Thread update 8/1/12
Some background on me I guess: My name is Kyle Gallagher, I'm a Graphic Design student in my 4th year of a 5 year program at the University of Cincinnati, and although I study design, I've always loved comics and illustration as well, and I hope to create comics and designs that people will love and enjoy every day.
Decided to make a goals section, sort of just to keep track of my progress and to use as a reference, since I write a lot of this stuff down but when I change sketchbooks I forget which one had what.
Long-term goals:
-illustrate and/or write a graphic novel
-draw everything, all the time, forever
Short-term goals:
-design t-shirts from custom typography
-make more comic strips
-follow through on more personal projects, post completed work rather than just sketches
Also, here's where some of my work can be found and will be posted other than in this thread:
Tumblr:
http://rgbfame.tumblr.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/kylebunker
I don't update these often but here they are:
DeviantArt:
http://siegfried14.deviantart.com/
BehanceNetwork:
http://www.behance.net/kylegallagher
Portfolio //
Twitter // Behance // Tumblr
My fav is when I can get my kiss on with other dudes.
Posts
After I eat some pizza.
EDIT: Okay so I wrote these up earlier today and they are my goals for November/December. If I finish them early enough I'll make more I guess.
-1 fully rendered character drawing (cleaned up linework, colored, shaded)
-1 completed character drawing with enviornment
-1 "painting" in Photoshop
-1 new avatar
-2 portraits, one b+w and one color
-1 drawing of another forumer's avatar
And now here's some drawings and doodles:
Your traditional stuff is probably the most impressive to me, like the still life and the tape measure. Doing things like this will help you see and improve. Getting some pencils with darker tones will help punch things out some.
Your doodles and digital stuff seem to suffer from the bunch of little sketchy line syndrome that people often have when they're not confident about what they're doing. But you know what you're doing, so now start drawing like you know you can.
INSTAGRAM
For your sketches in your sketchbook...they look like they're mostly out of your head. While that's fine - you'll probably improve a lot faster if you draw more from life. Draw people from a coffee shop, at a bookstore, on a train, whathaveyou. Draw more still life. Draw some buildings.......all from life.
Also, just a suggestion...but it might be better for you if your fully-rendered character is just done in graphite, and not colored. Trying to throw together proper lighting, proper values, and proper color together (especially traditionally, with something like...colored pencils) can be extremely difficult. To be honest, if I was going to do something like that, I'd probably do a graphite thumbnail anyway, just to get the values down before bothering with the color. I just think that based on what you're looking to achieve, it might end up being more helpful if you try it out with just graphite first.
Is there a better word for that?
Well the tape measure and skull drawings completely crap on that statement. You're nuts.
Your sketchbooks are nice. good creative ideas (most important thing my opinion)
still life skull is really good too.
I would really like to know how you did that. It looks great.
Thanks.
It was a bitch, I'll tell you that much.
It was from this project here, where I had to draw out the object, then make the object in Illustrator, and then I had to render it and make a graphical representation of it.
Basically I just scanned in the linework and went over everything with the pen tool. The black and white shapes on the final was just a matter of filling areas with black and deleting other parts.
And this is possibly a sketch of Fug.
The colouring is quite excellent, though-the shading is subtle but evident, and your choice of tones are pretty strong. Keep it up. :^:
A good start is to figure out your lighting setup and tone the palette accordingly.
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/05/toning-palette.html
Time for a very quick and dirty paintover:
I'm going to go with a bit of an exaggerated blue here for toning, (an entirely truthful color reproduction of a night scene light this would largely be very dark greys and blacks, and not very romantic), and adding a very small touch of pale yellow to the moon color/light.
By spreading the blue across the board, everything in the picture becomes visually unified; by adding the lighter white/yellow, it allow you to use light as a means to point out what is visually important to the composition. This may seem like a complicated thing, but the fact is it makes the picture easier to read- which becomes apparent if you look at it shrunk down:
On the original, the composition gets distracted by all the shapes made by the snow and the grass, and the snow and clouds and moon all blend together tonally, making things seem somewhat visually chaotic. In the second, it becomes simplified to the point where all the things that are lit are shown as prominent- the moon, the soft forms of the tops of the hills, the couple (the rim light on the couple should be more pronounced now that I look at it shrunk down, actually, to pop them out more- which shows the value of the exercise of looking at a picture shrunk down.
Twitter
INSTAGRAM
If you say so, I just painted over it because it was in the way, haha.
Twitter
On a side note, on the monitor I was working on everything was a little darker in value, for example the snow was supposed to be like a 20% grey or something to help reflect the night theme.
I have so much trouble getting my monitors to display the same color settings, and even then somebody else's monitor displays differently from my own. Is there a way to take care of this, or a specific setting most people use or something?
What this means is that you can't rely on your 20% grey looking 20% grey everywhere. Luckily, however, the eye doesn't rely on absolute value in a picture to look correct, (ie: "That value is 30% grey when it should be 25%! Waaaah!") What is relies on instead is relative value (ie: "That value is lighter than this other value over here").
What this means is that as long as the values make some kind of rational sense on one monitor that's not obviously totally fucked up, it will generally look ok on most monitors, because the color/value settings on monitors generally effect their entire value/color range, rather than specific spots. A monitor won't arbitrarily make one color more blue without making the rest more blue; it won't change the brightness of one color without changing the brightness of all colors, it won't increase the contrast on some values and not others; this means that no matter what, the relative values and colors always remain the same.
So when it comes to this picture, the monitor is no excuse; 20% grey the snow may or may not be, but it doesn't matter because it's still so bright compared to the sky and the ground, that it appears to be glowing. Conversely, it would be possible to make a picture where the darkest value is 20% grey and still look believable, as long as the relative values were maintained.
Twitter
Again, thanks for the paint-over sample and advice, it just sucks that I won't get to try it out until at least Wednesday. I really enjoy digital work much more now that I'm getting the hang of the software and how to do stuff.
The final product will be up within a week when I work out all the kinks.
EDIT: Forgot the white cover.
I guess it doesn't really have a point.
I would love to make two portfolios, one like this where it's a more conservative and design-friendly approach, and another that exudes more of my personality. Only problem is I really don't have time for it.
And via UC's Professional Practice Program, I can only upload and send one portfolio anyways.
But the design firms I'm applying to include:
-Christie's (NYC)
-Gallagher & Associates (DC)
-Hornall Anderson Design Works (Seattle)
-Kate Keating Associates (San Francisco)
-Landor (Chicago)
-Two Twelve Associates (NYC)
-Vanderbyl Design (San Francisco)
-Minelli (Boston)
And a couple in Cincinnati. There are a surprising number of graphic design jobs in Cincinnati.
On a side note, which of the two final pages do you like? I prefer the first one but a friend suggested that I make it more like cover slightly.
I'm gonna be making comics next month! Hold me to that!
Still needs some tweaking but that last one is about done. I'm essentially just going to make the serif font a sans-serif.