Revisions and Speed Painting

Woah, blogger changed the edit layout. Trippy. here are some new things I've been working on.

Continuing to revise my formations piece, messing around with colors and value:

Making some adjustments to another of my previous paintings, still a work in progress:

And here is the process for a new painting I did today:

^ ~2 hour speed painting.

^Refining and integrating the form/ environment.

^Adjusting light/ color. I will come back to it, it still needs a little something I think.

Then I decided to do a technical line drawing of the structure for clarity:

I was told at a portfolio review at GDC that doing line drawings for complex paintings was a good idea since it helps the modelers. It makes sense to me. I should do a back view, but I'm out of gas for the moment.

This and that

Here are some different scraps of things I've been working on...

^New one hour paintover. It's pretty faithful to the photo, but I messed with the color some.

^ New thumbnails I did this morning. I need to show gameplay/ character progression better, so I am trying to do a couple pieces that give a sense of movement through an environment, with cover and a destination.

^Revamping an old 1 hour painting. spring show is coming up, I am looking at messing with a few of my pieces and seeing if I can make them nice for submission.

^Technical drawings of some of the formations from the above piece in line.

 ^Idea for a space ship. Not finished.

^Tinkering with my old man environment piece.

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.

New stuff

I was recently inspired by the concept art for Deus Ex Human Revolution, so I decided to try and apply some of those concepts to a new drawing. I'll put up the progress drawings here to sort of explain the process.

I started with a rough idea of what I wanted. I planned on doing a research station. I'd previously done a research kiosk prop, and I wanted to create an environment to showcase that. I figured the space should be set up overlooking a testing area. I wanted the time period to be slightly but not ridiculously futuristic. (yes holograms, but also yes to paper, pens and books)

After getting the basics shapes in I started messing around with the lighting to make sure the piece was clear and understandable.

More lighting, contrast adjusting. Working with the value and really messing with the composition of drawings in the early stages has become increasingly important to me. Even though it's easy to get excited and want to rush forward, I am trying to really get the most out of the value and lighting, I think those things make or break a nice piece. Especially when your reference is the art for DX:HR, that style really seems to be all about contrast, lighting and color.

More details, continuing to push the lighting and contrast. Toned down to greyscale in prep for coloring.

I kind of had a color scheme like this in mind from the beginning, hence the green tone on the early drawings. I played with a lot of color combinations, but in the end I came back to this one. Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're coming back to the original color because it's best or just because your eyes are used to it, but I think the green works well for the laboratory feel.

Some final lighting tweaks. These were made mostly in deference to the DX:HR art references. I usually don't like to muddy up the atmosphere of my drawings, but I think I tend to draw everything too clean and the purpose of trying out new styles is to see how a thing works right? In the end I liked the lighting changes, it makes things softer and more atmospheric.

Snowy Mountain Town

Been trying to get back into my three hour speed paintings. And failing. I need to set more rigid timelines. The trouble with being on break is you want to keep coming back and tweaking, and that defeats the whole point of everything. So I'd say with futzing and messing around this is more like 4-5 hours over two days.

I've been working more in black and white to start lately, just to really focus on values. I'm not sure if it's actually good or bad. On the one hand my values are improving. On the other hand I think my colors feel less spontaneous. I've been painting back into the finalized work and this seems to help somewhat.

This is the spot that I don't like, where everything feels soft. It's in between being gestural in a cool way and being detailed in a cool way, but instead to me it just feels like halvsies with all the negative bits of both. I've been told I'm too harsh on myself, but I really think it's true!

And this is where I am at. I think it's less soft, but it still feels a little halvsie-ish. (I'm inventing words!) It definitely feels better, but the definition on the town feels somewhat out of place with the background. I'm still trying to decide how to rectify this in the future, but I'm going to try to keep my hands off this for now.

Various stuff

I've been trying to experiment and do some different things lately. I got inspired by Guild Wars promotional art and decided to take a look at the images and see if I could do something from scratch that was similar. I never work this way, so I'd say the drawing took 4-5 hours with all that noodling I'm trying to stop doing.

Line

So I started with the line. It's way sketchier than I like to work, but I'm trying to loosen up a little and be more gestural.

Adding value

Then, while referencing the other GW promo images I looked at how and where the value was applied and started trying to mimic the style. I took out some of the line and started punching values in selective areas.

Texturing

I ended up altering the pose because the movement directions felt wrong. I'm not sure if this really works either, she feels kind of stiff now. After I got the intensity of the values the way that I wanted I went in and added texture elements like I saw in the GW images. Overall I'm pretty happy. It was a fun experiment.


I've also been doing some props stuff lately. Here are some research kiosk designs I've been working on:

Digital Paintings

I've done a few environment paintings over the winter break. I try to keep things short (3-4 hours) but I find I end up nit picking and noodling over them. It's a bad habit and I think it makes things look overworked. I'm trying to cut it out and be more efficient. Still, here are some progressions on recent paintings:

I actually really like the colors here, although it's a bit like an oil slick.

I've been really trying to experiment with color. I have a pet peeve with all the gritty realism I've seen in recent years, so I've been trying to create sort of a heightened realism where things look realistic but with slightly more saturated colors. I've been trying to play with color combinations and create ambiance through color choice. Sometimes it ends up looking like a leprechaun urped rainbows all over the drawing, but other times I feel like it really adds something.

Here's a drawing I've been struggling with for color choice. I ended up putting it on the back burner, so it's technically not "finished" in my mind:

Color scheme 1: late afternoon

Color scheme 2: dusk

Color scheme 3: night

Each scheme changes things differently. I like the 2nd one the best because it has the widest range of color in it, but each one adds and detracts something. It's something I'm still trying to analyze and understand better.

If you like thumbs, here was the progression for this one. Slightly different than my usual way:

Base thumb

More detail

More 3 hour painting

I love reddit. I have to be careful about going there, because it's a ridiculous black hole for productivity, but it can also be a great resource. There are subreddits for all kinds of interesting photos such as interiors, abandoned buildings, nature scenes and a lot of other incredible things.

I recently was rooting around in there when I found this national geographic cover:

I was really inspired, so I decided to do a painting of it:

It took two and a half hours. I'm pretty pleased with the end result. It's not exactly the same, but for the time spent I think it came out all right. I might revisit it later on and do some more with it.

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!