Druid Orthograph Final

After a few extra rounds of feedback and adjustments, here's my final Druid orthograph. It was definitely a good challenge, this is the first actual ortho I've ever done and I learned a ton of stuff from it.

It's sort of the cast drawing of the entertainment industry, every little thing must be considered and accurately drawn. I pity one of my classmates who chose an alien creature with porcupine-like spines on his back who was told that, yes, he did have to work out the perspective and make the spines identical in all his views, haha. But it's good practice and good discipline, really forces you to slow down, think, and do a good job, cause if you half-ass it early on then the mistakes just snowball and it becomes impossibly hard to fix.

All in all though it was fun, looking forward to getting in to some more painterly look and feel concept work. I know I need my veggies first, but dessert is just so sweet.

Have a good one!

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God of War Weapon Final

Here's my final for our weapon design assignment in Industrial Design class. As before, this is a design meant to fit in to the God of War universe. Though I liked some of the sword roughs I had done, our instructor thought that it might be interesting to incorporate a more delicate weapon in to the game so I ended up going with the chain sword whip thing, with a bit of a re-design, and this is what came of it.

All in all this was a very big learning experience, both technically and process-wise. I worked on this for a good portion of yesterday and today, and when I got home today I looked at my final and realized it was pretty much horrible ( Link ) and so I started completely from scratch at like 9pm with a much better understanding of the process and goals and got a much more successful result.

Though I think I got a cool shape and the action is nice in the first attempt, I failed to provide so much necessary information for this particular kind of rendering, the weapon is just vaguely rendered in an undetermined value range, there's no description of different surfaces, barely any description of color, and the piece itself just doesn't show off the weapon well which is the main point. So in starting over, I made it much more of a point to focus on properly rendering the weapon, gathering reference for the different types of surfaces, and making a much clearer value structure. So I'm definitely pleased with how it's all turned out, and I feel like this is a big step closer to giving assignments my absolute best, rather than just turning them in on time.

But, enough rambling, hope you dig it and have a good one!

<- Rough Thumbnails - For realz final ->

Figure Painting - 8-30-11

Here's a painting from today's session, it was the continuation of a pose we were working on a couple weeks ago and the second sitting got cancelled, but I had my drawing all finished after that one so all I had to do for this was transfer to canvas and have fun paintin. Overall I'm really pleased with how it turned out, I think I managed to get much better color than I have before, still learning to incorporate neutrals in to the skin tones to make it look not crappy. Still got a long ways to go, but it's better than the last one, which is all that matters! :D

Now it's time for late nights and homework-finishing. CHARGE IN TO THE SLEEPLESS PRODUCTIVE YONDER!

Oil on canvas board, 16"x20".

Personal Piece - Pt. 1 Thumbnail

Here's the beginnings of a personal piece I'm gonna do. It's probably one of the first personal pieces I've done that's actually personal in a deeper sense than, "Oh I have some free time let's paint something." and I'm really looking forward to working on it.

It came as sort of a divine inspiration sorta thing, In about 10 minutes I was just thinking about it and knew exactly what I wanted it to be and can see the final really clearly.

I'm gonna do my best to not let this one fall by the wayside and do as good a job as I can on it; even if it means working on it half an hour every couple days for a few months, I feel like this'll be a winner. We shall see. :)

Figure Drawing - 8-28-11

Here's some figure droarings from today's session. Good times as always, same as usual, made some improvements, getting better, long ways to go, hardy boogha blah.

Except for the rendered ones up top, I tried I really push my constructive approach. I'd been working constructively before by building in 3D forms rather than just shape, but I was abstracting the forms in front of me more than understand them, so with this one I tried to really work from the ground up and work out the ribcage, pelvis, scapulae, etc. etc. and add muscles on top that matched the form of the model. It was a challenge, but I think it gave me a chance to apply a lot of stuff that'll help my imagined work, which is my ultimate goal. I think the torso-leaning-on-staff one in the lower-ish right is my favorite of the bunch.

Practice practice, doin mah art pushups!

