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I’ve decided to make my ‘Oatley Essentials’ set available for download. This set consists of 32 brushes – mostly ones that I made.  There are a few that came from other places (friends, free PS resource sites etc…).

BEFORE DOWNLOADING :: VERY IMPORTANT ::

I use tool presets to manage my brushes instead of the brush palette so make sure you place the file (OatleyEssentialBrushes_ToolPresets_Fall2008.tpl) in the ‘Tools’ folder inside of the ‘Presets’ folder inside of your ‘Photoshop’ folder.

Here is a brief overview of the collection:

The first brush in the list is my new favorite brush “Daisuke_Brush_Wild_83.”  This one is named after one of my favorite artists Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi.  You can check his work out here to 1.) be incredibly inspired and 2.) realize why my brush was named after him.

The next brush in the list, “Hard_Mask_100,” is the brush that I use for creating crisp masks when I am doing VisDev work for an art director and I know that there will be a need to make changes quickly and a need to present many different versions of a design.

The next three “Tapr” brushes are the ones that I use for most of my painting.  They are simple and built for optimal speed.

Next are a couple of ‘Sketch Pens’ that I got from my friend, Ryan.  They are great for when you need to draw or sketch in Photoshop.

The ‘Square Angle Brush’ set is for use with the Wacom 6D Art Pen.  These sharp, rectangular brushes change direction as you rotate the stylus.  They are great for getting a cool, stylized look to your paintings.  They will work with a standard stylus, but you will have to change one thing.  If you do not have the 6D Art Pen, you can change the ‘Rotation’ setting to ‘Direction’ inside of the Brush Editor in Photoshop.  This will make the angle of the brush change in relation to the direction of your brush stroke as opposed to having the angle of the brush change in relation to the rotation of the stylus tip.

The ‘Airbrush’ set is self-explanatory.

‘AluKlecks’ is a cool texture brush that came from Goro Fujita.  I have mentioned him on this site a couple of times.  He’s awesome.  Check out his blog.

Octoprimus’ is one of the first brushes I ever made.  It is good for achieving a brushy look.  It is named after my character ‘Octoprimus’ because I built this brush while I was designing him.

Lastly, there are some more ‘Daisuke’ brushes that I made, five more texture brushes that I did not make (I can no longer remember who did) and one brush that is a customized version of one by the company WACOM Technologies.  (I believe that they are giving more of these brushes away for free on their website.)

…and thanks for reading, watching, listening, looking and for all of your comments and encouragement.

Go well.

For those of you that have been wondering why I haven’t been posting much recently, its because I have been diving face-first into a new comic book project that I was hired to develop a couple of months ago.

This past week, I’ve been posting some of my process images and I thought I would condense it all into a single post.  I would love to go into detail about how I arrived at the visual conclusion that you see at the top of this post, but I don’t have the time right now.

All I will say (for now) is that I have been searching for a graphic, stylized approach that can also be taken seriously.  I have been trying to figure out how to blend my animated visual style with my more realistic visual style (see the gallery for examples of both).  I also need to make that resulting style something that I can replicate quickly and consistently since I will most likely be doing the sequential pages of the book as well as the designs and covers.

Here’s a new color study for one of the environments:

I’ve been trying to decide how to create a dreary, utilitarian futuristic city that doesn’t just come across as boring.  This piece pushes the color and decoration of the buildings pretty far compared to some of the other versions of this place…

I don’t love it.  I think the yellow is too far and generally, the composition is pretty boring, but as I’ve said before, knowing what you DON’T want out of a design is just as important as knowing what you DO want.  These types of quick and dirty pieces can really help to crystallize that vision for you very quickly.

The key is to not get hung up noodling all kinds of insignificant little areas in the painting or drawing… …something I struggle with CONSTANTLY.  Keep to the broad strokes with these kinds of pieces.

Below are a few preliminary versions of the character featured at the top of this post:

I included the first finished version of the character, a detail of the face, the line drawing that I did beforehand, a few experimental silhouettes and another more final version that I abandoned because it was a little too silly…