Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Saltwater Witch Wallpaper

Took my favorite panel from the last set of pages, flipped it sideways, and sized it for your desktop.

Three sizes, right-click to download:

SaltwaterWitchWallpaper1280x800.jpg

SaltwaterWitchWallpaper1600x1200.jpg

SaltwaterWitchWallpaper1280x1024.jpg

Here's what it looks like--click to see the full 1280 x 800 version:

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Kitchen Witch with wings of red bell pepper and green onion stalks

I was thinking of painting something for Christmas, bright reds, something magical--and I hadn't had lunch yet.  So, I'm doodling with one of the panels I painted for Saltwater Witch chapter 8, and I came up with...Kitchen Witch - with wings of red bell pepper and green onion stalks.  A bit goofy, I know.

But, tell me, would you hang one in your kitchen? I printed a couple proofs and they came out nicely.  Should I have prints made for Christmas presents?

Click for the full view:

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Saltwater Witch - CHAPTER 8!

I painted like a demon last night and this morning, turning out the first four pages for chapter 8 of Saltwater Witch. I just posted a set on Friday, but Friday was a big day, Saltwater Witch was featured on Monday at Drunk Duck web comics community and sometime during the week my saltwatery web comic stepped into one of the TOP 10 spots at Drunk Duck.  This thrilled me so much, I vowed to paint another set--two in one weekend!  

Check out Saltwater Witch

Here's a panel from the last set--with a couple new details:

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Friday at The Villains Corner--BE THERE!

The awesome guys at The Villains Corner web comic chat have invited me on the show this Friday, 12/4/2009 at 10PM EST.  We'll be talking about Saltwater Witch, drawing, painting, writing, and anything else you want to bring up.

Help me spread the word!

Here's the link:
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/31632

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Perpetual Prose Interview

It's up at PerpetualProse.com, and right now there aren't any comments.  Not one.  So go over there, read the interview, hit the "retweet" button, and comment--even it's just to ask what's up with the strange tree and acorn metaphor that doesn't really work? I'd answer here, but then no one's going to go over there and comment.

Here's the link:

http://perpetualprose.com/author-spotlight/chris-howard-interview

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Naiad studies - painting in Art Rage

Here's what I'm painting at the moment, a panel for Saltwater Witch, the last of a set of pages with the naiads--river witches.  At least for a while.  Did these in Art Rage, Wacom tablet.  

 

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Working on another set of pages...

...for Saltwater Witch for several reasons. One, I love the last set so much I want to do more.  Two, Kassandra is one maybe two sets away from getting back in the water, and I'm dying to do some more underwater stuff.  Three, Saltwater Witch is now in the Top 10 web comics list at Drunk Duck and on the front page--really excited about this.

Oh, and I'm really digging Ephoros the demon.  Here are a couple panels from the set of pages I painted today, Kassandra and her buddy Ephoros, a king among sea demons.

Read it all: Saltwater Witch.

 

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Saltwater Witch - new science teacher?

Really kicked butt with this set--five pages!  Very happy. So much so, I posted early! 

Check out all of Saltwater Witch here.

Featured on Drunk Duck!

Drunk Duck is a web comics community with a ton of great artists and their work--and with the coolest name ever.  My web comic Saltwater Witch was Monday's feature and the feedback and favoriting has just been wild. 

Saltwater Witch on Drunk Duck:
http://www.drunkduck.com/Saltwater_Witch/index.php?p=636877

And just gets better.  The guys at The Villains Corner have invited me on the show next Friday.  I'll post more about this in a bit.  Info here: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/31632

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Painting on your iPhone with the Brushes app

Or, as I would have called this post if there was enough room: Nazca's All-Nite Diner, open 24 hours, coffee and good food for all Captains of the Heights, the brave men and women of the Blue Forest Air Corps and East Shadow Dippers. Best pizza this side of the Orn Gulf. 

And all painted on an iPhone.

Here's the first in a series of tutorials to share some of the things I do when I paint with the Brushes app on the iPhone (everything here also works on iPod Touch).  These aren’t in order, although I might consider some more important than others, or maybe a better way to put it: some of these are work-for-me-but-may-not-work-for-you kinds of techniques, while others are just things to try, and still others are general use and I’d advise using them no matter who you are. 

I am by no means an expert with Brushes, but I’ve been using this wonderful painting app for months, and I’ve settled into a bunch of techniques I use over and over.  (For digital work I mainly use Painter, Art Rage, Photoshop on a Wacom). Here are a few things I’ve painted entirely with Brushes, starting with a blank canvas, and using all of the tools in the Brushes set. (Click to see the full view).

