Anatomy = pain

I've never been good with anatomy. So when I decided today that I'd start my own world design, I'm not sure what possessed me to begin with human characters. The pic below is the result of a lot of google research (*cough*) and a lot of time rendering. I'm fairly happy with the outcome - I think I've learned a lot from this study. Things like knees and collarbones and fingers are really tricky to do properly.

I'm basing a lot of this world design on PoP - a male and female pair for lead characters, fantastical environments, weird creatures.

And nope, the female won't be running around naked, so I'll be using this pic as a template to explore clothing options tomorrow.

Random enviro

I decided I'd do a bit of painting really late tonight and this is the result. I started off with the base idea of a 'Mountain castle in the snow' - the Environment of the Week challenge at Conceptart.org - and the idea just grew from there. Not particularly happy with the idea or direction it went as it reminds me a lot of my previous post (in style and composition anyway), but I'm sorta happy with the way the colours turned out and I think the quality of the render is getting slightly better. Meh.

Less excuses, more paint

I must've run out of excuses not to draw tonight, cause I chose to sit down and spend some time in photoshop. Its true what they say about a lot of creative things - that it all comes together in the last 5 minutes. I started painting with no other real clear thoughts in my head besides the fact I wanted to do an environment, and it was a muddy mess up until near the end.

I think its pretty evident I'm definitely still thinking of the art style of Prince of Persia, but thats not such a bad thing. With such high calibre art, aiming to achieve something like that can only help me learn. Being able to work on such an awesome title one day, like PoP's lucky concept artists get to do, is also plenty of incentive for me to jump right in.

Its taken ages, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of some things - A few custom brushes first of all, but more importantly: Contrast. Contrast between colour, large and small brushstrokes and soft and solid edges/brushes.

The following pic took about 45 mins, I'm really happy with it - will continue this tomorrow.

Speedpaint 12th Dec 08

We had a really vague topic for the 30 minute speedy at work today - 'machines'. We've been pretty character focused with the speedpaints since we started doing them, and so decided to switch it up a bit. Today's was more about an industrial design than a character.

Anyway, I actually really like the idea behind this one. All my previous entries have been a little gun-ho and completely lacking in story, so this is a nice change of pace. I'll have to develop this one a little more sometime down the track.

Speedpaint - 5th December 2008

I've pretty much fallen in love with the new Prince of Persia game, which looks absolutely incredible and plays just as well. For last friday's speedpaint we didn't choose a topic, we just spent 40 minutes painting for the heck of it. I wanted to try out some brushes, as well as experiment with a different painting style. Add that to the fact that I've thought about nothing but Prince of Persia since it came out last thursday, and this is what I came up with.

Speedpaint from 28th Nov 08

This week's 30 minute speedpaint topic: Monkey Magic.

Meh.

A few things bug me about my speedies - I need to become more clear with my lines/detail (something I'm hoping my daily figure drawing will help), I probably have to start focusing my pics a bit more instead of trying to get so much info in (maybe just focus on a characters' upper half or something), and I need to stop making all of these so monochromatic... it gets boring really quickly for both you and me to look at!

Meh again.

CGtalk Steampunk challenge

I'm still running off all of the motivation gained at the NZ workshop a few weeks back, which is great, so I've decided to enter the Steampunk CGtalk challenge. More info on it can be found here: http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/steampunk/

Here is my initial silhouette exploration. I chose a few from these to develop further into the thumbnail sketches on the grey page.