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 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.

5 hours, 5 more paints + gun thumbs

 

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.