Zack Castro art.

Liquid graphite sketches.

2012-02-06T02:36:00.000+11:00

I've been looking for Liquid Graphite for ages, and the nice man Steven from Derivan was able to show me where to get some, here are the results of some sketches I did whilst at work.

line art practice.

2011-10-16T20:41:00.002+11:00

Billy Demon Slayer.

2011-10-13T21:05:00.000+11:00

My friend and comic artist Hayden asked me to do a pin up for his comic Billy Demon Slayer. Here are the results.

Remember to click on the image to see the full version. :)

Spent a while on this one.

2011-09-06T19:35:00.000+10:00

Inspired by Yoji Shinkawa

2011-08-29T00:00:00.000+10:00

2011-07-29T19:30:00.000+10:00

Natural Media.

2011-07-28T23:38:00.002+10:00

2011-07-17T15:27:00.000+10:00

More painting.

2011-07-10T19:15:00.002+10:00

speed paint.

2011-07-09T21:24:00.002+10:00

Line art colour.

2011-07-09T14:43:00.000+10:00

Decided to try colouring one of my sketches, pleased with the results.

2011-07-03T20:29:00.001+10:00

2011-06-29T19:08:00.000+10:00

Decided to have a go at a more traditional painting style.

2011-06-27T01:39:00.000+10:00

Dragon.

2011-06-20T22:19:00.000+10:00

Witcher 2 competition on Kotaku.

2011-06-03T02:09:00.002+10:00

Image I painted for The Witcher 2 competition. The theme was The Witcher 2 and Barack Obama combigned. I decided it would be amusing (and awesome) to see Geralt of Rivea and Barack of the USA fighting side by side.

Good luck to those who entered.

Please note that Geralt and The Witcher Is property of CD project red. No copy right infringement intended, just entering a competition.

Different technique practice.

2011-05-28T15:06:00.000+10:00

Because secretly we all want a giant hermit crab as a pet.

2011-05-27T20:08:00.000+10:00

Some digital paintings.

2011-05-15T23:26:00.000+10:00

Random Sketches from my imagination

2011-03-28T01:56:00.000+11:00

Sinthetic sketches.

2011-03-28T01:38:00.000+11:00

March Conservatory Sketches.

2011-03-28T01:36:00.001+11:00

Werewolf

2011-03-20T16:23:00.000+11:00

Painted for my good friend Clifty's birthday. Happy birthday dude. Wips below main image.

Sin city sketches.

2011-03-20T16:19:00.001+11:00

Went to Abode's Sin City. Did some speed sketching. :)

The Conservatory sketches.

2011-02-28T01:51:00.001+11:00

Last Friday I went to the Conservatory to sketch wonderful people in wonderful steampunk outfits.
Here are the results.

Finished the wip.

2011-02-20T02:00:00.000+11:00

Wip.

2011-02-19T22:22:00.000+11:00

Practicing new techniques I learned from Richard Anderson, here is what I have done so far. Now to colour it :)

Happy Valentines everyone.

2011-02-15T00:00:00.000+11:00

Technique test.

2011-02-14T19:20:00.000+11:00

Discovered new technique, testing it out.

Pirate face.

2011-02-13T19:37:00.000+11:00

Took one of the Chemistry home work sketches and coloured it in and added a background.

Sketching on the back of my girlfriend's chemistry home work.

2011-02-13T00:53:00.001+11:00

Done with a black biro, some felt tip pens, and a half dead calligraphy pen.

More landscape practice.

2011-02-08T16:42:00.001+11:00

digital sketches.

2011-02-06T21:53:00.000+11:00

Just some quick digital sketches I did this weekend.

Landscape.

2011-02-03T19:51:00.001+11:00

Generally I find painting landscape boring, which is all the more reason to force myself to do them, although this time round it ended up being fun for a change. w00t!

Quick paint.

2011-02-03T02:27:00.000+11:00

learned some new stuff, put it into practice.

Soo many sketches soo little time.

