I wasn't sure I'd make it, but here's my finished piece for the Diablo 3 contest on dA! Had a ton of fun with this one and am quite pleased with the outcome. The wizard's armor was a blast to paint, haha.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Pathfinder Characters
Here's the rest of this set of Pathfinder characters, all from adventure paths 73 and 74!
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Baphomet Cultist and Hosilla
Here's a couple characters I did for Pathfinder RPG by Paizo Publishing! Since Adventure Paths 73 and 74 have been released I can show them now and will be posting a couple a day for the rest of this week!
Had a lot of fun with these two, experimented a lot with process and techniques and think I found some interesting pros and cons to working super painterly vs. being very clean and organized with layers and selections.
© Paizo Publishing
Had a lot of fun with these two, experimented a lot with process and techniques and think I found some interesting pros and cons to working super painterly vs. being very clean and organized with layers and selections.
© Paizo Publishing
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Cloud Spin released!
Hey guys! I just wanted to give you a quick heads up, a game I worked on just got released in the app store and if you have an iPad 2 or mini you should totally check it out! [Link]
The developer put a ton of effort in to working on this and it's a crazy high quality game, and I spent the past few months doing texture work on it. You can check out the trailer below to see it in action! :D
So yeah, if you or anyone you know wants to have some high-speed fun for just a couple bucks be sure to check it out, you won't be disappointed! :B
The developer put a ton of effort in to working on this and it's a crazy high quality game, and I spent the past few months doing texture work on it. You can check out the trailer below to see it in action! :D
So yeah, if you or anyone you know wants to have some high-speed fun for just a couple bucks be sure to check it out, you won't be disappointed! :B
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
20% Off Artistic Development Series!
20% off code: artistsrule
Hey guys, I haven't posted things like this before, but I feel like this is very much worth sharing to those of you who are interested in having a career in the arts. Marshall was one of my instructors at TAD and he's one of the best educators I've ever had the privilege of knowing, so if you're in or around the LA area I would highly recommend attending this series!
As a bonus for helping with promotion, I've been able to get a coupon code for 20% off that you guys can use, and I guarantee that the information is more than worth the price. Hope to see you there!
Marshall's Website
You and the Mat's Website
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Advice for Aspiring Artists Pt. 3
And now for the dramatic conclusion to the epic trilogy. Heroes will rise, bad habits will fall, in this last chapter we'll discuss how to focus your efforts and learn the most and improve quickly with your studies. If you missed them, click these links for Part One and Part Two. And now for...
WISDOM NUMBER THREE!!! Work smart and leave your comfort zone. This part is my qualifier for art school, tutorials, and educational resources in general, because they can be good, but only if you make them good. Once you've gotten in to the habit of drawing consistently, it's important to start being mindful of what you're drawing, how you're drawing it, and why you're drawing it. A key ingredient of success is hard work, but if that work isn't purposeful it might not move you along very quickly. For a highly nerdy analogy, think about a video game; generally speaking a player with the strongest weapon or the largest army is going to have a serious advantage and likely to win the game, but if that player just goes around attacking things at random then a smarter player with fewer resources has a good chance to win the game. It takes not only resources and dedication, but also a little bit of strategy.
To translate that to art, if you're drawing all day every day but only draw the same front-view character that you've drawn a million times already, chances are you won't learn too much. Sure over time that character will start to look pretty awesome because you've ironed out so many mistakes, but what happens when you're called upon to do something else? To be a successful artist you must be a master of principles that can be applied to any situation; if you just follow the same 3-step formula every time you're not going to be able to deliver when an art director asks you for something you've never drawn before.
Now the problem here is that there are different ways to draw the same thing, and a lot of the times beginners will practice, but they do so in a way that doesn't strategically help them with their immediate needs. For example, if you go on any art forum ever and ask for advice, I guarantee you someone will drop this bomb:
COPY BRIDGMAN!!! and the crowd goes wild! And I can tell you that I've seen a lot of sketchbooks with pages and pages and pages of Bridgman copies that the artist learned absolutely nothing from, mine included. But why? How can this be? Because it is copied with the wrong things in mind; people open their book, grab their pencils, then start copying angles, try to get the same texture as him, draw fun swoopy lines, and notice that he has a little zig-zag shading and they completely miss the point. They are copying Bridgman by observation, not realizing that he's meant to be copied by construction; not by using the same angles, but by understanding that all his drawings are forms: cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones that are welded together to form 3d representations. Now, if you copy Bridgman with the mindset of form and perspective, you're going to learn a whole different ball game, and odds are your figure drawing is going to jump 10 levels in the coming months because you're not not just drawing lines on a page, but you're learning to create 3D space on a 2D surface.
