Friday, February 8, 2019

Cthulu Manifests! Also barbarians, SF heroes, and more...


Cthulu manifests! Do you know your H.P. Lovecraft?! This picture came out of an observation that one of the Amberlight images I did a week or so ago seems to have an alien face looking out of it...

Original Amberlight render
...so it was a case of spinning the image around, using custom numbers to get it upright, then painting it lavishly in Photoshop:

Photoshop painting over Amberlight render
Ouch! Then it occurred to me that this would make one heck of a great backdrop for a much deeper work, where a human bears witness to the manifestation which tore open a great rent in the cosmos as we know it, so -- back into DAZ Studio for the barbarian to be added.

One of the final experiments I run on any piece of artwork is to bucket-fill a color layer into a blank top layer created in whatever new piece of art I'm finishing, and run through the blend modes, just to see what magical weirdness might spontaneously happen -- and it did! This time I used an ickly shade of green, and this happened:


...and of course as soon as I saw that, I thought to myself, "Dang, I can see this was a magazine cover from the golden age!" Mike got involved at this point, and we had all kinds of fun making up the ludicrous story titles and witty bylines, and running the DTP software (Serif) to mock-up the cover. Cute!

And I was fiddling with characters and starship sets yesterday, and this happened:


Soon as I saw this, I said, "I know who you are!" Do you remember Tully Ingersol fro the Hellgate series? Yeah, the chief engineer on Rick Vaurien's incredible salvage Vessel, Wastrel. Whooo, I used to love that ship, that crew. I'd happily sit down and read another six books, if the author could be coerced to write them. Anyway, I saw this guy, and I thought: I know you! (Which is really, really inspiring me to get back into the Hellgate art. The fact is, all of that art goes back to 2012, and ... I could do it sooo much better now. Okay. Let's get into this.)

Lastly for today, am starting to hammer some sense out of Bryce 7 Pro:


Now, that one doesn't bear very close examination, but it's getting closer and closer to the photo realism that one knows, academically, Bryce will deliver, but emotionally, one begins to doubt it after the fiftieth crap render in a row! But yes, the penny is starting to drop now. We'll get there.