Photoshop is a beast

http://www.justincoombsart.com/home/comic.html

this file has about 300 or so layers. Yet it is at a very low resolution (675 x 900). When I run it on my macbook pro is feels like a 10 year old computer. It is amazing how these files can make a brand-new computer bog down like it is crying. It is positively frustrating waiting for everything. There are ways to work around huge files- one way is to do it in pieces. So you have a 100 layer piece to the pie- and you flatten- and convert it to a .jpg- then you import that image and work on another piece of the pie (because a flattened .jpg file consumes very little, instead of the 100-later beast it is representing). But you eventually have to slice it, compile it, and animate the gifs- these all have to be done at full-res with all layers activated. It is truly frustrating waiting 5-10 minutes every save-state. perhaps it is time to upgrade to 2gb of memory?

anyways, with frustrations aside I am happy with the final product, and these will hopefully all be compiled- and activated/uploaded within the next month and ill have a new justincoombsart.com version 3. YAY!

Doing art while leaving a country..

it doesn't work very well- but I haven't been doing nothing.

Justin Coombs Art continues to progress, I am super-excited once this thing launches, and is all put together, but it is a beast, so I will continue to trudge on it. I have about 2 more full- design pages to do, and then I should be good to go- WOOT,

Another last-step will be ensuring the pages match color- across the whole website- I want the lighting to be similar, etc.

and heres is a random dude running with a gun as well...

POTTER 5

just wanted to get this up before I go out.

gonna see harry potter 5.
woot

im trying to wind down justincoombsart.com as well.

smoi blavin!

yay a new page of the 5- things are starting to heat up- snerp!

they are fun to do when I can sit down and do em. It is a balance between everything and drawing. Drawing is what I want to do, so naturally it should take up a lot of my time- so I am always trying to draw more and more. But it works sometimes, and doesn't... its a struggle.

Another 5

Woot,

Letting go of being super tight is always great. Sometimes it can be destructive, but I think that in this situation It turned for the best.

I threw together a little cartoon (one second worth...) for a little side-project as well. super lame, but still something different to do. imagine telling avant-garde artists to animate something useful.

THE NEVER ENDING STORY


well not much has been happening. I was gone all last weekend, and kind of got sidetracked these last two days with random happenings related to moving back to America.

hopefully tomorrow night will be productive. At this point I am hoping to get one or two more Large-format ink posters done, Another couple pages of the 5 and hopefully another piece of the never-ending story that is justincoombsart.com

GO NOW

http://www.justincoombsart.com/home/design.html

go to it and love thy design!

Must... Finish... Webpage!

here is 25 hours of design work.

ew.

but it is badass.

basically I get off of work, check my blogs,websites,play nintendo DS for an hour. Munch on food for 30 min and clean a little, jog for an hour, and eat dinner. then I work on art for 2-3 hours.

It is hard when you spend your time doing it- but your day-job gets in the way. Although I have 6 days off coming up, perhaps I can use em to get some seirous work done.

I still need ot get another wall-sized comic picture done. Work on The 5, and also do concept work for a new comic my brother and I are working on. All while still getting Justin Coombs Art up. That is my life right now- but this only happens about 3-4 nights a week. The rest kind of gets lost between other stuff.

so 12-15 hours of work on art a week. not enough. not enough.

*also just added the sketch work for this new comic. just a cool dude.

SNERF

I AM 25 TODAY!

yeesh.

well here is the finished d-day invasion poster/drawing. Very cool indeed- the thing looks great in real life- so to give it justice I composed a big picture from 3 images. It isn't as clean as the real thing- but darn close.

Justincoombsart.com is becoming a pet project. it is taking a good bit of work- but I love doing photoshop work. It feels good to do some graphic design.

Well these two pieces both took me 2 weeks. Thats isnt enough. I need to simply work more than I have been. WERD.

Art vs. College art

So yeah.

Well what is this disparity between commercial viability of artwork and academic interest.

Colleges like wierd, obtuse, bizarre, and avante garde.

People like pretty, fun, cool, amazing etc.

Finding an overlap is the ideal- but the work I look at on university websites would indicate they prefer the more avante than the art for the masses.

So if I want to go to school at some point I am going to have to make avante-garde artwork. This involves putting more thought into ideas and trying to say something on a topic. And it isnt necessarily that I can use this ink-style to cater to that objective. I would be bending my style to cater my message- and hopefully not vise versa. But either way I feel that comic-style art isnt that great for college applications.

Sadly.

so I will prolly end up having to make some artwork that is less-mass appeal.

ugh.

well still cranking a little on this piece. It has been one of those weeks that not as much as id like gets done. But here is the D-day. I should be finished with this thing by sunday and I think I will start a WW1 poster next in similar fashion. Werd.

WAR!