Because of these dangers, you must seek out good information to help you in your quest. If you're trying to walk to a store, you can walk up and down every street until you find it and you'll eventually get there, but it's easier if you just get directions beforehand and go straight there. Similarly, you'll improve faster if you seek out quality information and use it as a compass for your artistic journey. Now don't get me wrong, because that does NOT mean finding a magical figure drawing tutorial that instantly makes you great. Rather, use your good judgment to analyze whether or not the information you're ingesting is actually educational or if it's simply fun to watch. A big one here is time-lapsed speedpaint videos; digital art is great, but these videos are the bane of beginning artists of today, because they leave people with the impression that if you just use texture brushes you should be able to create awesome art in 20 minutes. But what people miss is that the artists who can actually do that have such strong foundational skills that they're able to condense the massive amounts of information they have in their mind in to a few simple brush strokes. You can watch 10,000 speedpaint videos and download all the custom brushes in the world, but you will never learn as much from that as you will from a solid lecture about vanishing points and how to place cubes in perspective.
And lastly on a similar note always remember that you have to have the courage to leave your comfort zone. You improve by doing the things that cause you trouble; so if you have trouble with drawing dynamic figures in crazy perspective, don't try and sneak your way around it and always draw the same one point perspective and hope no one notices. Rather than shirking and avoiding, charge that shizz like a bull and just get it done and get it out of the way. If you can draw great figures from photos but as soon as you try to draw from your head it falls apart, the solution probably isn't to keep drawing figures from photos. Take off the training wheels, put on your helmet and ride. You will fall down, scrape your knee, try not to cry, cry a lot, but then you'll get over it and try again and eventually you'll figure it out, and once you do it will never cause you problems again. You don't want to be 30 years old still riding a bike with training wheels because you're just not sure if you're good enough to ride without them. Of course you're not good enough, that's why you need to take them off and fail a few times, because ultimately that is how we learn.
I hope this series has been useful to you, I'd like to do more things like this in the future, perhaps weekly and with some better editing and presentation, so if there's something you're hungry for feel free to suggest it. Beyond that, keep drawing, don't give up on your dreams, and go kick some ass! :)
WISDOM NUMBER THREE!!! Work smart and leave your comfort zone. This part is my qualifier for art school, tutorials, and educational resources in general, because they can be good, but only if you make them good. Once you've gotten in to the habit of drawing consistently, it's important to start being mindful of what you're drawing, how you're drawing it, and why you're drawing it. A key ingredient of success is hard work, but if that work isn't purposeful it might not move you along very quickly. For a highly nerdy analogy, think about a video game; generally speaking a player with the strongest weapon or the largest army is going to have a serious advantage and likely to win the game, but if that player just goes around attacking things at random then a smarter player with fewer resources has a good chance to win the game. It takes not only resources and dedication, but also a little bit of strategy.
To translate that to art, if you're drawing all day every day but only draw the same front-view character that you've drawn a million times already, chances are you won't learn too much. Sure over time that character will start to look pretty awesome because you've ironed out so many mistakes, but what happens when you're called upon to do something else? To be a successful artist you must be a master of principles that can be applied to any situation; if you just follow the same 3-step formula every time you're not going to be able to deliver when an art director asks you for something you've never drawn before.
Now the problem here is that there are different ways to draw the same thing, and a lot of the times beginners will practice, but they do so in a way that doesn't strategically help them with their immediate needs. For example, if you go on any art forum ever and ask for advice, I guarantee you someone will drop this bomb:
COPY BRIDGMAN!!! and the crowd goes wild! And I can tell you that I've seen a lot of sketchbooks with pages and pages and pages of Bridgman copies that the artist learned absolutely nothing from, mine included. But why? How can this be? Because it is copied with the wrong things in mind; people open their book, grab their pencils, then start copying angles, try to get the same texture as him, draw fun swoopy lines, and notice that he has a little zig-zag shading and they completely miss the point. They are copying Bridgman by observation, not realizing that he's meant to be copied by construction; not by using the same angles, but by understanding that all his drawings are forms: cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones that are welded together to form 3d representations. Now, if you copy Bridgman with the mindset of form and perspective, you're going to learn a whole different ball game, and odds are your figure drawing is going to jump 10 levels in the coming months because you're not not just drawing lines on a page, but you're learning to create 3D space on a 2D surface.