More—with videos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the0phrastus/sets/72157620184866701/

Okay, let’s get started.

I've broken this up into a set of "techniques", which run from advice, to the painting processes I use, tools I like and use, and other suggestions. Again, some of these work for me, and may work for you. Try them out, let me know what you think, let me know what I'm missing.

Technique: Start with a background and tell a story

Or just start fiddling and see if a story shows up on its own.  Start with a blank Brushes canvas by hitting the + sign.  Open up the brush size dialogue and slide it right, to the largest size.  Pick a color, any color, and keep the transparency slider somewhere less than the middle.  (You can also slide the brush selector to the bristly one--my favorite).

Start painting.  I like to make some broad strokes across the background, usually at an angle, sometimes angling both sides toward the middle giving it looking down from a great height sort of lines, sometimes zig-zags or ocean waves.  Pick a direction and paint.  For now, try to cover the background without lifting your finger—this creates an even tone with the selected color and transparency.  The fun stuff starts happening when you lift your finger and paint over the previous paint you just put down. This is where the brush transparency plays an exciting role, laying down a less transparent stroke with the same paint color.  Try leaving some white space, try different transparency settings and colors—unfortunately Brushes doesn’t currently support blending, smearing, color mixing, but it still allows you to do some wonderful things with transparency.

More than likely you’ll see a pattern emerge, a treeline, mountain, the edge of a forest, a dark street.  I consider myself an author before an Illustrator.  I love telling stories.  I love creating characters, places, conflict, and danger.  Look for the pattern or story in the background and bring it to life.

I start just about every painting in Brushes with one of two things in mind: A general idea of a character, place, scene.  Or nothing whatsoever.  When I haven't the foggiest clue what I want to paint, I pick a color, set the transparency to about a quarter way up from the bottom, slide to the widest brush, play with the strokes, and look for the patterns that emerge. At the first sign of an interesting edge or angling shadows I usually add a layer, move to black and the smallest brush size, then trace some of the outlines, bring the shapes to the foreground, make the edges of the unknown clearer.  Before you know it, you’ll have a heaving ocean, the mouth of a cave, a sky full of stars, a forest of blue trees, or a microscopic view of fresh cut grass.

Here’s a set of backgrounds I recently worked up in a coffee shop over lunch, just playing with brush sizes, colors, and transparency:



Technique: Use a mix of broad brush strokes to create shapes and define them
Sometimes I start small, sometimes big. If I’m thinking I need an airship in the foreground, I’ll create a new layer and use a big brush to give me a general shape for this airship. Then I’ll go to the smallest brush and give it definition, create the edges, refine the big pointy looking blob into something that looks airship-ish.

I think it depends on what you’re drawing. It may make sense to create a new layer and use the smallest brush to outline a figure, the horizon, ocean waves, or a 24-hour diner in the treetops.  Then on another layer, use a broad brush to fill in with solid color—again, use transparency to your advantage.  I rarely use a full solid color unless I’m drawing lines with a tiny brush.  You can also do some fantastic shading and reflection with the transparency down very low and then going over a shaded or highlighted area repeatedly.

I'm painting something inetresting for this set of techniques, and here's what I started with, a background with a few colors and then some defining with the smallest brush:

I pictured trees, giant blue trees with an airship-catering all-night diner a hundred meters off the ground.

I drew the basic structure of Nazca's All-Nite Diner, and then started adding details, lights, some bracing--with shadow and highlight using a nearly transparent brush:

Technique: Finger-painting works better than a stylus

You may not think so, and I didn't either when I started out with Brushes. I bought a stylus, used it for a few days, and have never picked it up again. If a stylus works for you, use it. I think the perception is that a stylus (a pen like device for drawing on the screen) will give you accuracy, better fine line drawing, and while I think this is generally correct, there's a serious downside: it affects the way I use Brushes. While painting I'm constantly hitting the Brushes toolbar buttons--undo, layers, brush sizing, colors.  In a typical work I'll hit undo five hundred times or more, I'll change colors and brushes a hundred times, roll through a hundred layers.  The stylus quickly became a pain to flip out of the way every time I wanted to select buttons, colors, and anything else.  And with a little practice I've found I have everything I wanted: accuracy, pressure/touch sensitivity, and easy access to the toolbar with my fingers. Fingers work better. Try them out.

