Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Sketchbook - 7-20-11

Another workshop update! Still going strong, keeping busy and having a blast. This second week has been heavily focused on entertainment design so far, so the instructors, mainly Jason Manley, have been giving a lot of good info about the industry and how the process goes for making games. It's pretty interesting, and has got me thinking about careers and such and if concept art is really what I want to do; there's so much cool stuff in art that it's hard to choose, I'll probably talk with the instructors this week and see what's up.

But anyways, arts! Not too much to say about these, the first is just a flock of sketches and figure drawings that I've been doing over the past few days. The zombies near the end are some initial sketches for our second assignment, which is also a character design assignment.






















Then this one is just a quick speedpainting done of my view out of the KC pod while waiting for a lecture to start, messing around with some more direct painting and economic brush work.














Ciao!

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Workshop and Sketches

Hot diggity dog an update! I've been super busy with everything lately and haven't had much time to update, which will probably be the case for the next couple weeks while the TAD workshop is going on, and after that normal daily posting will resume and I'll try to update as much as I can in the meantime.

I'll try and talk a bit about the workshop in later posts when I have more time to update, cause so far it's been awesome, there's a ton of great people here and as always the information the instructors are presenting is great. We've had crits, lectures and demos from John English, George Pratt, Ted Kinsella, Andrea Wicklund from Valve, Brent Watkinson, Anita Kunz, Francis Vallejo, Jon Foster, Marshall Vandruff, and Ron and Vanessa Lemen so far with plenty more on the way. Maybe when I've got more time I'll take a week to just recap what went on during the workshop, we'll see. Below is a pic of Vanessa Lemen starting an oil demo.
















And since it's nice to see some art on art blogs, here's some of the things I've been up to lately. Some sketches from life drawing and imagination, which I'm feeling very happy with, I think my drawing is taking a turn for the better.






















Hope ya dig it, have a good one! Regular updates shall return soon!

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

EoW 167 - Walkthrough


Here's a quick walkthrough for my EoW piece, which is hopefully somewhat helpful or insightful. Click the link above to view it!

I'm still pretty out-of-town so I dunno what kinda updates I'll have in the next few days, but I'll try and post up some stuff. I got like 800 photos of awesome mountain environments on our drive through CO so I'll sort through those and do some environment studies and maybe post a few of the pics, we'll see.

Have a good'un!

Friday, July 1, 2011

Cast Drawing - Finished!

After many long hours, days and nights, blood, sweat and charcoal snot, it is done!

I still need to send it in for final approval, but I'm gonna be heading out of town tomorrow so this is about all it's gonna get (that also means updates probably won't be daily next week).

Overall this was a ton of fun to do and I learned a lot about value structure and subtlety of modeling for realism. It was definitely a struggle, but I can safely say that I've done everything I know to do to make it as good as it can be, so I'm happy with it.

Ultimately it's just a really good exercise, if you want to boost your finishing skills, do one of these. Not only does it teach realism and the effects of light on form, but also the patience and discipline that's oh so important to being able to create the most impactful imagery you possibly can. It's not done until it's as good as it can be; good can be various levels of polish and could be 2 or hours or 200 hours, but it's not done until it's done and that's how everything should be.

Final tally: 80-90 hours, about 2.5 sticks of Nitram charcoal consumed, approximately 15.34 miles walked between station point and drawing, 2 sore feet, 10% increased left arm strength as a substitute mahl stick, and many tracks of film scores and dubstep listened to.

Cast drawing, I wipe my hands of thee!