Hey folks,

Just over a year ago now, a lovely woman by the name of Grace, was kind enough to give me a wonderful little gift.  She set me up with a subscription to the sci-fi / fantasy digital art magazine Imagine FX.

Now aside from being a spectacular looking magazine, ImagineFX is also an incredible resource tool for anyone who wants to know more about the how-to aspect of digital art.  And ever since I received my first issue I've been wanting to really dig in and to try my hand at digital painting.

Unfortunately I've always been too busy, tired, or just plain intimidated to give it a go.  Still, I knew that eventually I'd have to suck it up and give it a shot.

Fast forward about 12 months to November of last year.  I had been doing the colorist thing over at Evil Inc for about nine or ten months, and in that time I felt Brad and I had developed a pretty solid working relationship.  On top of which I had finally reached a point where I felt that my work was really becoming quite solid, and at long last I figured the time was right to try and expand my skill set.

So one day I sent an e-mail off to Brad with an idea.  I told him that if he'd be willing to do up a few rough sketches of some of his characters, and in turn trust me enough to really go to town on them, I'd kinda like to try my hand at painting them.  After which, if he liked what he saw, we could figure out some sort of way to maybe incorporate the paintings into the Evil Inc empire.

Now this may not seem like a big deal, simply e-mailing someone with an idea, but for me I saw it as a big step between Brad and I as collaborators.  You see this would mark the first time that I presented an idea to him regarding his work since I first sent him the offer to colour his work, and I wasn't 100% sure how it would be received.

Thankfully the response I got was enthusiastic to say the least.  I think it was the next day that Brad sent me off three sketches that he'd whipped up, along a few ideas as to where we could possibly go with this should it work out.

And so, after a couple months of me spending a few minutes here and there trying to teach myself the ins and out of digital painting, I present you with this...

 Miss Match from sketch to paint.

As you can see I tried to stay as faithful to the original sketch as possible, but I did make a couple of small changes.  Granted there are still a few touch-ups I need to do here and there, but basically it's done. And despite being my own worst critic, I find myself being pretty damn pleased with my first attempt.

I'm kinda hoping that now that I sorta know what I'm doing, and no longer have to spend hours playing around with various brush setting instead of using that time to actually paint something, that I'll be able to do more of these in a much shorter period of time.  As well, I'll do what I can to give y'all sneak peeks at the various "work in progress" stages of future projects.

Alrighty, that it for me folks. Time to get my ass to bed!

Later,

-Ed