A series of unfortunate events

David launched the social media bomb by referring to Lemons, hence the Lemony Snicket quote for a title. Bare with us, it has been a roller coaster of emotions today. Tears were shed, but David ensures me they were manly tears filled with testosterone and manliness.

First of all: All you people rock! There are no words that can sufficiently describe our gratitude and how humbled we feel by the response we got. Colleagues, fellow artists, friends, fans, and random strangers helped to get the message spread and ensure our “emergency slots” were filled up. An old Flemish saying says “You always have a no, but who knows you might get a yes” and with this in mind David launched the request this morning on our studio page over on the Book of Faces. Thank you once more for the response we gotten.

We have had issues with a client paying us, this was a large company and the amounts outstanding were quite substantial. My main task for the studio has lately been doing credit collections with this particular company, needling them and convincing them to pay. We are not a large company and an issue like this ripples through our cash-flow with a long lasting impact. Imagine doing a job more than 2.5 years ago and still not be paid for it: That is in a nut-shell what happened to us. Contracts and everything were signed by both parties, but a Goliath tried to intimidate a David and hoped the artists just cowered away or gave up. We have taken steps to ensure this will not happen again, neither for us nor for another artist.

Now a delay in getting paid also led to us not being able to pay some of our creditors and even though we always had an open debate and discussion with them, at a specific point we were about to loose everything we have worked for in the past years. The actions undertaken against us which were set in motion by a series of unfortunate events and started by a big company not respecting their contract with us which led to a situation where we would have lost dearly.

We did not ask for charity, we asked for the word to spread so 5 lucky people can get their hands at the deal of the year and get a commission. And once more: we are grateful for all the feedback and support we got. (Also thank you to all the people who inquired about my canvases!)

An event like this makes it all the more apparent how much artists of all kinds need to be aware of the pitfalls of the art industry. Art is still not considered a full-time and “serious” occupation and the cliché of the “starving artist” endures. At moments like this the value of places like PACT prove their worth. We do leave reviews of companies there. Most are good, but we are not afraid to leave points of improvement neither.

And now we leave you with a response we have gotten as a response to David’s “Ugly Lemons” quote. Thank you and know your support made us battle on!

Cray Cray times

We were told to use “hip” language to be “with-it”. Last time I take advice from the resident 10 year old.

Busy days as usual at the Studio, and even though I have been prodding my dearest hubby and art-partner for days, he keeps on forgetting to update the blog.

Road to Jove is slowly but surely gathering a larger fanbase which is nice. Currently we have been creating and discarding quite a few concepts to introduce in the near future.

David in the meanwhile made this awesome propaganda poster for Fomoria which gives an insight into the wartime years of this mysterious country/alliance.

A rhythm in regards to Road to Jove is being set in the Studio, a bigger undertaking than initially expected.

Road to Jove deals with the aftermath of war, a theme so very much alive right now in Europe and the current crisis made it even more a burning issue.

So, remember that awesome music from the Road to Jove Trailer? (if not, you can find the trailer here.) An old friend of ours Ryan Northcott aka Mechanorecptor participated in a project which is already several years old called “Dance 4 Syria”. This is a compilation of some really awesome trippy music ànd most of all proceedings go to a cause to aid the Syrian refugees.

So for all of our followers whom have a dollar or a few to spare: You can buy the track here. Making the world a better place though art should be a goal we all aspire to.

Commissions:

We still have spots open for commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding things we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form, or just email us. The address is right up there, to the right of this post!

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

Let us use this #tbt thingy you young peeps are using all the time

Apparently we are old and established as a studio. It came equally hard as a shock to me as it does for most artists whom get called “successful”, “established”, and more bizarre terms. One thing can be said about the profession of art, and that is we are all an uncertain bunch of friendly neighbourhood neurotics. Most artists we know can go from complete euphoria to “o-my-god-I-suck-I-created-the worlds-most-horrible-abomination-please-destroy-me-and-my-works” in less than two seconds. It takes skill to face those faults and remake parts of something you have been working on for months. So yes, well “established” is taken as a compliment. It is nice to know people are buying in to the illusion of us being good at what we are doing, mainly because we quite often feel like a fraud ourselves. It is odd to have people look up to what we produce and one just wants to point people towards the works of a Julie Bell, Gerald Brom, Paul Kidby and many more and just shout “Those are the real ones! We are just faking it and doing what we love to do” 🙂

But then we have been at it as an official business since 2007, and have been dabbling with arts for money since 2003. Scary to think about, it does make us quite old. It also gives us ample material to actually compare now and then.