Well I am liking how this piece is going so far. The subject material is all pretty familiar so I am moving on this thing pretty good. I have really only been inking it two hours and it is already about half done or so. (then again that is how ti always starts.. prolly 1/4 done)

But it is a cool piece so I am definitely gonna work on it as much as possible. for refreshment sake:

The 5: currently on pause until i finish this piece.
Website: much the same, altho I do peep in on it a little more
Journals: Started a way cool on- will have pics soon
Paintings: nonexistent- the big problem right now. I am going to start a painting a day tonight if I can. 30 min quick paintings. werd.

the biggest difference between my work now, and my work a year or so ago is that I can actually sit down and feel confident enough to draw completed figures. At least in clothing (clothing allows a larger degree of error in form-while still looking believable... nude forms are a much greater challenge).

You can see my underlying pencils- with inks on top. The pencils are loose and crazy while the inks simply make the general form on top of these. I build the form with various loose sketches in a sketchbook. Then after I have 8 or so poses I like (and after viewing the Saving Private Ryan omaha beach landing on youtube 8 times) I put the paper down and make some big lines with the ruler and by hand. These are for perspective. Then I grab the figures and do big oens and small oens to reate depth and throw my guys on the page. Then using disposable pens by Copic, I ink over the pencils. This is all directly on the same sheet (whereas with most comics I use a light-box to 'trace' my pencils with ink).

The process is very hands-on and a little more messy than usual- but the 'history' and framework of how the drawing came to be is all still visible in the final work. Thats why I don't wanna sell the originals for THAT cheap, altho these days I cant justify asking for more than 50$ considering who I am up against. So im prolly not going to be able to let any of these big inks go for a sellable price... ah well thats why i work.

hmmmm

well as was suspected last night I have started another big-size comic style piece. This one is going right along with my recent WW2 obsession.

I love war- because it is interesting, violent, cool, explosive, dramatic, and comic-booky.I am also reading a history of post world-war 2 Europe so it is already in my mind. So yes, I am starting a hopeful war-series beginning with the D-Day invasion from a personal perspective. Way coolness.

as you can see it is still VERY prelim.... but more to come.

I also threw in a few hours on Justin Coombs Art.

website continues

well I am still wprking on the webpage and slowly getting a bit done on The 5.

I have slown downa good deal with my drawing-while I am doing this webpage. Its alright for a little but I am trying to keep up with The 5. My expectations were too high for hoping for a couple pages a week. Inking takes so long- as does prep-work and drawing. But that is the nature of the whole thing I suppose.

I get good feedback when I do post it on forums ro what not- so I will continue to work. But There is this bug that is telling me to get back into paitnitng and the larger-format inking pieces. One idea i had was a series showing combat in different time periods but similar compositions.

kinda cool.

go to my new site.

http://www.justincoombsart.com/home/paintings.html

it is cool (a few of the buttons dont work yet...)

so this is the culminatino of 20 or so solid hours of photoshopping goodness. The file itself at full res is about a gigabyte. Basically the process it simple. Come up with an idea for an item to put in. Make the shape. Give the shape depth. Give the shape texture (using google image and mayangtextures.com) then rotate it. add highlights with the airbrush.

repeat for every item.

its fun- and i get quicker at it every time. There are also some pretty advanced things to know- in regards to where each layer needs to go. Sometimes you need to fool photoshop into thinking that some things are below others.

This means that if you want to go back and change everything it is really hard. but yeah- the effect is nice.

The 5

Inking is an interesting art from. You basically draw over your old drawing and make it into somehitng in itself. Almost like applying a filter effect in photoshop...

One of the interesting aspects of inking is in line quality. A really good inker will have very parallel lines. You will also have a sense of depth as defined by the line width and amount of black.

It is a balancing act and I am still only beggining to figure it out.

Cool effects in photoshop

completely un-user friendly webpage. It will be next to impossible to upgrade content... but the look is cool and I think a website should impress. This is going to be one of the links off of the main page. So I will throw the art in little thumbnails on there- and youll press the buttons. The art that is on top of the cage has to cast a shadow onto the floor below- and that process is a bitch. I have about 100 layers in this PSD file, and that is definetaly going up. But it is really just a process of make a shape- add a few layer effects, and decide where in pseudo 3d- space it would go.

this process if done in 3d would be infinetaly easier... but whatever im not a 3d artist.

Phew- out of the rut, at least for a night.

Life is ups and downs. I got lucky today. I penciled another page of the 5 and it turned out great.

NOTE TO ARTISTS! the biggest reason this page turned out well- was the wall-sized mirror I have in my drawing room. Simple and priceless- having the ability to pose. It helps so much.

The page is far from perfect though- the guy looks like hes catching- not throwing (i shouldve extended his finger to straight) and the foreground weeds r just annoying.

Jordan grabbed coombscreative.com- so HAHA to you fucking URL squatters. Now that we have that -we are going to start work on the html.

so another website... damn I knew i might use my graphic design degree at least once in my life... but not twice!

NEW WEBPAGE!

http://www.justincoombsart.com/home/sneef.html

go to that site and you can check out the brand new launch page for Justincombsart version 3.0

YAY!!!!!
well I will be working on uploading the content during this week and hopefully have some goodness up really soon.

in the meantime I have hit a stump. This is a common occruance when I do somehting that impresses even me (the last page of The 5 was really good... and now I am afradi to continue)

there is always this hesitance- and damnit im gonna get over it and draw the fucking page tonight- good or bad.

werd.