Dusty Ghost Blog

Take a look at this:

Click image to View

This is my old desk at home and as you can see I had no room at all for my tablet! I had to prop it on the edge of the desk and rest it on my knees and was constantly fighting with a wall! It was sooooo frustrating!

Well, my mother in law moved out a few weeks about and I got one half of her old room for my new workspace!! cool!!

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I got this new desk from an auction for just £20! It was in perfect condition, and it MASSIVE!! Those are two small book selves you see on the left side there!

First shelf has all my art reference books on, the second shelf up has my sketch books and pencil cases, all within arms reach.

I have room to keep my tablet plugged in at all times, 2 screens now, and I still have some space to draw in! Phew!

The book open on my desk is Digital Painting Techniques from Focal Press. Highly recommended!

So I decided that I wanted to get back to basics.

This is an anatomy study I did in Photoshop. There is also a GIF to show the progress I went through. Total creation time, about 5 hours 30 mins.

However I lost his head at one point and forgot to paint in back in. LOL! :p

Also had to use the liquefy tool to get the proportions right, I kinda dropped the ball on that at the start. But it was easy to fix. And you learn from your mistakes.

Click to View

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Believe it or not, the hardest bit was getting the veins on the arm to look natural!

Just for fun, and the fact I wanted to practice with Adobe Illustrator a bit, I created this website design.

I created all the images used on the site. I didn’t take the picture of the workman, but I did edit it to fit into the square tile theme of the site.

Please note this for a fictional company I made up!

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Hi all! Sorry for the delay since my last post. As you could see from my last post I’ve had a fair bit to deal with and have taken a longish break from any hobbies, business, ventures and such.

However, recently I have started to get the busy momentum going again!

So, what have I been up to?….. man…. where to start….

Although I said I was taking a break, I still seem to have found time to get into all sorts of mini projects along the way.

Just posted a new set of images in the Photo Editing section. A colleague of mine at work had an old family photo, and for what ever reason, he wanted me to remove one of the people from it and have me re-print it for him.

So that’s what I did:

Before (Click to View)

After (Click to View)

Ok, so this was a little creepy, removing someone from history…. lets just hope I haven’t stopped someone from being born now! :S But, this was also a great test of my skills, having to reconstruct things from the background where the man used to be. My colleague is happy with it though, so I guess I am too.

One thing that I am badly missing at the moment is ZBrush! I still have not had a chance to mess with it, even though we are now on V3.5R3!

But, with God’s blessing, I hope that will change very soon.

I have a couple of other projects I am working on at the moment too. Including:
A new site to help players of Pen and Paper Table Top Role Playing Games…. more on that later!
A small 3D printed money making idea with a friend of mine…. more on that later!
A 3D printing job for a space ship model…more on that later!
A possible 3D job on a music video…. more on that later… if it happens…;)

Not to mention the fact that I am still trying to fit all of this around 1 full time job, 1 part time job, and a VERY active family life! LOL!

So as you can see, I am still VERY busy! Hopefully some order will come to my life and I can get back on track with my various ideas and schemes!

Laters for now,

Mark

I’ve always found it amazing what can be done to images these days. I’ve seen some seriously inspiring adverts on billboards and magazines around the world. The internet is full of clever deceptive images edited in Photoshop and other such programs.

I thought it would be cool to learn how this is all done.  I’ve used Photoshop to create images for websites and to edit my 3D works in post production. But I never knew just how much fun it is to edit photo’s and make them into a new reality!

Ok, I’ve created a new page to show off my progress in learning this wonderful process, you can visit it here.

There are only a couple of images there ATM, but I plan on adding more later.

The unfortunate thing at the moment, is that I don’t have a decent camera, so all the images I am taking on the one I have are JPG format. That, and the problem of auto focus and bad lighting mean that I may have to find stock photo’s to edit for professional looking edits. But at least I can practice for now.

A great cheap resource for high quality stock photos is www.fotolia.com They offer relatively cheap stock photos that you can download and use for almost any purpose.

Keep coming back as I plan on doing a lot more of this fun!

A looooooong time ago, in a galaxy far far away….. well… actually it was a long time ago, but not too far from where I live….

So I’m working on a REALLY cool project for my friend Ben. He’s designed his own Star Trek  ship …. a long time ago ….(he REALLY loves Star Trek BTW!) and we both thought it would be cool to make a 3D model of it. Actually Ben had made it in clay once…. but it melted…. at least that’s how it looks.

Anyway, so I started working on the ship in Blender and it’s going well so far (more pictures to come on this later), and then I discovered…. SHAPEWAYS.COM!!!!

I kid you not this is the single most exciting thing I’ve encountered since ZBrush and Blender!!!

Imagine not just creating your models, but actually having a plastic version of them sat on your desk!!

