A week's worth of dumps

Some things I've been working on this week:

Some alternate angles on a bug and a bobcat, plus a new iteration for the tramway I'm brainstorming.

After my thesis was passed my director told me I needed to work on finishing. I'm not sure this is very successful, but I dedicated a few hours to working with photos and trying some detail, but it's tough to do without it looking overworked. I think I need to start doing some style analysis.

Work in progress, messing around with different ideas. Still fighting with simplistic shapes vs. overworking.

I'm sure Hemmingway is doing back flips in his grave over this one.

Trying out some different thumbnail refinement techniques to get away from my cartoonishness. These are for the club we started, we're building a post-apocalyptic city on the ocean. Some are not really complete, some are less thumbnails and more preliminary sketchwork.

A few things

What a week. I'm in the middle of a bunch of projects in various states of finish/ unfinish so let's start off with a comic I did about a month ago after I found out I'd won the IGDA scholarship to go to GDC:

I actually do a 5x a week comic strip for my undergraduate campus paper, and have done it for 5 years now. These days it... sometimes isn't 5 times a week. Things are pretty busy now. This one made me laugh in post though, since after having gone through GDC I think my stress and concern was actually somewhat well-placed. But in the end it turned out okay, so at least there wasn't a horror story postmortem comic that followed it up.

Things I've been working on the past couple days. The triumphant return of grandpa robot legs:

My classmate gave me the assignment wrong so I had to redo him. That sort of thing would have likely ticked me off in the past, but I'm starting to realize the more times you draw something, the better you get/ it ends up looking. I like this grandpa better than the one from last weekend. Maybe I'll just continue drawing grandpa robot legs for the rest of my life, and he will become my magnum opus.

Or.... maybe not.


Color studies:

The pink one is likely to haunt my nightmares.

Also some quick sketches of tram/ monorail car ideas. Vehicles aren't my strong suit, but I would like to improve at them, and I'll be doing a tramway system as part of my thesis if it gets approved.

So I'll probably look at those tomorrow and start refining/ doing some more iterations on that.

Crazy town catch up week(end)

So I missed all my classes last week to go to GDC. Which meant that Friday night I had to immediately start cranking into my homework to start making up for lost time. I have Monday/ Tuesday classes, so after picking up my homework assignments I didn't have a lot of time to get things done, but I did my best to kick it into overdrive and get some stuff done.

First, a fun drawing. about 1.5 hours total part paintover part imagination:

I'm going to keep continuing to do 3-5 of these a week. But not 25 a week like last time. That was insanity. That's only for SPECIAL weeks.

My props homework is due today. We need 3 props, large medium and small. The props are our own ideas and they need to be used together to solve an in game puzzle. It was sort of rushed, but I did my best to get something together for class today:

The top one is my large prop. I decided to do a reactor that powers a space elevator. The reactor goes offline and the PC needs to reconnect the lines and inject a reagent to restart it. The second image contains a nicer detail of the reactor console and on the upper right is the prop used to reconnect the lines. On the bottom is the volatile reagent transport container. It works sort of like a french press (I've been drinking a lot of coffee this weekend). A friend mentioned the arrows are confusing and make it look like the transport container and line connection bracket prop are related, so I'll probably just take them out. I think it's pretty obvious that thing is pulling up and down.

Here are all the thumbnails:

Tuesday I have to do a 3 point turn of the character I've been working on so it's the TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF GRANDPA ROBOT LEGS! It's not due until Tuesday though, so I have a little while left to purdy him up.

I hate the T-pose. I always have to check the arm length 27 times because it makes him look like he has gorilla arms.

Send help!

Wow. The past week has just been a maelstrom of tasks. I've been making it my spring semester goal to draw an average of twelve hours a day and with all the projects lately it's been hard to find a way NOT to draw at least 12 hours a day. Usually it's start drawing by 8am, finish drawing before midnight, eat when I remember to. But hey, it's got to be good for skills, right? Right? ....Guys?

Between classes and personal projects the planets have aligned in such a way that all I do is thumbnail lately. Thumbnails forever, thumbnail until YOU LOVE IT. Seriously, getting a little punchy here. What were we talking about?