Because of these dangers, you must seek out good information to help you in your quest. If you're trying to walk to a store, you can walk up and down every street until you find it and you'll eventually get there, but it's easier if you just get directions beforehand and go straight there. Similarly, you'll improve faster if you seek out quality information and use it as a compass for your artistic journey. Now don't get me wrong, because that does NOT mean finding a magical figure drawing tutorial that instantly makes you great. Rather, use your good judgment to analyze whether or not the information you're ingesting is actually educational or if it's simply fun to watch. A big one here is time-lapsed speedpaint videos; digital art is great, but these videos are the bane of beginning artists of today, because they leave people with the impression that if you just use texture brushes you should be able to create awesome art in 20 minutes. But what people miss is that the artists who can actually do that have such strong foundational skills that they're able to condense the massive amounts of information they have in their mind in to a few simple brush strokes. You can watch 10,000 speedpaint videos and download all the custom brushes in the world, but you will never learn as much from that as you will from a solid lecture about vanishing points and how to place cubes in perspective.
And lastly on a similar note always remember that you have to have the courage to leave your comfort zone. You improve by doing the things that cause you trouble; so if you have trouble with drawing dynamic figures in crazy perspective, don't try and sneak your way around it and always draw the same one point perspective and hope no one notices. Rather than shirking and avoiding, charge that shizz like a bull and just get it done and get it out of the way. If you can draw great figures from photos but as soon as you try to draw from your head it falls apart, the solution probably isn't to keep drawing figures from photos. Take off the training wheels, put on your helmet and ride. You will fall down, scrape your knee, try not to cry, cry a lot, but then you'll get over it and try again and eventually you'll figure it out, and once you do it will never cause you problems again. You don't want to be 30 years old still riding a bike with training wheels because you're just not sure if you're good enough to ride without them. Of course you're not good enough, that's why you need to take them off and fail a few times, because ultimately that is how we learn.
I hope this series has been useful to you, I'd like to do more things like this in the future, perhaps weekly and with some better editing and presentation, so if there's something you're hungry for feel free to suggest it. Beyond that, keep drawing, don't give up on your dreams, and go kick some ass! :)
Monday, June 10, 2013
Advice for Aspiring Artists Pt. 2
Here's the continuation of yesterday's journal discussing the importance of hard work. If you missed it, click here!
In part two I'm gonna talk about one of the biggest roadblocks I hear from artists who are having difficulty getting in to good study habits, so without further ado...
WISDOM NUMBER TWO!! Don't wait for perfect weather and stop making excuses. So often I hear things like "I don't want to waste paper" or "I don't know what to draw" or "I haven't found a good tutorial" or "I don't want to study perspective" or any number of things along those lines. I'll be blunt and just put the answer out there now: get over it. If you want to be an artist, you have to do the work, end of story. And with all the time you've spent thinking, wondering, being uncertain, and searching for that magical art secret of power, you could have filled 10 pages in your sketchbook today and increased your skill by an exponential amount.
Paper is not "wasted" by being filled with bad drawings, that's what it was made to be filled with. In fact, what even is a "bad" drawing? One of the literal definitions of the word bad is "Not working properly", something that's not fulfilling its purpose. Well, if you're drawing in your sketchbook with the goal of improving, is a "bad" drawing a drawing that doesn't look like Rembrandt drew it? Or is a "bad" drawing something that didn't teach you anything, because that was your goal in the first place? If you fill an entire sketchbook with drawings you couldn't pay people to hang on their walls, but you learned from it and are now a better artist, then you have a sketchbook of very good drawings!
As for not knowing what you should draw, it's a lot easier than you think. Look around your room and draw the 3rd thing you see; spending 30 minutes drawing a stupid sock will increase your skills much more than scrolling through 80 different tumblrs for 3 hours trying to find the perfect, quintessential reference to draw from. If you run out of socks to draw, then be a little more thoughtful and try to analyze weaknesses in your work. Do you have trouble with hands? Draw your own hands, google image search hands and draw the first 50 results (50?!?! Remember the hard work part?). Like I mentioned in part one, having great resources and a meticulously planned curriculum does help, but if you don't have that then don't let it hold you back from drawing. Drawing something for 30 minutes a day is far better than trying to decide what to draw all day and never actually drawing.
Now for something a little tougher to digest, which is that you must be self-disciplined enough to study all aspects of art. If you don't want to put in the effort to study "boring" subjects like perspective, anatomy, color theory, etc. then I guess you don't care enough to become a great artist, because those are the prerequisites. These things are the push-ups you do before you enter the boxing ring; they're boring and repetitive, but you do NOT want to go in to the ring without having done them.
