2007-07-21 After (for Illustration Friday -- 'Poem' and Illustration Friday Night -- 'My Favourite Lyric')

2007-07-21 After (for Illustration Friday -- 'Poem'), originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

This one's for the Illustration Friday topic, 'Poem'. Which kinda ties into the Illustration Friday Night topic of 'My Favourite Song Lyric'.

It IS a poem. And I do sometimes sing my poems to myself in the shower. So it could be construed as a lyric, if I really push hard.

I've based this painting on a 3D animation model I made in the free and open source 3D suite, BLENDER. I've been following the tutorial for beginners, and this monkey in a mountainous landscape is the result.

I rendered a jpeg, and opened it as reference in ArtRage. And then I went to work on the paintwork. I made the mountain first. Then the sky. Then my monkey dude.

When the pic was nearly finished, I did the typography in CorelDraw 10, exported that as a jpeg, and brought it into ArtRage as a tracing image. I painted my lettering (about an hour's work). Then I exported the entire ArtRage file to Photoshop.

In Photoshop CS2, I manipulated my lettering, squashing it, stretching it, distorting it, then placed it on a layer behind the mountain range.

Finally, with that done, I opened it in ArtRage again, and did my final touch ups. If you look carefully, you'll notice that the white border is actually painted. I do that as the very last thing. When I print my pics out, this gives them a more painterly feel. I really don't like the rigid line that happens if I don't do this smudged border. For me, organic feels better.

This painting was made on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc using Blender 2.44, ArtRage 2.2, CorelDraw 10, and Photoshop CS2.