Ah yes. Thumbs. So earlier this year I mentioned that I and a couple of mates started a club and out project is adapting The Old Man and the Sea for video games. Weird concept, I'm sure Hemingway is doing backflips in his grave over this one. Funny thing is, I think it would actually be a pretty sweet game the way I'm doing it. The specifics are in one of the posts below, but I did some inspiration boards today.

I have mixed feelings on open world exploration type games, because I'm all about the story, but I think that for what I'm doing a Shadow of the Colossus type approach is really spot on for the material. It reminds me of wandering the dune sea in SWTOR, or even in Uncharted 3. The desert can be very powerful and beautiful. With the right backdrop, music and random encounters what fun that sort of world could be. I haven't played Journey, but I wonder if it's a similar concept.

As part of my Visual Development class we were given an exercise. Usually I don't care for exercises too much to be completely honest. They're often "for your own good" sort of things that really ARE beneficial but also time consuming and horrendous. (I recently had to draw 100 cubes from different angles. It gets old quickly, let me tell you.) This one was really fun though, here's how it works:

Write down 6 emotions. Write down 6 place types. Write down 6 occupations. Then, roll a d6 for each list and do a thumbnail of a character that embodies all three words. It can be pretty hilarious, the combinations. Reminds me of dwarf fortress! (Crafty unicorn steaks anyone?) The top two rows are from that exercise and it was really pretty awesome! I would do it again, for kicks. Also good for brainstorming when the creativity isn't flowing naturally, so that was really great.

Then I did some silhouettes of soldier guys because I thought it'd be a good personal exercise. Then I thought about it and remembered how lady soldiers always seem to get ripped off, so I did some of those too. Armor for ladies is harder though, hard to still make them look like ladies while also making them look appropriately soldiery.

I'm also continuing work on my 3 part props for a game puzzle. I'm doing a reactor that powers a futuristic lab facility. The reactor gets sabotaged and the PC has to locate a vile of the reagent (volatile), get it back to the reactor and insert it to restart the power. The hose lines also need to be reconnected in the correct order, so the props are the reactor, the reagent/ transport vile, and a tool to reconnect the lines. It's coming along, hoping to have it finalized and colored by the weekend.

Finally, I decided to do a character speed paint last Monday for a change. I did it from imagination, wanted to make a spacey bounty hunter type character:

I like the red one, but my friend said it looked like Samus Aran. I guess you just can't do a spacey woman in red without someone thinking it looks Metroid. There are issues, but I finished it in just under three hours with no references, so I'm kind of proud. I like to usually use some kind of reference, just for inspiration. I went into this one not really sure what I was going to do and just sort of let it happen and I'm reasonably happy with the results.

So I hear you like thumbnails

...Actually I have no idea what you like. Do you like thumbnails? Because the soup d'jour is thumbnails.

I've been working on an interpretation of Old Man and the Sea for a club project. I'm resetting the story in a location where the old man is a member of a desert steppe village and hunts rogue AI machines with a harpoon gun on some kind of sand ship. It's not really a concrete idea yet, but I think it's going to be sort of a technological fantasy. I like the idea of a lone elderly hunter taking down killer robots with a harpoon gun, something about that resonates with me as especially bad ass.

So... I looked at a lot of references of fishermen. I wanted him to be ripped, but in a 65 year old sort of way. I was surprised at the sort of guns for find on older guys who haul nets for a living. I'm not sure we know much about the Old Man's past, but I like the idea that he was attacked by a robot  resulting in the loss of his leg(s) and so he tracked that robot across the dune sea, slew it and used it's legs for a prosthesis. A leg for a leg!

Also I've been doing some robots. I have three separate projects right now involving robots of different types so it's looking to be semester of the robot. Probably good for me. Girls don't usually grow up drawing robots, they grow up drawing horses and stuff. Oh wait, I'm rubbish at horses too. I'll just show myself out now.

 

So, just a variety. I'll be modeling one in Maya and that needs to be bipedal in a generally humanoid shape. The lower hunter type robots I was thinking of for the above project. Just brainstorming for now.

