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!

Recent Work

I've been so busy with class and side projects lately that updating the blog hasn't been an enormous priority. But I thought I'd check in with a sampling of what I've been up to. If you check my Flickr page there won't be anything new, but here's some of what I've been doing:

I'm starting up the three hour drawings again. I'm working from photos, but then trying to tweak and adapt them. This isn't something that comes to me naturally, so I've been making a concentrated effort to get past my fears and do my best, even if I'm not happy with the outcome.

The Tattooed Man

Forest Scene

I'm struggling with overworking and I want to make fewer more decisive brush strokes. Here's a process piece from the scene above that shows how I used the photo and expanded on it:

I wish I'd tweaked the composition more in the finished piece.

3 hours isn't a lot of time, so I need to work on cutting out my nitpicking and really focusing on what matters to get the most out of my time. Which is really part of the goal with a restricted time limit in the first place.

I've been working on practicing some different styles. I looked at some of the neat work from ArenaNet and I was inspired to do some trees on rocks. Certainly not the same as ArenaNet's, but it was something different.

I think that to make them better I should use less sweeping curves in the future, it makes them feel cartoonish.

Here are some pieces that I've been working on for my perspective practice:

I need to work on more realism in the faces.

Cafe/ Secret Technological Base for my thesis proposal

Nar Shaddaa - I'm excited for the Old Republic.

And then here's an hour drawing I did from a live model in chalk. Chalk isn't my favorite, but I'm trying to improve. Faces are one of my current focuses, since I've drawn cartoony for too long and I'm trying to get away from that.

That's all for now.

Rubble Rubble Everywhere

It's been a busy few weeks, so not a lot of time for exposition. I just finished a new drawing though, and it seems good for this space so I thought I'd put it up. I decided I'd do a street scene after maybe a bombing or an earthquake. So, I cooked up a line drawing for it:

I'm getting dizzy looking at those cracks.

I do a lot of line drawing. but I've been really trying to push toward more realistic textured stuff. To make things simple I decided to just add one color hue for value, in blues:

Sort of intense, but I can work with it for now.

Once the base colors were down, I started adding in the shadows I knew would be there for certain, based on the light source I'd chosen. (It's in the upper left.)

I went with slightly redder shadows, just for contrast.

Then I plotted out the more complex shadows based on the precise position of the sun in relationship to the objects in the image. I also started planting secondary shadows and throwing in more texture to make it feel a little more realistic, as well as additional detail.

It's getting there, but it's still a little intense.

After I finished making sure the shadows were pretty accurate, I went through with a final pass, adding a few more highlights and secondary shadows, checking for mistakes, etc. I also played with the levels to tone down the intense blue purple color scheme. It's one of those things where I'd stared at it so long it started looking normal, but there is such a thing as too much... purple.

Not a huge change, but I feel like it's a bit of a relief to my eyeballs.

I need to put it away for a while, but I may come back to it. I'd thought about coloring it properly, but there is so much going on I'm not sure if that would make the finished piece too crazy. On the whole I like it. Not sure it really needed the people though.

Do the Robot

One of the things on my list this summer was I wanted to do a mech style robot design. Things being what they were, I didn't have a lot of time for personal things, but I tried to make some time over the past few days to do one. I'm still planning to revise it here and there and clean the edges etc. I did a variety of silhouettes and styles before deciding to go with this one.

I like the combination of polish and clunky. Growing up I liked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman and Power Rangers, but I'm embarrassed to say I wasn't into shows like Transformers much. My inspirations here came from sci-fi movies and games - I've recently been into Dead Space and I was also inspired by some of the incredible concept art for District 9.

Overall for a couple days work I'm pleased, but as with anything I wish I had more dedicated time to work on things like this.

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.

The Archives

I recently did a digital painting as a response to some essays by Mikhail Bakhtin. This particular quote was really interesting to me:

"I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward athou)....The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate....To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another....I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance)."

Naturally, being me I read it and thought about games. Because I always think about games? Hmm. I do have other hobbies, really. With the advent of more and more sophisticated choice based/ morality meter/ ethical dilemma games, I think this quote has a lot of relevance in games. Through the choices we make in simulated RPG environments we can learn a lot about ourselves. Even in other game types, like strategy games, this is true. Are you aggressive or defensive? If you're playing Civ 5 do you research wonders early, or go straight for the mass armies? 

I think that when Bakhtin wrote this he was implying that it is through our interactions with people that we learn more about ourselves, but I was intrigued at the substitution technology can take for human interaction in this regard. So I decided to draw a picture about my thoughts on the matter:

The Archives.

It's meant to be a little ironic.

 I decided to invent an advanced library system, which would catalog not only archived copies of all media outlets, but also compilations of information cross-referenced with known behavioral patterns of individuals which could be mapped to create simulations of those people within a certain degree margin of error. Essentially it would be a master computer catalog system that would save all user profile information and use that information to create simulated versions of real people who you could speak to. The more information the system had associated with an individual, the smaller the margin for error.

 While the person depicted could be using these tools for any number of purposes, when I drew this I imagined her using a private reference room in the archives to access genealogical information about her family. She would be able to sift through news reports, blogs and articles, then use the computer system to tie related data to user profiles for deceased relatives to create more accurate simulations. It’s a somewhat literal interpretation of the quote, but I thought it would be interesting to see what you could learn about yourself through your interactions with technology, or in this case the search for the self through simulations of one’s own genealogical history.