Weekend Project - Broken Gas Station

Phew! This is the first weekend I've had in nearly a month to do anything at all. East coast, west coast, I've been a traveling fool lately. PAX last weekend was a blast - if you like video games I can't recommend it enough. Every time I go I meet more interesting and friendly people. While I was at PAX, I was lucky enough to get portfolio reviews from Bioware's Matt Rhodes and Peter Lipman. They were very kind and gave some thoughtful advice. One of the things I bump up against a lot is my issues with perspective, and a couple of friends have been urging me to work more with Maya in my under-drawing, so I am about to embark on what I will refer to as The Autumn Of Maya Block Meshes (I think that's what it's called in the Mayan calendar too, roughly.)

I do a lot of Sci Fi (because it is fantastic and I love it) but I thought I'd depart from it and try something different. At PAX I got to see a lot of The Last Of Us footage and I'm really excited about it, so I thought I'd try something in that direction.

So, I made my base mesh. I didn't want to make the mesh too complicated or I'd end up feeling tied to it. I thought I'd make the focal point a gas station, gas seems like it would be a useful commodity in the TLoU universe. Also gas stations have nice easily recognizable silhouettes.

I modeled a street space, then set my camera at a player POV height (I had little markers in the scene for PC character height reference) and took a number of screen shots around the space looking for an interesting composition.

I decided I was going to work really heavily with photo textures as a part of this process to prevent myself from being too meticulous about the painting. I figured it would also help make all of the surfaces look distinctive and avoid the homogenous painting look.

More photo textures intermixed with painting. I added the traffic light to frame the image.

More textures and painting. I started feeling light the station was getting lost inside larger shapes, so I played with its size as well as the buildings behind it.

At this point I started beating up on the place and adding foliage and a person for scale.

Initial color pass. I tend not to worry too much about saturation when I first build up the colors, more just trying to get a sense of what color each object would be, what general colors look good together for the scene. I don't think too much about color until this phase, just about the time of day in the planning phases. The time of day was supposed to be late afternoon, so I wanted warm late day colors.

After I got the colors decided, I started playing with the temperature and lighting to reinforce the time of day. I added some highlights and nitpicky details. At this point it's done enough, I'll probably put it away for a few days and come back to it and see if there are any major things I want to fix with fresh eyes.

Overall I'm pleased with the results. If I can control myself and stick to the block mesh this seems like a reasonable solution to some of my perspective issues.

Odds and Ends

I've been messing around with some environment ideas in my spare time over the summer, here is so more of that. A lot of it is playing with ideas for my thesis, which involves time travel.

^Seedy Bladerunner-esque back alley. I love the idea of the little food stalls back there, but I bet it'd smell like crap!

Another afternoon speed paint with some of the David Levy brushes. It's ok, but I'm not wild about it. I'm planning to do a set of research bases located in the Himalayan mountains as part of my thesis, so this was the beginnings of that brainstorm.

^Some building doodles for the above research station. I ended up combining a few to make a mountain-side research complex, but I'm not sure where that image went at the moment... huh.

^Brainstorming and reference for my police station.

^Police station drawing, but with unfinished color and lighting.

^Thinking I'll probably end up going this route, but I'm still not completely married to it yet.

In other news, I'm very excited to be going to PAX next week! It's going to be a great time. If you like video games I highly recommend it. Cheers!

Interior Spaces, Putting Clothes on Naked People

I was lucky to land an internship this summer, so things have been pretty busy. I've been drawing a lot though, so here are a few personal things I've been working on lately...

A big thing I did recently for a group directed study I've been taking is an interior environment piece for my thesis. Part of the thesis takes place in Moscow of 1812, as Napoleon rolls in and the city gets burned. My villain has a secret attic study, so I wanted to design the room.

First I planned it out:

In order to get a good idea of the space I looked at period buildings for the area, then roughed out the layout and ideas:

Then I did some line:

Rough value:

Refined value:

And finally color:

I worked on this after work and during lunch off and on over 2 weeks, I think it came out reasonably well. I really enjoy coloring pieces, but I tend to over-saturate I think.

Here is a naked lady I drew from life in class:

I went home and put clothes on her, made her into one of my thesis characters:

Here's another Maya to line piece, working on my police station:

Here's a funky in class exercise we did, we had 20 minutes to take some styrofoam shapes and make them into buildings. It's odd, but I kind of liked how this one came out:

 Lots more to come.

More Speedy Life Drawing and 3D

The workshop ended today. Sad face. I wish I could have taken the whole thing, I always feel like it takes me a few sessions to warm up before I can actually get the hang of drawing from life, but I'll take what I can get. Here are some edited highlights from today:

2 - 3 minute quick poses.