So let the #tbt shenanigans begin (David will be your willing victim this time):

We begin with an oldie from 2007. This Stoic Son of Oblivion was deemed by quite a few of our fans to be an piece which, and we are quoting now “could be taken right out of a codex”. Quite the nicest of compliments, but in retrospect after having produced pieces for actual Games Workshop codexes, this particular one we would both want to redo. The mood setting is nice, however there is too stark a contrast between the forefront and background and between the top and bottom parts of the image. Several styles seem to collide somewhat in this image and even though it is a smashing piece of fan-art, right now we would both approach this one from a different angle.

Number two: This ork in combat with a marine. If our whisky-marinated memories serve us well we think this is an image from 2009. Two years later, similar background.  A piece of fan-art where the overall sense of balance is prevailing. Less contrast in this image, however now the actual definition of the lines and the individual brush strokes are something we would want to redo if we were to remake this piece. However the evolution is visible and this image is definitely more dynamic that the static portraits from before.

Exibit three:

The cover to Road to Jove: Prologue

This one dates from early this year (2015 for you peeps from the future seeing this). The difference is noticeable: this page is more dynamic even though both Tara and Ceathair aren’t moving. The lines, colours and overall definition are the same everywhere. Now we are quite happy with this one, however we would probably remake this one if we were given the chance. You may catalogue this information under the above-mentioned “uncertain bunch of friendly neighbourhood neurotics”-bit :).

Commissions:

We still have spots open for 100€ commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding things we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form, or just email us. The address is right up there, to the right of this post!

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

Next update:

After tackling the #tbt, perhaps time to in real, proper, old people fashion, tackle #yolo and some of Natasja’s pencil sketches.

David & Natasja

Nothing will work unless you do. -M.Angelou

Promise creates a debt and the post last week promised some Shadowrun images.

Catalyst Game Labs is currently having the rights to under licence bring out new Shadow run material. Both David and myself have fond memories of this game and recall numerous hours spent playing this one. It is rather nice the legacy continues and the demise of Fasa did not mean the end of Shadowrun and Battletech.

These images are already several months old, but since the book got published we can show them without any issues. The book is called “Datatrails” and is available in PDF.
Enjoy!

Commissions:

We still have spots open for 100€ commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding things we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form, or just email us. The address is right up there, to the right of this post!

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

Blog Limbo

Wow, the last update on this puppy was April 29th. Given the long hiatus,it is safe to say we have been swamped with work.

First things first though: The new webpage for Road to Jove has been up and running for a few weeks now, and the lads over at 49th Floor did a rather smashing job. At the same time, the pressure is up 🙂 and we are providing at least one page a week for this chronicle. There are moments when one curses the choice to not go black and white, or line-art with cell-shading. This weeks update however made it all worth it. Designing the lay-out of this particular page, made Ennio Morricone tunes play in my head. For others it gave a similar sensation which can be found in movies like “Apocalypse Now” and other war movies. Needless to say: we do not regret the choice of how the pages look, albeit they do take up a humongous amount of work.

But it pays off. We have some peeps who support the chronicle though Patreon and we are immensely grateful for the positive comments and support we have received.

It takes about a day, a day and a half per page. So this becoming somewhat of a joint effort at the studio here. I am designing the layout and quick lines and David paints the frames when he decides the lay-out is ok. (He is such a bossy husband sometimes :p ). This saves David about half a days work on a page and makes it so we can plan the pages ahead. This comes at a cost though, and it is a struggle most artists know all too well. Personal projects get put on a back-burner in order to further the companies needs 🙂 but it is all worth it. Admit it: Our little company rather oozes pure awesomeness…

Secondly, we are having loads of images under NDA and between some very exiting projects for the gaming industry and Road to Jove, little time is left for personal projects. We are however still open for suggestions. Our portfolios can always use diversity.

Now for the good peeps over at Catalyst Game Labs we had the joy of producing some Shadowrun and Battetech pieces of art. These can be found in the book Battletech book: Handbook House Kurita. Shadowrun has been an old favorite in our house, we both played and still own the FASA corebooks. So getting asked to paint images like this is something one hardly can say no to.

The Shadowrun ones are for a future post. However for the moment feast your eyes on the following eye-candy 🙂 These images are almost a year old.

This one is my favorite though; it has a definite Blade Runner feel to it and really emanates a crowded dystopic world. I am a sucker for Sci-Fi with a dystopic twist.