2011-02-02T20:17:00.001+11:00

Over the past few months I've done a fair bit of sketching, especially of of lovely people I've met at cool events, sadly I was not able to give all of these sketches the attention they deserve, or even get them on my computer. Here however, I have managed to gather most of them into one place for you to look at. Some are speed sketches from the Sunday circus group, others are from Euchronia, and some are just random drawings and ink sketches that I have done recently. I hope you enjoy.

Etchity etch.

2011-01-30T15:59:00.000+11:00

Armour of Infatuated Perplexity.

2011-01-08T20:06:00.000+11:00

A great artist once said bad moods make for great art, I was in a bad mood when I started this, was pretty happy by the time I finished it though. :)

The Queen of light.

2010-12-28T01:06:00.000+11:00

Digging through the abstract mess on my digital canvas, what originally started out as a suit of power armour turned into a super fancy floating chair with a girl sitting on it, go figure.

Insomnia fueled art.

2010-12-27T02:18:00.000+11:00

I was actually tired when I painted this, but I really wanted paint rather than sleep. This was fun to make ^_^

Merry Lolita Christmas.

2010-12-25T01:52:00.001+11:00

I finally finished scanning and colouring all of the sketches I did at the one day in paradise tea party. I'd like to thank everyone who let me draw them, and Marie for hosting the party, and Belle, for inviting me. Click on the images to enlarge, and if anyone would like a full sized version of the drawing I did of them send me an email.

Happy Birthday Belle.

2010-12-21T17:11:00.000+11:00

Painted this for my friend Belle's birthday. She invited me to a Lolita tea party a few days ago where I met a bunch of awesome people and had a great time. If you are one of those awesome people and you are reading this, don't worry, I will be uploading the finished sketches soon.

Holiday sketches.

2010-12-11T23:38:00.000+11:00

Been Visiting my family in NSW, so no digital artwork. But here are some sketches I've done whilst I've been up here.

Portrait practice.

2010-11-26T04:17:00.002+11:00

Quick sketch.

2010-10-08T02:15:00.000+11:00

I've been trying to get into the habit of painting quick sketches more often, even if the subject matter is something simple or cliche, just to get me painting. I also try and fill up the entire canvas, even if it is just a simple background. Here is my latest effort.

Because guitars are awesome.

2010-10-07T09:08:00.000+11:00

More art where I apply what I have learned. Still have trouble keeping it as loose as I want to, too much fiddly rendering + not enough big shapes and textures = soulless work. I especially have this problem when drawing women, which I unconsciously try to draw too perfectly. *Searches for new ways to harvest mess.*

w000t! Part 2.

2010-09-28T09:08:00.000+10:00

So now that I have a better understanding of layer lock and am over the initial excitement, I had a more serious attempt at painting using the knowledge I learned. This painting took me about 15 hours, I think, my concept of time is rubbish to begin with, and with that sense being distorted even more when I'm painting you get the idea that 15 hours is just a guesstimate. Any way, enjoy!

w000t!

2010-09-25T17:55:00.000+10:00

I just figured out what layer lock does and it's AMAZING!
Painted this in about 2 hours to try it out.

CHOW#215

2010-09-23T05:52:00.001+10:00

Still haven't finished this one yet, but I felt like posting my wips early. so far this one has been a bastard to make, mostly because I wasted 4 hours rendering in colours that ended up being dreadful, and had to start colouring again from scratch.

The theme was insect/anthropod based armour. so I designed my armour around funnel web spiders.

Thief

2010-09-12T21:48:00.000+10:00

So I learned some new techniques today, and when you learn new techniques you should put them into practice, so this is what I came up with.

CHOW#213

2010-09-11T01:06:00.002+10:00

This weeks CHOW was an 8 bit character redesign, and one of the 8bit characters they had was final fantasy's black mage. I love black mages, so I couldn't pass up the chance to draw one.

Character of the week. #204

2010-07-12T03:09:00.000+10:00

Another post for conceptart.org's character of the week, they're up to # 204. The theme for this week was captain of the sky pirates. I went for a sci fi steam punk cross. Here are the wips as well as the finished image.

And here are the wips.

And here is the conceptart.org format.

I kinda had to rush this one to meet the deadline, I woulda preferred to work on it more and perhaps add some colour, maybe I'll do that later.