Props, etc

Well, school started up last week. We recently had an assignment in my hero to take a number of pre-created props and draw them in different angles. The assignment was just line drawings, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to practice trying some other paint styles and trying to color the props similarly to the originals as well. The only prop I know the artist for is the 4th one down, which is by Dan Ghiordanscu.

 It was actually a pretty challenging task. Line didn't take very long, but the bottom 2 color props took a while to color because I'm not very practiced at the style. It's encouraged me to try to do more of it though, so I can improve.

Other stuff I've been working on... took some of my old thumbnails for a Russian character circa 1812 and did a quick(ish) painting of what I thought were some of the more successful elements. I think it took about 2 hours.

I looked at Justin Sweet a bit earlier and I think that rubbed off.

The Warden Commander

I did a drawing recently of my grey warden from Dragon Age Origins. I don't do a lot of fan art, because I don't think it serves well for portfolio pieces, but I've always loved the scene where the human noble origin catches up with the man who murdered his/her family. It's a very cool story filled with high emotions, so I thought it was be a good scene to try illustrating.

I'm really working on perspective, so I started with the main characters:

Just flat coloring to start, trying to get a sense of what colors I think would look good. I used a variety of references, as well as making up the things I thought would look cool. One of the things I love about concept art and illustration is being able to work with pre-existing concepts and pushing them to be as exciting or inspiring as possible. I'm glad I live alone, posing in front of a mirror with my swiffer to try and get the pose of whipping in a circle would have been pretty ridiculous with an audience.

I just added this to show how it took me a while to figure out what sort of background was right. I initially intended to do the scene in a dungeon, because that is where it is set in the game. However, I ended up deciding to go with a different location that I thought would be more interesting.

I set it in a chantry. It was fun making a variety of details and playing with light. I chose a chantry a) because it seemed like a cool place for a fight, but b) there is a lot of architecture to make my life miserable with perspective. Since I'm trying to push myself to sort things out, this was a good opportunity. The shadows here are wildly inaccurate.

Continuing to futz around. I made the table into a pew and that seems more natural for the setting. Messing with the shadows, but they still don't feel right. Other issues are that even though Howe is flying through the air, he still feels very close to the Warden. Since she's not traveling backwards, that just doesn't work. Also the windows behind her are behaving like they are on a flat wall, not on an elipse.

You're never really finished with something, you just have to decide when to throw in the towel. I adjusted Howe to make it look like he's really moving toward the viewer. I mapped the shadows from the light source and found that the reason they looked so wrong is from this angle you can't actually SEE his shadow at all. It looked a little odd, but I can't argue with math. I also fixed the windows, which is a relief to my eyes.

Overall I like it. I want to push harder to use less line in my work though, so I am disappointed in myself for falling into old habits. Must keep trying!

More Character Design

I'm away from home, which means away from my Cintiq. It's funny, I've worked for years with my trusty Intuos 3 tablet, and now 3 months with a Cintiq ruins everything. Working with the Intuos feels like an incredible chore now, which is ridiculous and probably one of those first world problems you hear about.

I've been working on a female character in the same vein as my male design for Donovan down below. I wanted to do something fantasy, so I decided to do a mage, mostly because mage clothing in games always bothers me. Usually it's some sort of ridiculous robe, dress, gown or something. To me, even if you are a mage I'd still think in battle you'd want to move around. Just because you can shoot lightning out of your hand/staff/face doesn't mean agility isn't important when people are trying to murder you. Also, there's hardly any armor for mages. I know that you have magic, but there's nothing wrong with a little something between you and a sharp stick, right? I mean, this is battle we're talking about. Things like that have always gotten to me, so I decided to pursue some options.

Oh, also - it's a huge pet peeve of mine that women aren't fully clothed in games, so it should go without saying that we're going to do a clothed female character, not a cleavage babe in thigh highs. It will never cease to amaze me the things lady characters wear into battle. But I could talk about that for paragraphs, so let's just move along shall we?

My process for this was different than with Donovan because a mage by class tends to have his/her role a little more defined. I saw this as your sort of starting archetype female character for an MMO. If it was for a story I'd say that this is a practical, battle-hardened type of person - serious and seasoned. I dislike the archetype that mages need to be frail sensitive people that cringe on the outskirts of battle for fear of breaking a nail.

