it up without removing too much and making the spot where I erased stand out. Here you can see where I had to erase around the white on the face in a few spots. It was mostly just around the area of the mouth just above the lower jaw but I erased a bit more to spread out and create more of a gradient so it didn't look so obvious I had to erase the texture there.

STEP SIX: GRADIENT... THING.

Just to add a little depth or whatever to my icons... hmm that kinds sounds like bs. JUST TO MAKE IT LOOK COOLER, I darken around the edges of my icons. depending on the icon I either use black or a dark shade of the background color. This is usually with the Air Brush tool, set with a soft edge, low opacity and large size. This icon is 300x300 px and the Air Brush was set to 80 px just to give a general idea of how big a "large size" is

And there you have it, that's how I do my icons and actually how I do a lot of my art. You can pretty much see that in any of my other WIP posts of cheaper commissions or stuff that doesn't have shading/a lot of shading.