This is an update to a project I'm working on...

I'm finished the Vigilants of Astragoth picture and in the end I'm pretty happy with the how its turned out. As is my brother, who will be pressing a vinyl record with the image I created for the cover. It will be a cacophony of madness. Here are some other little tidbits about the project.

If you take a gander at the above image, you will spy a little into the process. I've been inspired by a lot of illustrators who have been photobashing their pictures. This means that I will be mixing 3D renders, photos, and digital painting together to get the final result. In my opinion, it's closer to collage than digital painting; once you go digital the lines all begin to blur.

To do the photobashing, I began the whole process in black and white. That way I only had to worry about creating a sense of realism with tonality and then bring the colour back afterwards. I rendered the drums and the character in 3Ds Max. I then went across the street from my apartment and took some pictures of the demolition next door. I used those pictures at the bottom of the illustration to suggest homes are being ripped apart by the growing storm.

I also took this picture of our neighborhood..

As for the storm, I decided to have some dramatic clouds with an eye of Sauron kind of demon presence in the background. I remembered a scene from Howard the Duck that was pretty much perfect. If you haven't seen that movie you should watch it sometime soon. It's not very good. But you should watch it. I found it on YouTube and took a screen grab with the Windows snipping tool.

So "borrowing" images from the internet isn't the postmodern heaven its cracked up to be. I couldn't use the image because it was too small, thus pixelated. Just look at how compressed that image is! I had to repaint pretty much the whole thing. Which wasn't the end of world for myself because I was beginning to feel weird about painting so little.

Bump Fugget, The evil eye of Astragoth, Air Jordan 6's (the ones in red and black.)

I ended up painting a lot of the details in Bump Fugget's body in general, including his Air Jordan 6s (the ones in red and black.) Those fucking shoes.

Like I said before I also repainted the storm and the eye that goes with it. The eye went through three variations. One was a fiery blaze but it looked TOO MUCH like the eye of Sauron. This isn't fan art. The second variation isn't worth mentioning and this last one was based on a reptile eye.

Since I'm photobashing most of this illustration the painter in me feels like I'm cheating. But after some soul searching I've come to the conclusion that the act of painting isn't what's important at all. If the execution feels seamless that's whats really important at the end of the day. Does it feel like it has that Magic!

Finally for the logo I did a tutorial by Craig at Spoon Graphics of "How To Create an 80's Style Chrome Logo Text Effect in Photoshop" which you can see here. The font treatment makes the whole thing.

I wonder though, Is the final piece working? I think there is a lot of room for improvement.

I want to know: does the final image have a little bit of that gawd damn magic?