I did some costume concepts:

I'd like to do multiples in color like I did with Donovan, but I've had a lot of side projects on my plate lately. So for right now I picked one that I liked best, an amalgamation of a few designs, but primarily taken from the right image of the second set. I picked that design because I felt like it was practical, but the silhouette still read as a mage. What's more, even though there are drapey elements to the design, the outfit would allow for movement, while still theoretically still providing some protection.

I went for a bright blizzard style color scheme:

And then I added textures and scraped/scuffed it up so it looked like it wasn't fresh off the hangar at the Mage Surplus:

Voila! Job done. For now, at least.

Back from the dead!

Well. Summer class. Let me tell you: summer classes are not to be underestimated. I knew being a grad student was going to be intensive but I got kicked in the shins repeatedly over the past few weeks.

However! I have still be working, albeit it at a little more muted pace. So I'll be dumping a few sets up here in the next little while. Today I am posting some character design I've been doing.

I've noticed a trend in video games, where you have this caucasian male twenty something with brown hair that we're all supposed to identify with. Well, not me - I'm a blonde female twenty-something and any time someone threatens to make a character I'm supposed to identify with there's a shit storm. But I digress.

So I started out trying to think of a cool character that wouldn't be caucasion/ brown hair/ hooded sweatshirt. I'm not sure I've succeeded, but it was an attempt to think about a different sort of character. I decided to go black/ ambiguous minority. I also didn't want to make him completely ripped, because games are stacked with characters that are incredibly muscled. Like, comically muscled. I'd prefer a character I have some chance of feeling like I could be the person (well, if I was a dude, but being a female gamer is a trove of weird issues that I don't even want to think about wading into on this space.)

What have we got so far? Non-white. Non-steroided. It's a start. Next up, what sort of character is he? I thought about it a bit and I like the idea of ex military turned mercenary, maybe vigilante-esque. Think... Oceans 11, Guy Richie, that sort of thing. And I don't want him to be an elite killing machine. Maybe he's combat trained, but more of an agility pistol sort of guy. If he's not a combat specialist what is he? Maybe... a tech. Like a computer guy. Maybe it's 50/60 years in the future and rather than mechanics, hacker types are far more useful in picking locks, hotwiring vehicles, etc...

This is how I think things through, sort of an example of my stream of consciousness. So we've got a lot of useful information now:

Race: Minority mix/ African American leaning
Age: 30-ish
Build: Lean muscular
Occupation: Ex-military tech specialist. Hired merc, possible vigilante agenda.
Alignment: Chaotic good most likely
Time period: 50-60 years in the future

Hm. We need a name. I like "Donovan Wallace," so that's what I'm going to run with for now.

Let's get drawing!

Some potential face shapes - you can see the edge of my notes about personality on the side.

I look at photos of actors and things to get an idea of what I want. I think I used 3 different actors here, I try to make it not look like anyone specific, but it helps keep the ideas consistent. Plus with actors you can find pictures at different angles of the same guy which is very convenient.

Ideation.

The Donovan on the right is getting a little too beefy. Also maybe a little old, think it's the hairline. Just trying some different poses to get a feel for the character. If one of the many sketches work out it could make a good basis for a finished digital piece.

Clothing concepts.

So now I'm trying to figure out what he'll wear. We know his occupation, given that he's ex-military we can range from very military influenced to very casual. Lots of freedom, so I'm trying out a range. I'd think he'd still be a little military influenced in his look, since that tends to stick with you - probably not too movement restrictive; utility, comfort and protection are important.

Now that I have some ideas, let's flesh them out:

Donovan # 1

Donovan #2

Donovan #3

I actually like number 3 best. It's pretty casual but the colors are interesting and not something you see as much in games. Usually it's pretty gritty, so the red/orange is nice and goes well the the skin color. I also like that the gun holster and tightness of the sweater carry the subtle military feel I wanted. It might be a little Nathan Drake though, unsure. I also like that this one feels "normal" but still futuristic enough to fit into a near future aesthetic. They probably won't be wearing moon boots in 60 years, but you never know.

That's a wrap for now.