I’ve gotten a few questions about the artwork for our (LifeChurch.tv’s) latest series, “SuperNatural,” most of which relate to how the process works, so I thought I’d start my first blog there…
finished art
CONCEPT:
First, Craig had the title and idea for the series already planned out (an in-your-face look at the spiritual world that surrounds us every day), so concepting was minimal this time around. We were able to go straight to visuals, and it was immediately evident that we wanted to go with a dark, hand-painted, layered feel.
As I started to sketch out the elements, I realized that the wings would be a common theme and, because of them, symmetry would be the way to go…
MATERIALS:
Heh, people are going to laugh at us when they see what we used.
Something that we’re constantly trying to excel in is stewardship, so we’re always looking to do things as inexpensively as possible (but without sacrificing excellence). So when it came time to buy paint supplies, we went all out and bought the best canvases and easels we could find…Oh, no, wait – we painted on $0.57 black construction paper. Oh yeah…construction paper.
The most expensive part was the little acrylic paint set that cost about $20 at Hobby Lobby, but now we’ve got enough paint to last us for a good year or two.
EXECUTION:
This was the fun part. It was basically a day-and-a-half playing with paint. All of the elements were hand-painted individually and scanned so they could be manipulated later in Photoshop.
background texture scans
a few of the individual element scans
Note that the wings were only painted once. Hey, that’s not lazy, that’s efficient (which is also good stewardship, heh heh). Plus, it was an aesthetic decision because, as I mentioned earlier, symmetry was a big deal to me on this one.
One interesting note is that our less-than-top-of-the-line scanner played a big part in the color scheme of the art. The notorious black construction paper came out looking ridiculously violet when scanned, but I really liked the feel. I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of a happy accident (or, more accurately, providence) and to always be on the lookout for ways that the art can evolve itself.
Once compositing started, the piece began to take shape. The background textures were combined to provide a nice base…
…and then the individual elements were laid in. Masking each of them out was a beast, but it paid off (especially later, when we decided to print lobby elements of the angel and demon separately). A lot of different tweaks were applied – duplicating and blurring layers, adding glows, etc – to make the elements feel as though they belonged together.
After that it was just a matter of color tweaking and adding the organic pattern to the sides, along with the title treatment that Stephen Cox had been working on all along, to create the final art.
And that’s it! Exciting, I know, but hopefully someone out there finds it interesting. Total time on this is hard to gauge, because we work on so many projects at one time, but it was completed in the course of about a week-and-half once paint hit construction paper.
Thanks for reading this far! As always, the layered art will be available for free church use at lifechurch.tv/open a couple of weeks after the series ends.
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