Now I know 3D printing has been around forever, but it’s never been cheap! Well, Shapeways.com seems to be working hard to bring the costs down as much as possible for its customers.

So we want to make Ben’s 3D ship become a real thing you can hold by actually 3D printing it into a plastic 3D model!! Cool!

We had to make a few tests first, so I uploaded my DG Mascot model (the one you see in the background of this site) and requested a print to see how detailed it is.

Check this out:

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How cool is that!! As you can see the detailing is actually VERY good! So good you can still see some of the edges on the polygons, though that’s mostly down to me rushing the model for the 3D print and is something I will avoid in future.

So we learnt a few lessons and are really happy with the print.

BTW, this model is 6cm high and hollow (hollowing out drops the price dramatically BTW). It cost just under $27, which exchanged to around £15 for me in the UK. Cool!

So, I now have Dusty sat on my desk, looking at me! Bless!

It’s been a looooooong time since I had a chance to post anything!

So here is my last peace of work. I decided my skills in 2D painting are lacking again, so I needed to have a go at a portrait.

So here he is, Mr Jack Nicholson!…. ok so I know there’s some improvement needed…. but it’s not bad for me! LOL

I totally forgot to post this when it happend!!

On 6th June 09, a number of the congregation of Narbourough Congregational Church went to Bristal to perform a sponsored Abseil for the charity CAP (Christians Against Poverty).

Weather forecasts told us that we would have torrential rains all day, and this had a number of us worried that the event would be called off.

Well we all prayed, and God blessed us with small rains in the morning and clear skies for the rest of the day!!

That was wonderful for us as we from Narborough Congregational Church managed to raise over £600 for CAP!!

Sarah, myself, Andy and Elaine all made the climb down.

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It should be noted here that all climbers showed great bravery on the day, and we saw a wide range of people, from all backgrounds and all ages! We saw many young, and some old, some able, and some not so able. Yet all of them made it from top to bottom!

Congratulations to everyone involved and thanks to the people from CAP for your great works.

And just to show off, here is the cliff we climbed down, it was higher than this looks!

Yup that’s right! Finally after all this time, we have a new company mascot!

Dusty Ghost himself!

As you can see, he’s just a cute little ghost who’ll be popping up all over the Dusty Ghost website, this Blog, any invoices and contracts we send out, and of course any promotional material we may be sending out later!

Again, I must say thanks to Craig Thomson (cst-art.com) for the initial idea and concept.

In case you’re wondering, I made him in ZBrush using a toon material.

Expect to see a lot more of this little fella!

Well! It’s certainly been hectic here recently!!

I’m slowly catching up with the website work I have on my list, woo hoo!

Learning a new work flow using Adobe CS4 has been really fun and now I’m confident that producing websites is going to be a ton faster and be all the better for it!

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I’m still pulling together areas for the Dustyghost.com website right now, including portfolio of websites, graphics, 3D and other bits and bobs.

I have a rather unique way I want to do this, and although it’s going to involve allot of work, it’ll be worth it if I can pull it off.

The DustyGhost.com website will, with a little bit of elbow grease, be the flagship for all the websites I have created so far!

For the first time all my different hobbies and skill sets will come together and will hopefully, finally, be worth all the frantic learning, investment and practising in both website design, 3D rendering, digital art and animation!

The best thing is others who are involved in getting DustyGhost.com off the ground are contributing too!

When the site goes live, more details about the creation process will be revealed, and just who did what bits.

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In the mean time I’ve eased back a bit from all the work I’ve been putting in, to take some much deserved time to go back to one of the things I love most… ART!!

Or, more specifically, the right way to create art!

I started Sketching a long time ago, about 9 years, and have never really taken the time over that near decade to learn how to do it properly! I’m not bad at drawing, but I’m by no means a pro!

I really used to get depressed about what I had sketched and then give up for days on end. Now, for the first time ever, I seem to say, “OK how can I make it better!?” then I draw some more and go “Look! I learnt something new!!”

I’m getting addicted to this as I seem to be improving in just this one short week of trying to re-learn to draw again! It’s still amateur stuff to be honest (I’m REALLY rusty!), but it’s getting better, FAST!!

For the first time EVER I realise that if you don’t give a crap about how bad it looks, nor how others will look at it, you can achieve sooooo much!!! It’s all about attitude and confidence when learning, I guess!

It’s addictive when you’re like this, I never knew that before. I always wanted to sketch because I thought it would be cool to be able to. Now I just love doing it for the love of it! I actually feel real enjoyment, even on the really rough stuff!

And best of all, learning to sketch again seems to be improving my digital work! It’s odd but developing a good sketching technique can be passed right through to what I do in Corel Painter when sketching there! Cool!

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So, all in all the Balance is coming back into my life!

And I’m really happy and excited at the same time!

Yours,

Dusty