5 minute quick poses.

More 5 minute quick poses.

A few detail ones:

I spent an extra 2 minutes shading this one. ^

And another 3D piece that I lined up for my futuristic police station:

Speedy Life Drawing

I've been taking the same workshop I took at the beginning of last summer, with the excellent Michael Buffington Jr. Due to conflicts, I could only take the last 3/6 sessions, but I really love his workshop and I haven't drawn a model in ages, so it was really good. I have one more session on Thursday, I just wish I could do it more often.

Here are some 3 minute poses:

Details on a couple:

And 5 minute poses:

Details:

We need more male models though, I feel like I am better at the ladies than the men. Maybe it's a side-effect of being a lady. Or maybe it is just that ladies are awesome. I was having trouble loosening up, but found if I spent 30 seconds to a minute markering the pose approximately first it made a world of difference. So if you're feeling stiff (...at drawing...) I recommend giving it a try.

Continuation, etc.

I hate titling blog posts. Maybe I should start using a random word generator. For someone who's drawn a 5 strips a week comic for 6 years I have no creativity for applying titles to things. I never know what to call my pieces, either. Ask me the name of a piece three days in a row and I'll give you three different titles. Why? Because I just pick names out of the air and forget them a moment later. I'm sure that says something about the sort of person I am.

First, I toned down the saturation on this and made a few very minor tweaks:

Then I picked the color I like and did some more studies on how the costume would respond based on movement:

I'm not afraid to admit that I used Benjamin Huen's presentation style on this. Hilarious after the last post where I was concerned about ripping him off, but really I just think the way he lays out things looks nice. I love the idea of using reflections instead of shadows. It's so much slicker for sci-fi work. I also like the idea of doing a nicely rendered front and then flat colors on the back and explanatory poses. It seems like a waste of time to perfectly render everything, once is more than enough to explain the material if the back is more or less the same, right?

I'm working on using maya for a layout. I'm doing a series of layout angles for a police station, so here is the beginning of my work on that:

It's still really simple. I'm going to do 3-4 different angles, once I start detailing it out I'm hoping it will be more clear. Some of the people are incredibly off scale, but it's an early rough. I don't normally work this way but I'm trying to explore it since I think in the long run it will really cut down on my work time. Some reference photos I used:

Shot from Black Dahlia^

Vucan Learning Center^

SF Chronicle office from Zodiac^

Environments, Characters

I've been very busy these past few weeks. After not getting into the Spring Show last year I wasn't exactly holding my breath about being accepted this year, so I was blown away to find 6 of my pieces were being shown as well as winning two awards. I've worked really hard over the past year to improve, and it was nice to finally take a moment to enjoy some of the progress I've been making. After I did that for about 30 seconds though I decided to stop being emotional and GET BACK TO DRAWING.

In all fairness, when I think about where I was a year ago versus now I can see that even though I still have so much to improve on I have accomplished a lot. It occurred to me that since I'm trying to find a job I should start taking down the early entries to this blog (seeing as they are horrendous) but I think I'd rather leave them. I think keeping them there serves as an example that you really CAN make a big difference if you work your ass off, and there is no shame in that. No one starts out perfect, and some people have to work harder to achieve results than others, but knowing what sort of person you are and doing what it takes to accomplish your goal is what really matters. This time last year I remember making a spreadsheet of self inflicted homework assignments to complete over the summer - creatures, aliens, vehicles, and an environment every day. I'm grateful that I did that for myself.

Now enough wishy-washy rambles and on with the art!

This is where I got to with the thumbnails from the last post. It's a nice mood piece, but I think that I need to put more effort into creating useful ideas and objects that are good for modeling too. But it was faithful to the thumbnail I chose, and I think it came out reasonably well.

I was playing some Diablo, can you tell?

While my boyfriend was out visiting I decided to do some character work for my thesis. This character is Renee Murong, set in the time period 2150 or so. She is an undercover private investigator posing as an administrative assistant trying to blow the lid off some white collar crime.

I liked this outfit the best.

I like the blue and purple best. I'm worried she came out looking a little too much like Benjamin Huen's excellent character design for Ashley Williams from Mass Effect 3. I'm a Mass Effect fan, and I try to be conscientious of outside ideas contaminating what I'm doing. I just thought that the boots kept her feeling strong, and I didn't want to give her straight heels because it started feeling skanky. I wanted a balance of strong and sexy, because she's assuming a role and has to dress the part. Administrative assistants in any time period need to look professional, but they also tend to be attractive and these were all ideas I tried to hold onto while making the design futuristic.