Character of the week.

2010-07-03T07:27:00.002+10:00

This is my entry for this weeks character of the week brief at ConceptArt.org.
Basically I'm supposed to paint a necromancer at a dark arts college, I chose to do a modern take on the concept, and after roughly 8-9 hours of digital painting and forcing myself to keep working on the damn thing, this is the end result.

I'm also supposed to post wips and talk about the process, so I'll do that here as well.
I started off with a black and white sketch, I was originally trying to do it with straight up colours, but my art skills are still too piss weak, so I opted to go black and white and add colours later.

Then I started to build up colours using a bunch of overlay, hard light, and multiply layers. Whilst continuing to add more details.

At this point I was trying to decide wich direction I was going to take the overall tone of the image, I initially whent for a greenish corpse light sort of thing, but as I added more colour I set my standards higher and forced myself to do something that wasn't so monochromatic and boring.

By this point things where starting to pull together, I had enough colours in there that I was confident enoguh to paint with colour directly. And I had been using distorted images to quickly add some detail, as well as sketching in some interesting bits of my own. I was really tempted to call it finished at this point. But I had a shower, came back, and decided that the actual character was too plain, and too yellow. So I got back too it.

This is the format that ConceptArt.org wants the image in, and since I'm hosting from here I've posted it as well. As you can see I finalised the image by doing some colour correction on the skin, adding some spiffy spider tights, fixing the shadows on the ground, and adding a few minor details and clean ups like her signet ring and the creases in her clothes. Finally I was ready to call it finished.

I don't think I've ever pushed myself this hard on a piece before, and it just goes to show that patience is just as important as skill and talent when it comes to painting. I got frustrated allot whilst making this, and allot of the time I was sorely tempted to paint something else or call it finished or just delete it out of spite. But now that it's finished I'm glad that I stuck with it, and hopefully knowing this will help me produce better work in the future. Hope you guys enjoyed this.

Quick Sketch for Dark Heresy role play.

2010-06-10T10:17:00.002+10:00

My character for a play by post Dark Heresy game I'm playing. Guardsman Drask 'Spectre' Vorenus.

Traditional style practice.

2010-05-12T18:28:00.000+10:00

Here I tried using more traditional techniques in painting whilst still using a digital medium. plus I felt like painting a gunslinger.

Fun with Alchemy.

2010-05-04T05:31:00.000+10:00

So I was trawling Youtube in my never ending quest for more art knowledge, and I stumbled on a digital speed painting using a software I had never heard of called alchemy. And it looked awesome, a bit of Google hunting later and I found this website. which has this amazing free art software that is soo00oo0 tiny and yet so awesome! Alchemy is digital abstraction and simplicity at its finest, there is no editing, no undo, just you, the canvas, and a plethora of simple but powerfull tools for creation.

This is the first thing I created after experimenting with the software for about 15 minutes.

I highly recommend that everyone download it and give it a try, it's a small download, it's free, it's great fun, and you can't do anything wrong.

Self portrait.

2010-05-02T11:01:00.000+10:00

Ok, so I got a small desk mirror recently, and I have resolved to paint a self portrait every day in order to get better at art. by doing self portraits I don't have to worry about thinking of something to paint, I can just paint, and focus on learning new techniques.

Montage self portrait.

2010-04-15T17:48:00.000+10:00

This is for the montage exercise for digital photography. When doing the montage, I found that using soft edged brushes and variable opacity brushes with my wacom made for more realistic blending of the 3 photographs, rather than just using a hard round brush.

Work in progress.

2010-04-15T02:28:00.001+10:00

Working on a new painting in photoshop. Here is a small preview.

Protrait practice.

2010-04-15T02:23:00.000+10:00

Practicing portraits for my photography, They are slightly blurry because I have stupid shakey hands, Need to get better at holding camera steady, although I never had photos as blurry when I used an analog camera in the past. I may paint one of these later on.

At the beach.

2010-04-15T02:19:00.000+10:00

Whent to the beach, took photos. More practice for my digital photography, I also got crude oil on my hand, thinking it was a shiney black rock. That shit is hard to get off. Sunblock is a poor substitute for soap.

