Tim makes art

The ramblings of an illustrator and game developer

Category: Illustration

  • A doxie morning

    A doxie morning

    I’m getting more into traditional art now that I’m working on a game about museums, so I felt compelled to do a still life of my view this morning. Laying in bed with my dogs, home alone, I was struck by the beautiful lighting and how it bounced across the room. I’m a massive lighting nerd when it comes to realtime graphics, so I can appreciate some excellent global illumination like this, but instead of putting my render engine to work to recreate it, I decided to paint it.

    It reminds me of one of my favorite paintings and certainly my favorite still life that I did, which is this one, of the backdoor in my parental home:

    Stool life
  • A fistful of flowers

    A fistful of flowers

    Finally found some time to draw! I was going to do a more realistic portrait, but when I sketched out the silhouette for this one I kinda liked the grungy impressionistic vibe, so I went with it.

  • Keep driving

    Keep driving

    I’ve been thinking about my drawing style again lately.

    I’ve had a fairly recognizable black and white ligne-claire style for a long time, and it’s still my go-to style when I sketch something out quickly. But for the longest time I wanted to get good at color. Dimme McWood taught me a lot about silhouettes and color harmonies, and the past few years I’ve been experimenting with it a lot more as you may have seen.

    I think it goes hand in hand with my gamedev skills improving, to where I can simulate the real world a lot more accurately. And so I’ve been doing that in my 2D work as well, getting more detailed and working with light and shadow a lot more. But that style, it doesn’t really feel like me yet. In particular, sometimes it looks like a photo at a glance. So I’m experimenting with ways to bring these two things back together, and in doing so, finding a sort of recognizable cohesion that binds my work together again.

    Today I feel like I got a step closer to that while working on this image. I started with color shapes, added detailed lighting but avoided blending it too much, kept the face details abstract, and at the very end added the outlines, and I like this a lot more than what I’ve been making lately. So I’m going to keep ‘driving down this road’!

  • Damsel in the dark

    Damsel in the dark

    I should take a week off more often I think, I’m well in the mood to draw again! I wanted to do a portrait painting exercise for capturing a likeness and rendering it realistically, without losing myself in too much blending and detail work. So I only used my default brush that I otherwise use for linework.

  • A quick sip

    A quick sip

    Dit weekend was ik in @paradisoadam voor @son.mieux. Eerste show weer sinds Het Grote Gedoe, en het was euforisch. Mensen gingen los, Camiel brak z’n voet, Tim Hofman stond erbij en keek ernaar, het was een hele happening. Maar ook Amsterdam lag er prachtig bij op deze lenteavond, en het herinnerde me weer aan alle mooie dingen die we de afgelopen jaren niet of nauwelijks hebben mogen beleven. Het was een lange droogte, hoog tijd om weer eens een slokje te nemen.

    Deze metafoor met dank aan Maud, die ergens halverwege de avond afdaalde in de gekleurde mist die op het podium hing om een drankje te pakken. De belichting was precies fantastisch, en dat zijn het soort momenten dat ik denk “tering dit zou een toffe illustratie zijn”. Helaas had ik geen camera paraat, dus heb ik getracht het vanuit geheugen te reproduceren.

  • Evening encounter

    Evening encounter

    “She appeared out of nowhere.

    Out of the corner of my eye I saw the light of the setting sun catch the golden adornments on her evening gown. When I looked up, she paused and looked back at me from across the room. For a moment we remained motionless; only her curls swayed softly in the breeze that blew through the marble arches we stood under.

    Where did she come from? What was she doing here this late?

    These questions remained unanswered, as with a graceful flutter she disappeared back into the shadows. The faint patter of her bare feet on the granite floor echoed away into the unseen.

    I don’t think I ever considered finding out where she went; it felt like she had a divine purpose, and I was merely a silent observer. I returned to what I was doing: mopping the floor.”

    Some #sundaydrawing. In a way she did appear out of nowhere when I started with a blank canvas. As did this little accompanying story I wrote. I’m not sure why, I guess it felt wrong posting this without a good caption to go along with it ?

  • The Wide Open

    The Wide Open

    Honestly, for me the best part of being my own boss isn’t the financial independence, or that I get to choose which projects I work on, it’s the fact that I get to take my dogs on a midday walk. When I first started working from home, that felt like such freedom. There are great nature preserves around here, and on a day like today, nothing beats that.

  • One year hence

    One year hence

    I watched The Green Knight last night, and I still wanted to properly try out my new Ghibli foliage brush set, so 1 + 1 = this.

  • Off-Stage is back on stage

    Off-Stage is back on stage

    Some of you may remember my webcomic about music and life in Amsterdam, Off-Stage. I worked on it during the twilight years of the traditional webcomics model, where you have a website and post pages each week and maybe earn something from merch and book sales (I never got to that point). It didn’t feel like the right format for that story anymore, but I wasn’t sure what was.

    Fast-forward a few years, and we’re in a new era. Comics exist on social media now, and in a way that makes sense for our mobile-first world. Pages get chopped up into panels that fit the portrait-orientation screen of a smartphone. Platforms like Tapas and Webtoons are bringing a whole new generation of comics to readers.

    So this week I re-launched Off-Stage on Webtoons! It’s a full remaster at a higher, crisper resolution, optimized for a vertical scroll.

    I was not looking forward to having to chop up all the existing pages, but I must say the process was fairly quick, and it is opening up so many possiblities to write more naturally, now that the length of an update doesn’t matter anymore. Once I get to the point where I can start making new material, I’m sure that will feel great. For now I’m busy reworking all the existing pages and posting them week by week.

    Head on over to Webtoons and subscribe to stay informed!