D&D Character Concept WIP

Here's some more work on my D&D character, I finished writing up his backstory and am trying to work out his design. Still got a lot of work to do on the armor, but I think it's going in a good direction, just need to keep exploring until I can find the right shapes to get him feeling right.

Looking forward to painting this dude! It might take a while what with all the usual homework, but I want to get it to a finished level at some point, we shall see.

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Figure Drawing - 8-25-11

Here's a few figure drawings from today's session. We were doing half hour poses and I felt like experimenting with some drawing challenges and re-draw the same figure from a different viewpoint from imagination. The back views in this are observed, the front views are imagined.

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and it was fun to apply the turnaround concept we did in Figure last semester to a fully fleshed figure rather than just skeletons, it's a good exercise for sure. And I actually like the imagined front view of the standing pose better than the observed back view, hurhur. Practice practice practice, doin mah art pushups.

Have a good one!

D&D Character Concept Sketches

Not too much to show today, but here's some sketches for the design of my character in the D&D group we started up at the Austin POD.

He's a deva cleric that I'm thinking is going to have been betrayed and abandoned his divine ways and turned to a darker path, which should provide some interesting visual opposites in shape language, which is what the little comparisons at the bottom are for.

I'd like to design and draw this guy out really well, so this might be a project I work on for the next month or so until reaching a finished illustration, but maybe it won't take that long, we'll see how much work on it free time will allow, hehe.

Still got a lot of work to do on him obviously, these are just basic ideas, need to do lots more thumbnails and iterations and experimenting until I find the right mix of things, but it should be a lot of fun. One of the nice things about playing D&D is that it's a game, but half of it is doing concept work, so I can totally say that it's productive, pwnage.

Next update ->

Figure Drawing - 8-23-11

Here's some figure droarings for today. We had Eva Strangelove as our model for this session which was pretty cool. I tried a bit of a different approach and tried to be more analytical and observant, trying to describe as much as possible with very simple forms. Overall I think it was quite helpful and resulted in some pretty decent drawings; as fate would have it the easel I chose ended up being directly behind the light source so until the very last pose there was no pretty form for me to get caught up in rendering, I should probably take that easel more often. : P

So yeah, not much to say about 'em, just hu$tle and grind time. Gotta keep pushing so I can draw these dern things from imagination.

Have a good one!

God of War Weapon Roughs

Here's a WIP for our second assignment in Industrial Design class with Josh Nizzi. For this one we have to do some weapon roughs for one of five different games that he gave as examples, and I chose God of War.

The basic gist is pretty much a compositional thumbnail; it's all about figuring out the shapes and values and being sure it feels right before moving on to more involved drawing. I don't think I've ever done this before, but it's a lot of fun.

I think one of the coolest things is finding out how much overlap there is between the different disciplines in art; making a great game design requires a lot of the same stuff that making a great illustration does. These are probably pretty mediocre weapons as it's my first try at it, but whatever goodness they have is totally coming from composition class, learning to create abstract shapes for mood, including different types of shapes for balance and contrast, creating implied lines of action, and a whole bunch of stuff. I've only ever really composed paintings, so using that knowledge to approach weapons is really fascinating, and it'll be even more so to start applying it in 3D whenever we get around to doing that.

So yeah, hope ya dig it so far, I'll probably be refining these further tomorrow and we'll see what happens. Excited to get feedback on them, it's a brave new world!

Have a good one!

Final Rendering ->

Figure Painting - 8-21-11

Here's some funtimes from today, my first full-figure assignment in Figure Painting class with the mighty Jon Foster. This was a ton of fun to do and I think I made some pretty epic breakthrough as far as understanding and mixing color go, as well as how to handle oils.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came from re-watching Scott Waddell's webisode about painting an eye (Do check it out, it's worth a watch: [Link]).

I'd been having trouble mixing skintones cause there's just so much variation in skin that I didn't know what or how to mix, but he mentioned that it helps to start by finding the lightmost facing plane on the surface and use that to identify the local value, local hue, and local chroma (how light and dark, what color, and how intense the color is). So I gave that a try and it realllllyyy simplified everything down; instead of trying to mix an array of skin tones I was able to just start with the base and make all other mixtures relative to that, just saying darker, lighter, redder, greener, etc. I think it's some of my best color in oil so far. Now the next step is to get away from copying the photo's color as much and exaggerating it to better give the feeling of light.