And lastly as far "I don't have time to study." goes... Well, simply put if you don't have time to study, you don't have time for success; and how much time do you spend on facebook each day? Watching TV? Playing video games? If you spent just one tiny hour (about 1/16th of your waking consciousness) every single day studying and drawing, you would progress faster than 80% of other people claiming they want to be a professional artist someday. Also remember that consistency is as important, maybe more important, than quantity; drawing for an hour a day every day is far better than drawing for one 8 hour stretch once a week.
I know this part probably comes off as a little rude and blunt, and it is, but remember this: Firstly, I'm not judging anyone; this journal is for me as much as it is for anyone else, I need to get my arse in gear and get disciplined too, so don't hear this as the criticism of the high and mighty. Secondly is that I think a lot of beginners need a reality check when it comes to art; it's become a very flowery discipline where everything you do is awesome and all your relatives think you're just the greatest, but the cold, hard truth of it is that it's hard and it takes a lot of work. If you really truly want to master it, you'll have to steel yourself against all excuses and get started immediately. Heck, if you want to prove your dedication, close your browser right now and draw for a solid 2 hours, you'll be glad you did.
More tomorrow in part three. :)
And some more studies, too:
In part two I'm gonna talk about one of the biggest roadblocks I hear from artists who are having difficulty getting in to good study habits, so without further ado...
WISDOM NUMBER TWO!! Don't wait for perfect weather and stop making excuses. So often I hear things like "I don't want to waste paper" or "I don't know what to draw" or "I haven't found a good tutorial" or "I don't want to study perspective" or any number of things along those lines. I'll be blunt and just put the answer out there now: get over it. If you want to be an artist, you have to do the work, end of story. And with all the time you've spent thinking, wondering, being uncertain, and searching for that magical art secret of power, you could have filled 10 pages in your sketchbook today and increased your skill by an exponential amount.
Paper is not "wasted" by being filled with bad drawings, that's what it was made to be filled with. In fact, what even is a "bad" drawing? One of the literal definitions of the word bad is "Not working properly", something that's not fulfilling its purpose. Well, if you're drawing in your sketchbook with the goal of improving, is a "bad" drawing a drawing that doesn't look like Rembrandt drew it? Or is a "bad" drawing something that didn't teach you anything, because that was your goal in the first place? If you fill an entire sketchbook with drawings you couldn't pay people to hang on their walls, but you learned from it and are now a better artist, then you have a sketchbook of very good drawings!
As for not knowing what you should draw, it's a lot easier than you think. Look around your room and draw the 3rd thing you see; spending 30 minutes drawing a stupid sock will increase your skills much more than scrolling through 80 different tumblrs for 3 hours trying to find the perfect, quintessential reference to draw from. If you run out of socks to draw, then be a little more thoughtful and try to analyze weaknesses in your work. Do you have trouble with hands? Draw your own hands, google image search hands and draw the first 50 results (50?!?! Remember the hard work part?). Like I mentioned in part one, having great resources and a meticulously planned curriculum does help, but if you don't have that then don't let it hold you back from drawing. Drawing something for 30 minutes a day is far better than trying to decide what to draw all day and never actually drawing.
Now for something a little tougher to digest, which is that you must be self-disciplined enough to study all aspects of art. If you don't want to put in the effort to study "boring" subjects like perspective, anatomy, color theory, etc. then I guess you don't care enough to become a great artist, because those are the prerequisites. These things are the push-ups you do before you enter the boxing ring; they're boring and repetitive, but you do NOT want to go in to the ring without having done them.
And lastly as far "I don't have time to study." goes... Well, simply put if you don't have time to study, you don't have time for success; and how much time do you spend on facebook each day? Watching TV? Playing video games? If you spent just one tiny hour (about 1/16th of your waking consciousness) every single day studying and drawing, you would progress faster than 80% of other people claiming they want to be a professional artist someday. Also remember that consistency is as important, maybe more important, than quantity; drawing for an hour a day every day is far better than drawing for one 8 hour stretch once a week.
I know this part probably comes off as a little rude and blunt, and it is, but remember this: Firstly, I'm not judging anyone; this journal is for me as much as it is for anyone else, I need to get my arse in gear and get disciplined too, so don't hear this as the criticism of the high and mighty. Secondly is that I think a lot of beginners need a reality check when it comes to art; it's become a very flowery discipline where everything you do is awesome and all your relatives think you're just the greatest, but the cold, hard truth of it is that it's hard and it takes a lot of work. If you really truly want to master it, you'll have to steel yourself against all excuses and get started immediately. Heck, if you want to prove your dedication, close your browser right now and draw for a solid 2 hours, you'll be glad you did.
More tomorrow in part three. :)
And some more studies, too:
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