The image that follows is a suggestion we received from a friend. In the past we have produced similar images and as some of our fans pointed out: it has been way too long since the studio produced anything Space Marine (well at least something that is not currently under NDA anyways). So a Horus Heresy era Thousand sons protecting guardsmen in peril will hopefully fulfill your needs for fan-art 🙂

Commissions:

We still have spots open for 100€ commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding things we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form, or just email us. The address is right up there, to the right of this post!

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

Sluagh has arrived!

So officially an artist. Belgium luckily allows for a special legal state as an artist. It is a hassle to qualify for it, but once one does, life as an artist becomes more bearable since this status helps to even out the irregularities that are inherent to the nature of our business. So at least David is registered as artist, me on the other hand not. I still work as an employee somewhere else and keep on doing the studio part-time. Good news is stepping up to artist is definitely an option for me. So :yay!

What has happened the past month?

Well David and Aaron finished the prologue of Road to Jove. The new website is in the pipeline and will be available soon. This does not mean a break for us: pages for the first arc are being painted. Concepts are being sketched and defined.

And of course this smashing image was produced, leaving everyone wondering who these fab 6 are. What are they? Who are they pursuing? Are they cuddly? Ok perhaps not the last one but still…

Currently NDA’s are making it so we can show very little, which is annoying sometimes 🙂

Anyways we are working on three digital illustrations and two acrylic paintings at the moment. We cannot wait until the NDA allows us to show them, since we always are looking forward to adding new concepts to our portfolios.

Also keep en eye out for new Games Workshop releases: David might have some images coming up. The moment things are released we will share the art here as well.

Commissions:

We still have spots open for 100€ commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding things we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form, or just email us. The address is right up there, to the right of this post!

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

One Hell of a week

Hell indeed…even written with a capital H.

We had a burglary last week in our house and studio. The studio managed to get through without all too many injuries, but still… The week has been hectic with all the administration and red-tape that comes with an event like this.

Things are slowly settling again and we would like to thank our clients who had to wait for their orders or answers to their questions, for their immense patience and understanding. Your support and the support of family and friends gave us energy when we were feeling life weighing heavy on us.

Most items that got taken had sentimental value and in a few cases were family heirlooms. Our dog got a few blows from the thief but all in all it could have been worse. We are still taking stock of any items that are missing, should you encounter a laptop or items with a big studio Colrouphobia mark on, let us know 😉

We sure got beaten with a “bad-Karma-stick”™ this week, since we go to spend time in hospital yesterday with our firstborn.

Needless to say: Life can only get better 🙂

What can we offer you this update? Well head over to http://roadtojove.com/ where the next update is imminent. We are quite overwhelmed with the response we have gotten so far. So bookmark the page is you haven’t already.

There are a few exciting NDA’s in he pipeline. and hopefully the items are published soon so we can showcase some goodies.

And for the peeps who sponsor us through Patreon: The first Empyrean Champion is bound to be released the coming days:

https://www.patreon.com/StudioColrouphobia

Commissions:

We still have spots open for 100€ commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding things we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form, or just email us. The address is right up there, to the right of this post!

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

“I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”

What better way to start this blogpost that to cite the illustrious Jessica Rabbit?

We have been drawing, and sketching, and publishing, and have generally been very busy bees.

Road to Jove is rolling, and with at least one new page weekly coming out, it is making the cogwheels of the studio grind. If you have not checked it out yet, we do not want to know about it. Instead we urge you to go check it out and get lost in the captivating world which Aaron and David will be sequentially revealing. Strap in, it is going to be one helluva ride!

As much fun as the webcomic is, we have as per usual work in the pipeline for various companies. If only some would publish their books already so we could share the art provided. We can give a hint though: we are current working on the revival of an old and classic tabletop game. The art is there and now we are acting like smurfs asking the publishers “Is it there yet? Is it there yet?”

On a brighter note we can provide you with the image for our Ars Scribendi winner. Due to us having to replace our hardware at the studio and being forced to prioritise company commissions, this image got delayed. So congratulations Dave Boddy! We really hope you like the image, and thank you for providing us with an interesting, exiting tale which resulted in a very moody piece of art.

Commissions:

We have still 4 spots open for 100€ commissions. Feeling like you need an interesting piece of digital art? (Single character, simple background) Let us know! These kind of commissions help us evolve, quite often our clients give excellent briefs and have creative ideas regarding this we haven’t thought of. So take the chance 🙂

For anything outside of those specs, or if you need any information not covered here, go to the bottom of the About page and send us a message through the contact form.

Please note that Studio Colrouphobia will not do any paid commissions based on any IP’s not allowing any reproduction and/or derivative work.