Technique: Undo

Use it like it's keeps your heart beating.  Paint with the boldness of grizzly bears on  Red Bull, because you can always undo anything you paint. This feeds into the next technique on using layers. I can't tell you how many times I've created a layer just to see what something looks like, then if I don't like it, I'll trash the whole layer.  Another tip that fits with this is to create duplicates of your work as you go. When I get to a settled point in the painting--and there can be ten of these along the way in a single work, I'll click the "Done" button, and in the lower left, select "Duplicate Painting."  I've only gone back and started with an earlier version four or five times, but it's a peace of mind thing--knowing that if I somehow crap up a painting, I can always go back and start over with a good copy with layers intact.

Technique: Sometimes you can’t undo

Get used to this.  You’re pinching and expanding the canvas, painting, hitting buttons, more painting, doing all kinds of things.  And sometimes you’ll paint a line you don’t want and you won’t notice it until you’ve flattened the layers and you’re a hundred paint strokes on.  What you can’t undo, you can paint over.  Maybe this isn’t a technique all on its own, but I wanted to call this out as something that is going to happen.  I do it all the time. Painting along, everything looks lovely, and there’s a thin orange line through the center of the work. The only thing you can do is create a new layer, use the dropper tool to set the color next to the offending paint, and paint over it with little or no transparency.

Here’s a real example from the work I’m doing for this set of techniques:

Technique: Use hundreds of layers

Create a new layer for everything, a new highlight, shadow, new figure, every cloud in the sky.  Give them all layers. Brushes currently supports five layers, so make new ones and flatten as you go.  When I paint in Art Rage, Painter, or Photoshop, I use dozens of layers.  I just keep adding new ones as I proceed through a painting. I know some artists--when they use Photoshop--like Stephan Martiniere (www.martiniere.com) go through a hundred layers or more on most works.  Crazy cool.

Here’s what the layer panel looks like:

Click the + to create a new layer above the currently selected layer (that’s the one with the blue outline).  With layers, you can draw at different depths in your painting.  The checkboard pattern is the layer’s transparency—this won’t show up in your work, but lets you know what’s solid and what’s not—what’s going to show through any particular layer from the layer underneath it.

Click the down-arrow to merge layers.  Brushes currently supports five full layers, and if you need another you’ll have to flatten the image a bit.  Over the course of a painting I will run up to five layers and flatten twenty or thirty times.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  Here’s where I am with Nazca’s All Nite Diner, a late night crew of the airship Herakleia pulling into a berth because the captain has a craving for that insanely good summer squash and barbecue chicken pizza Nazca is famous for. And the coffee.  Damn good coffee.

One final note on image quality: Brushes allows you to download and create a high resolution rendering of any .brushes file, which is essentially a store of every recorded brush stroke for a work, with all its attributes, including color, transparency, layer, etc.  For a quick copy of your work you can also have Brushes send a lower res version to your camera roll and from there, email it to yourself or sync the images with your computer.

This is a low-res copy--nice enough for posting, but it gets a bit jagged when blown up.

Here's the video:

Go paint!
 

Grass Pixies

Tiny, quick, very tough to spot unless you catch one in a beam of sunlight, Grass Pixies. Painted with the Brushes app on my iPhone, about two hours. Video below.

Here's how I painted this one:

painting with the Brushes app on the iPhone--Grass Pixies.

Witches dig history

I was playing around with one of my paintings from last weekend, of four naiads--river witches.  I cut off one side and goofed a little, ending up with the one below titled, "I'll take four tickets to Independence Hall."  This is Olivia, the youngest of four sisters--all naiads, all characters from Saltwater Witch.

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"Going to Get My Magic Back"

Painted in Brushes on my iPhone, about four hours. I had the start of an idea a while ago, castle towers looming over a cliff, just didn't know what to do with the rest of it--until yesterday. Read this post by Kyle (I was going to quote something, but just go read it) and it sparked some cool stuff like towers full of magic-stealing sorcerers, walls of fire, angry seas, jagged rocks and ship eating cliffs--and one lone lost ex-sorcerer going to get her stolen magic back.

Definitely a story in there somewhere.

Want to see how I painted this one? Here's the video:

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Autumn sky

Took this with my iPhone, 7th floor--actually five shots stitched together with AutoStitch (which makes these lovely panoramas from a sequence of images).