I was also, again, trying to get some nice soft academic form modeling going on, and I think I got closer than last time with the bearded dude painting, but it's not quite there. I used a fan brush and a ragged round brush to ponce (tap) the canvas and then gently brush to soften edges, and it works but it's not as clean a final product as I'd like it to be, I think I still need to work on a light touch to really get nice blending going on.

But overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out, super excited to do more! Took about 4-5 hours, oil on 16"x20" canvas board, mostly a 1 inch flat sable, zorn palette.

Have a good one!

Figure Drawing - 8-20-11

Here's a couple figure drawings from today's session, about an hour each, vine charcoal on smooth newsprint.

We had a pretty fun model for these ones today, she was really slender and defined and you could pick out pretty much every muscle quite distinctly. It was more evident in the shorter gestures rather than these longer ones, but I didn't really get any good drawings of those.

Feeling like my figures are getting decent nowadays though; still suffer from proportional issues and my hands, faces, and sometimes feet are pretty bad, but practice practice.

Sorceress Paintsketch

Took a pretty chill day today, so here's a quickie paintsketch. About an hour total, half drawing half painting. Obviously inspired by the Ritualist from Guild Wars, which have some of my favorite designs.

Hope ya dig it!

Oil Portrait - 8-19-11

Here's the result of tonight's figure session, a 3 hour portrait which I did in oils. It was pretty fun, but I'm not too stoked with how the portrait turned out; I like it in the sense that I tried something I'd never done before, but I don't like it in the sense that it's... not very good. xD

The new thing I did was at about 2 hours in to the process I just didn't like where it was at all, the drawing was getting worse, some of the colors and marks were getting muddy, and just overall it looked pretty meh. So I grabbed a paper towel and wiped the whole thing pretty firmly which took off a lot of the paint, softened all the edges like crazy, but left a ghost of the image there which I spent the last hour working out of.

The process itself was good cause that's how I'm most comfortable working; start soft and find the forms inside of a blur, and if it's not working go back to soft and find them again. But that's digital, with this after I wiped everything down I realized that every color in the piece had changed and been affected by another color and I had no idea how to mix any of them accurately to paint on top of the ghost, so the last hour was just spent clarifying the background, adding highlights and not knowing what to do.

I think ultimately that's where my biggest weakness with oil is right now. I can mix up some flesh tones and it'll look decent, but actually mixing up the exact color that I'm seeing in life is just confusing still, mixing up a color that you're seeing in relation to other colors but mixing in relation with just white is... mindbreaking. I think that's where most of my struggle is going to be with figure painting class this semester, but that's why it's fun! So for this portrait, it's a failure moving towards success, hurrah!

Have a good one!

Druid orthograph Pt. 3

Allllllmost done with this! Got all 4 views worked out and gotten a round of feedback from my instructor, so now I've just gotta make another quality pass on it. Main thing to fix is the hands, and also make his shoulders broader and shoulderpads bulkier, see if I can get him more heroic looking.

All in all this has been a pretty fun process and I'm glad that most of the critiques I got were nit-picks, I feel like I tried my hardest and it paid off, and now I'm gonna try a little harder! Gonna try and keep that up.

<- Previous update - Next update ->

Figure Drawing - 8-16-11

Sorry for not updating yesterday, I spent pretty much the entire day doing homework but it was all research stuff so I didn't have any arts to post. xD

But such is the way of life, so for today here's some figure drawings from tonight's session! The middle right one is from imagination, and I think the bottom right one is one of my most successful drawings to date in terms of proportion and solid anatomy. Still got a long ways to go with my figure drawing, but it's definitely getting better and those Bridgman studies have helped a ton. Fun stuff!

Figure Drawing - 8-14-11

Here's a just-for-fun figure drawing done today, not much to it. I'm really, exceptionally happy to have some smooth newsprint again. I can actually render again! Yay!