Sunset.

2010-04-15T02:12:00.000+10:00

Looked out my window whilst painting, saw epic sunset, grabbed camera, took photos.

Drawing drawer's block.

2010-04-12T21:28:00.000+10:00

So I wanted to make another painting using the new skills I had learned, But I couldn't for the life of me make anything look right, I went through about 10 deleted canvases before I finally ended up with something passable enough to follow through. It ended up being an image of my creativity chained to the ground. Hmmm, my creativity has crappily drawn hands, need to work on my anatomy more.

Improvements.

2010-04-09T23:26:00.001+10:00

I learned allot about digital art recently over the past 2 weeks, About the capabilities of painter and its pattern chalk tools. Here is the end result of what I learned. I am quite happy with it. Because there where many frustrating failures before hand, yet I still persevered, and the result was definitely worth it.

Epic Rain.

2010-03-06T15:23:00.000+11:00

I was having a nap this afternoon, listening to my rain sound effects, when suddenly I heard a big peal of thunder and thought "thats not on the audio track". Looked outside and there was epic ammounts of rain and hail, with hail stones as big as the tip of my thumb, you can see them in the photos.

Speaking of photos, since I'm studying digital photography this semester, you will see allot more photos on this blog over the next few months.

My workplace, and another sketch.

2010-03-03T02:07:00.000+11:00

So this is a photo of my current workplace, Plus another sketch of mine I found whilst looking for cotton to fix my pants....

Fight club #1

2010-03-01T18:48:00.000+11:00

These are the first three pages for my turn in a fight club with Sian. for those of you who don't know, fight club (in this instance) is when you and another artist pit 2 of your characters against each other in a graphic novel, you each take turns drawing a few pages to make your moves. The objective is to keep it going for as long as possible, and to challenge each artist to draw new things outside their comfort zone.

For this fight club my ork kommando boss is fighting Sian's witch possesed by spooky hat. If any of you are interested in doing a fight club, email me: kalathis at hotmail dot com.

Unfortunately my sketch book is a bit big for my scanner, so these are a bit cropped :(

Dream of a better place.

2010-02-17T16:34:00.000+11:00

Watercolour, ink, gouche and citadel paints.

2010-02-15T21:33:00.000+11:00

Some more sketches from my sketch book. A mix of pencils felt tips biro and markers.

Wherewolf.

2010-02-05T17:01:00.001+11:00

I drew this whilst I was on a long train ride, initial sketch done with a pencil, then shaded with a black biro, and finally outlined with a black felt tip pen and some red added with a red texta. The red lighting seems to confuse people, but I like it.

flea knight.

2010-02-03T23:19:00.001+11:00

So I got back into the spirit of drawing, and made a nice line art, and then coloured it, the colours are a bit sloppy, but I like the drawing itself.

Christmas cards.

2009-11-12T00:59:00.000+11:00

Each year when christmas comes around, i usually go out and buy a dozen cheap christmas cards, and then mutilate them with a felt pen until they are twisted demonic parodies of their former selves. This year I intend to go a step further and simply design my own christmas cards. Here is a prototype sketch for one of them.

The metal roger.

2009-10-28T21:55:00.000+11:00

Making my own pirate flag design, because all cool people have their own pirate flag design.

Another day, another sketch.

2009-09-23T21:34:00.000+10:00

I used a photo of me at Dracula's bar as reference. Yes, I really was wearing a tophat (but not a monocle, sadly)

fiddeling with vectors.

2009-09-22T20:29:00.001+10:00

Sometimes i like to revisit old works and vectorise them. Here is an example.

Finally got my blog back/

2009-09-22T20:22:00.001+10:00

So yeah, I lost my password, and for some reason the password reset thingy asnt woking but now it is, so new updates!

New day new sketch.

2009-03-03T23:59:00.001+11:00

Just one sketch today, done in photoshop, speed paint.

First post, first sketches.

2009-03-03T01:53:00.001+11:00

Here are a bunch of sketches to kick things off, I did these over the past couple weeks, using mainly a gel pen, red paint marker, a black chisel marker, and whiteout.