  • Six fanarts

    Six fanarts

    I put the question out on my Instagram which characters I should draw for the #sixfanarts challenge, and here’s the result!

    It was a lot of fun to work on these, and I still have some good suggestions laying around, so I might do another one. Got more suggestions? Drop ’em in the comments!

  • My favorite Yoast illustrations

    My favorite Yoast illustrations

    When I started working at Yoast, making new illustrations for each blog post was still a thing. We’ve scaled that back now to spend more time on the products, but in those first few years Erwin and me drew quite a few of them. Now that we’re all quarantined working from home, we decided to let everyone pick out one to print and hang on their home office wall. Looking back through the archive, I came across a lot of good ones again that I had forgotten about.

    So these are, in no particular order, my favorites from the 150+ ones I drew.

    10 steps to writing better content
    Dealing with 404 errors
    Contributing to WordPress core
    Crafting great titles
    Ecommerce filters
    Engagement
    Findable content
    How Google parses JS
    Protect your site with HTTPS and SSL
    Yoast SEO importer and exporter
    Keyword research
    Planning your content
    Managed WordPress hosting
    Mobile design
    Setting up a permalink structure
    Preparing your blogpost
    Reduce HTTP requests
    Related posts
    Tips for small businesses
    Site structure mistakes
    10% discount for Star Wars Day
    XML sitemaps
    How to Yoast
  • A foggy beach

    A foggy beach

    Figured I’d try my hand at a #drawthisinyourstylechallenge, this one set out by the wonderful @izzyburtonart. I tweaked it to look like my wife and our dog, set against the cliffs of Scotland, which we visited last year. Indeed, not a lot of things can beat a foggy beach.

    Check out Izzy’s original here

  • Never out of style

    Never out of style

    Portrait of eternal style icon Claire Luxton.

  • Alina

    Alina

    Picked up the iPad again to do some sketching. I might color this one later. I like doing brightly colored drawings, but the elegant simplicity of a sketch often convinces me to stop there.

  • Toon Me

    Toon Me

    About time I jumped onto this bandwagon!

  • Lending a hand

    Lending a hand

    One of my favorite commisions from this past year was for a charity. They wanted a vision board in their office to remind themselves of their mission. I got to go wild on a great image collage drawing things I don’t normally draw, which later got overlaid with their mission statement and goals.

  • Inktober 2019

    I did a light version of Inktober this year – I was too busy in october to participate, so I saved the prompt list and spent some days in November drawing my favorites from that list. That resulted in these illustrations:

  • 2018 recap

    2018 has been a funny one. Even though it’s technically been a quiet year for Hedgefield lots has happened still.

    Intern

    For starters, I had my first intern! Kim Leunen from the HKU asked if she could intern with me for a few months, so every week we sat down and spent the day making games.

    It was really refreshing to work with someone from the game world again. And like me, Kim started from illustration and now wanted to tell interactive stories, so our design vision was very similar.

    We wrote a new concept from the ashes of Black Feather Forest, and built a prototype for her girlscout forest adventure game (a recurring theme in my career by now). I look forward to seeing what she creates.

    Read the rest »

  • Inktober 2018 selection

    I don’t usually get around to doing inktober, but this year I was doing a lot with my iPad Pro, so it was easier to roll into it. What helped me especially was not to try and do the prompts list, but just draw whatever was on my mind that day. If there is an emotion behind it, I find it’s easier to start drawing.

  • Hey Frank, isn’t that your horse?

    Hey Frank, isn’t that your horse?

    I’m enjoying Godless on Netflix a lot so far. Though as much as they market it as “it’s a western town full of women!”, it’s the small scenes with Jeff Daniels that steal the show. Like this one.

  • Klement backgrounds

    I was looking at these excellent Steven Universe backgrounds when I remembered a project I was working on a few years ago that I did some background sketches for. They show a school campus with Bauhaus and Fin De Ciecle influences in its architecture.

    There’s something really cool about designing a location for games or animation. It’s different from static shots, you have to think about camera movement and making sure all the interactive things are visible at a good angle. My favorite thing is to account for the camera perspective changing when it pans around, so it seems a little more 3D than it is.

    loc_atletiekveldloc_halloc_kantineloc_slaapgangloc_slaapkamer

  • With habits like yours…

    With habits like yours…

    Poirot and Bouc catching up, from Murder On The Orient Express.

    Had to pause this movie a few times to snap drawing reference, the colors and compositions are fantastic.

    This is the first digital painting I completed in Procreate for iPad. I miss some of the finer control of a Wacom + Photoshop, but it’s definitely powerful and fun.

  • Swan Market sketches

    Swan Market sketches

    I was at the Swan Market in Utrecht last weekend, and while my girlfriend was busy selling her drawings, I drew some attendees on my iPad.

  • New avatar

    New avatar

    I felt it was time to update my branding. My current avatar doesn’t really do justice to my hair situation anymore!

    The base for the first avatar came from a daily comic I drew in 2010. I then used it to advertise my font, and soon it became my business card and website header when I went freelance. I updated it once in 2014 to add the beard. Since then I never really looked at it again. I did draw a new version of myself in my daily comics from 2015, but it wasn’t until 2018 that I felt the need to update my official avatar too.

    A tradition that has snuck into these avatars is that each new version has the shirt I most like to wear at that time. This year was a bit of a challenge because it’s not as colorful as previous years, but I think the greyish-blue does contrast nicely with the orange.

    avatars

  • Suit-of-armor up!

    Suit-of-armor up!

    One of my recent post illustrations for Yoast. The theme was ‘protecting your site with HTTPS / SSL’. You can see I had Horizon Zero Dawn on the brain when I drew this.