And tonight I'm finally gonna go see Deathly Hallows Pt. 2, super pumped to see the last chapter, I've heard good things.

Enjoy your day, keep makin ur arts!

Sketchbook - 8-13-11

Didn't do too much today except for work on my ortho some more and that would seem to be a bit redundant, so here's some sketchbookings that I hadn't posted yet from the workshop. Some figure drawings, portraits of fellow students, and Bridgman hand studies... and random centaur guy.

On a random note, I found drawing the slightly heavier girl on this page to be rather fun, you can really see the forms and how they overlap and squash & stretch and things of that nature. Supermodel girls are great, but it's fun to get a different variety of body types from time to time. And in other news, I really need to practice hands. Will get on that... In the name of art!

Druid orthograph Pt. 2

Not too much to show today, but here's an update on that Druid orthograph, with a more refined front view and a back view. I've still got to do the side view and then tweak all three for perspective and accuracy, which should be quite the task but I really want to do as good a job of it as I can. My goal for this assignment is to turn this in and get it approved first round; like I mentioned a couple days ago after finishing foundations I feel like it's time to take a no-excuses attitude toward everything, so I'm gonna spend as much time as I need working out perspective, lining things up, and making all 3 views totally identical from different perspectives. I feel like I've got the know-how at this point, just need to put in the time, so if all goes well next Wednesday will show a professional quality ortho that could be sent off to a modeler. Here's hoping!

Also, vaguely related, classes for the entertainment 2D are totally awesome, I'm super excited for some of the assignments we're gonna be doing. I won't be able to post all of it, but I'll try to show some interesting stuff! It's dream-chasing time, aww yeah.

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Oil Portrait & Figure Drawings

Here's the results of today's 15 hour school day, woohoo! The first is an addition to the oil portrait from yesterday, I painted another one since the assignment isn't due till Tuesday, and I'll probably go back in and touch both of them up a little more. I was trying to get some really smooth, academic modeling going on on the bearded guy, but didn't quite get there, I think it's a matter of value mixing and brush control, but I'll keep practicing and find out.

And then after that are some figure drawings, which were so fun and nice to do. About 6 months ago I switched from smooth to rough newsprint for figure drawing cause that's all our local art store had at the time, and I quickly discovered that rough newsprint is the crappiest thing in the universe to draw on and I eventually just started doing figure drawing in my sketchbook. But a couple days ago I went to the art store and they actually had some smooth, so I stocked up 3 50 sheet pads of it and it's made my day and life notably awesomer, conte` on smooth newsprint is like heaven in the form of waxy papery magic, so that was fun. I think my best drawing of the night was the very bottom middle one, or the second row left where he's doing the whole goring-a-recently-felled-boar-with-a-spear pose. Figure drawing is so much fun!

Have a good one! :)

<- Previous oil painting update

Portrait & Orthograph

Here's some schoolwork from today, a quick oil painting based off of a sculpture for Figure Painting class with Jon Foster, and a WIP of a Diablo 2 Druid orthograph for Entertainment Design class with Jason Manley and Ron Lemen. It's pretty awesome, exciting and terrifying to be getting in to our majors after foundations year, though I'm still gonna be learning forever it seems like I have enough knowledge that I can no longer use a lack of knowledge as an excuse for low quality work. I think I'll hold my work more accountable now because of it, which is a scary and exciting thing cause it's exciting to see that I can produce better stuff, but scary that there's no hiding anything to try and cover up a job poorly done, I think it's gonna bring some serious discipline in to my life and workflow. We shall see what the next year and a half brings!

Hope you have a good one, and keep doin whatever it is you need to do to get where you want to be!

Next oil painting update -> - Next ortho update ->

Zombies & Warm-ups

At last it's time to get back in the groove. Daily updates return NOW! *explosions and fireworks*
To re-start things off, here's the final for the zombies I mentioned in the above post, as well as a few 45 minutes warm-ups some of the guys and I did at the KC workshop.

In other news, TAD semester 3 just started and we're all diving in to our majors, Entertainment 2D for me, so hopefully I'll have some pretty awesome stuff to post from that pretty soon! Woohoo, arts!