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iPhone art...back at it

Spent half of lunch working on a short story--pretty weird one, and the other half starting a new painting, new gallery, new everything with the Brushes app.  This one's similar to the last piece I was working on--actually that was three pieces, all with the same sky.  (Week ago or so, I lost everything I've painted and not backed up in a fatal iPhone sync mishap). I'm starting over with a less ambitious one, see where it takes me--I'm thinking somewhere with lightning and maybe dragons.  We'll just have to see.

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Naiad Wallpaper

On a suggestion from Jay, I've gone ahead and cropped and reduced the "three naiads" painting I did for one of the last Saltwater Witch panels into a few standard desktop wallpaper sizes.  From left to right: Helodes, Parresia, and Limnoria, three river witches from my web comic Saltwater Witch--and they can be yours. Wallpaper away!

Again, I'd love to hear if you like these, or if you want me to post more wallpaper. Comment or email me!

And here they are:

Naiad Wallpaper 1280 x 1024

Naiad Wallpaper 1600 x 1200

Naiad Wallpaper 320 x 480  (iPhone and other mobile devices)

Or you can view them by clicking these--you may have to click again to expand to actual size:

 

 

Future Wallpaper

Okay, I took the latest version of my offworld construction painting ("RTFS") and cropped it for desktop wallpaper use, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, and for the iPhone and other devices: 320x480.  (RTFS = Read The F***ing Sign).  Because someone's already asked: the red light thing coming from her left hand is some sort of advanced tether system.

I'd love to hear if you like this, or if you want me to post more wallpaper. Comment or email me!

Download:

RTFS Wallpaper 1280 x 1024

RTFS Wallpaper 1600 x 1200

RTFS Wallpaper 320 x 480  (iPhone and other mobile devices)

Here are the same three wallpaper images. Click to open the full view--you may have to click the image again to expand it to full size:

 

 

Some new painting themes

I've been idea-sketching and painting some new work with futuristic themes and really long titles like:

"LTC Ikuyo Annet, Corps of Engineers, Offworld Ops, 384th Construction Battalion,
Overseeing launchpad overhauls on Dermestith-Ore."  Or maybe the title is RTFS--Read The F***ing Sign.

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Saltwater Witch - I love naiads

It's become clear that I have a thing for these river witches. I just posted this week's set for the Saltwater Witch web comic, pages 153 and 154, and it's about setting up some allies for Kassandra.  That was probably obvious from the last set.  Here, we get a bit deeper into it, into some of the cool magic the naiads are capable of working, and Kassandra's taking a little bit more control of her life.

Go check it all out here: Saltwater Witch

Here are a couple detail shots of my favorite naiads, Parresia, Limnoria and Helodes:

 

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Playing with Gravity

Okay, back in business after the iPhone/iTunes deleting my work thing. Was up into the early morning painting in Art Rage with my tablet on a machine that won't delete my files at the drop of a hat.

Here's a small piece of the painting I'm doing for a cover art submission--it's SF, lots of violent motion and cool color, calling it "Playing with Gravity":

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Apple, you really disappoint me...

I wish Apple would get their heads out of Steve Jobs’ ass for a moment and fix iTunes’ destructively brainless device sync problems.  I just lost my whole collection, hundreds of paintings, thousands of hours of work I’ve done with the Brushes app because Apple decides to sync my iPhone and delete most of my apps and data.  I have a MacBook, I love the iPhone, but this shows what a total goat fuck Apple is when it comes to making things work behind the bouncy icons and rounded corners. 

Yes, I’m a bit…upset.

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You can't come to California...

...and not spend some quality time in Monterey.  With family and a decent camera.

Click on the following for the full view:

 

 

 

 

   

 

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iPhone Art at World Fantasy

Spent a little time painting with the Brushes app on my iPhone while sitting in on some panels at World Fantasy 2009.  I started this in the Steampunk panel yesterday, spent a couple hours.

In-progress video:

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World Fantasy 2009

Took in a few panels, including the Steampunk one yesterday, bought some books, including Nick Mamatas' You Might Sleep--got Nick to sign it.  Other than that it's been a lot of talking--talked to Paula Guran of Juno Books for an hour or so on publishing, book marketing, and then debated the goods, bads, futures of ebooks, ebook readers and other devices with Sean Wallace, Neil Clarke and Nick Mamatas.  Spent a little more time talking about Lightspeed, the new SF magazine Sean and John Joseph Adams are starting up. Cool cool stuff.

Got a shot of John, Sean and Neil:

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