Friday I’m in love

…or so The Cure tries to convince us. Not sure we’re buying it though.

Busy days at the studio, this means weekends are filled with art, sketching, concepts and other things -olly (had to make a Terry Pratchett pun there, sorry)

Currently we are trying to round and finish all outstanding digital commissions up, since we are planning a change in systems in a few weeks time. We are getting some new hardware and toys for the studio and it would be preferred to not have to migrate files between systems. This also has had an effect on the private commissions we take in, so we are limiting those ones to one per week now. Come December it will be business as usual again, and we apologise for the inconvenience.

Another heads up is that we will be spending a week in Scandinavia around Christmas.

So much for the administrative update. When it comes down to artsy stuff, two major personal projects are being processed at this moment. We managed to round up the last of the company NDA related ones, hopefully come Februari we have some interesting tidbits to show you.

David is working on his super-secret-hush-huh-project with Aaron. (We hope to be showing you the first official results soon, but at the moment we are spending quite some time with conceptualising so our drawing table is filled with sketches photo’s, items, and other details that give inspiration.)

Natasja is trying not to get sucked into he conceptualisation swamp that the super-secret-hush-huh-project with Aaron is, and is hoping to start posting the Khan the destroyer comic soon.

The idea is to make the lefty image into a series like the righty ones. (only more evil, more cat-like)

Why? It is training into finding the essence of an object, minimalise it, yet keep it cute and recognisable in a few lines of ink. So far concept #34 is in the pipeline and an entire moleskin has already been sacrificed to the gods of ink and art in order to get the concepts right.

Summarised: winter is coming, projects are rounding up and new soft/hardware will be arriving soon. It is nice with a short pause before all the new-years resolutions kick in and partners will be wanting new illustrations and concepts.

So with this in mind: we have just one slot open this week for private commissions, and will be working mostly on our persona portfolio’s the next two weeks.

Whoohoo, we’re rich…or some such…

Life is getting back to it’s normal routine after vacation. Mails have been piling up and some sorting needed to be done. Amidst all the junk and commercial mail we encountered a message from a certain Nigerian prince indicating we are his only relatives and we can inherit a fortune if only we give our bank-details…wow 🙂

First reaction was one of amazement: that mail is still doing the rounds? That felt rather comforting, almost like meeting an old acquaintance, like somethings never die and the internet, despite it’s fleeting character, has some consistency to it. Next conclusion: wow, they must’ve finally ran out of e-mail-addies and doing the rounds again in case they missed some the first time around 🙂

With this mail and the following S. Adams quote (yeah the Dilbert guy 🙂 ) we came to the conclusion that we have gotten some pretty bizarre requests during the years and thought we might share some gems with you. We shall call this category:

I get mail; therefore I am. (S.Adams)

Here are a few questions received by David:

• “I have a loose idea: essentially I want you to paint me violated.” We respectfully declined this one. 
• “She should look like she is in agony, not having an orgasm.” Alterations to the piece were made. Up to this day we still cannot see what the client saw  🙂
• “If you paint it in gray-scale, I can colour it in later.”

And here a few from the canvas scene as reported by Natasja:

• “If you paint on paper and use watercolour, instead of oil on canvas. Will it cost less?” No, it is the amount of time spent that makes up the lion-part of the cost of a painting, not so much the materials.
• “Does it have to be this yellow?” (Was a desert scene, oil-painting photo referenced)
• “Do you paint nudes and can I pose? Photo’s do not do me justice.” Person was slightly to eager and overzealous to pose nude. Received naked images for quite a while there, each one captioned “this does not do me justice.” 🙂 Eventually no portrait was made due to clients financial situation.

Now these are just 0.01% of the mails we have received over the years as a studio. It is however remarkable how much more educated our clientele has become, the majority of our customers whether private or corporate are very clear and professional. Most communication really helps us in furthering our artwork. Of course we have grown into this as well, but recently we have not received odd requests and comments. But who knows, perhaps like the Nigerian Prince they will reoccur once and a while.

Anyways, what has the studio been up to the past days?

We can give another glimpse of the super secret Aaron & David project:

More details will follow, this is just an initial concept. Loads of concepts in the pipeline atm.

And number two we can share is the initial sketch for our Ars Scribendi contest winner (yay!) When this piece is finished we will dedicate an entire post to it. So stay tuned.

For our private customers, last week we had no takers for our discount commissions (mostly due to our vacation° so the last two discount slots are still open. They will vanish after this week, so be fast or they be gone 🙂

And now to quote Tigger: TTFN!