Dragon Lair - Final

So! Here is the final of the Dragon Lair.

I had a few false starts with this, and after trying to start it from scratch I ended up just upscaling the color comp and working over that. It was my first time attempting that method, and it took a bit of elbow grease to get it to a polish I was satisfied with, but in the end it proved invaluable - especially with all the little color subtleties I got in the color comp. No need to replicate them!

Now that the environment is out the way, it's time to move onto the Dragon itself.

Dragon Lair - Value Study and Color Comp

I went with the last thumbnail originally for my final piece, but I quickly realized it was a poor composition and didn't show off much of the scene. So I went back to my thumbnails, and picked this out as my favorite. After doing a little bit of clean-up and expansion, it was ready to figure out values and colors.

I do these steps separate - when it comes to stuff like I currently figure out my values first, then apply washes of color over it to figure out my palette. To achieve the color without ruining my values too much, I used a combination of multiply, overlay, hard light, color dodge, and normal layers.

I should point out for the color comp I didn't keep multiple layers - I usually stuck to three layers - one that was the main layer, another that was the lineart, and finally my "temporary" layer, where I would make changes to the comp before committing it to the main layer.

It was a lot of trial and error to achieve the look I wanted, and once I had it, it was time to move onto the final.

Dragon Lair - thumbnail workups

So in the next part of the concept series I'm doing, I wanted to develop the lair of the dragon. For the planned storyboard sequence, this was where all the action was going to take place, so I decided on developing the environment location as a key painting to establish the look of the place, as well as a 3/4 top-down view to show off the larger area that everything might take place in.

I started off with a series of thumbnails. I wanted the dragon to live in a den, so I had at least some basic premise to work off of. There were a few trash sketches I did that were fairly uninspired and just a means for me to get a better visual idea going. Eventually I hit on the idea of the "cave mouth" idea and ran with that. I did a few different explorations of the idea until I settled on what I labeled as Number 6 in the lineup. I originally went with the last one, but after I started to hammer out the value study for it, it became quickly apparent that it was a boring take on it, and the composition wasn't very good.

From here, I went onto a value study and a color comp, which I'll cover in another post.

Painter 12 speedpaints

These are from when I had the painter 12 trial still running - I decided to give the new watercolor brushes a try, along with some adjusted digital watercolor brushes that act like gouache (Because the gouache brushes in painter are so horrific and terrible that I can't fathom ANY use for them, ever.)

I still haven't found much of a need for painter yet - I really want to incorporate it into my workflow, since I adore the blending capabilities it has with brushes, but to switch over to an entire program just for that doesn't seem worth it. So for the time being, I'm seeing if I can get a similar effect with photoshop.

Hunter Girl Final

As promised, here's the final of the turnaround. It's been done for some time now, but as I've mentioned earlier, I'm trying to play catch up with the various outlets I update on...unfortunately my own blog is one where I'm behind a few posts of art.

Up next: The intial design work for the environment! I'm actually quite excited for it, what I have so far looks and feels good to me.

Hunter Girl Concepts

This batch of rough ideas are from a set of concepts I'm developing for portfolio purposes. The basic story is that a girl from a local clan has decided to take it upon herself to hunt and kill the indigenous dragon that inhabits the area. So ultimately, the portfolio will show the girl and her gear, the environment in which the little story takes place (which for the intents of the portfolio is the lair of the beast and the small surrounding area,) and the dragon itself.

So, to start with, these are rough explorations I had for the girl. I eventually settled on the turnaround below, and if you frequent the CA.org sketchbooks, you would have seen the finished file already. I wanted to make her young, maybe 10-12 in age - right on the cusp of adolescence.

Although at the moment I just finished the turnaround, I'm also aiming to do detail close-ups of the weapons, as well as flesh out that action pose of her.

Bringing you up to speed...

All of my internet sketchbooks (including this blog!) Are seriously out of whack in terms of pieces being updated...so here's a big old art dump to try and get everything back on the same page.

Last Digital Painting assignment

Above is the last painting assignment we received in class before we assembled portfolios - design an environment. I really enjoyed doing environments - not something that I expected to like. So I think I'll explore more of those in the future.

In the meantime, expect some more figure studies...

Week 6 - Creature! Squaawrk!

Here's week 6 of the digital painting class - design a creature using photo textures. Unfortunately, I think I ended up painting over most of my textures! I'm still fairly happy with the end result though, and I DID learn a few new things from it, so it's still a success in my mind.

Week 5 of digital painting - Photo textures. Blegh.

Last week's assignment was designing a robot and painting it using photo textures. For some reason, early on I got it in my head I wanted to do a construction robot. So, the Caterpillar Inc. Heavy-Lift Bot was created.

I've never been a big fan of using photo textures, and this assignment kind of reinforced it for me (though not nearly as much as this week's assignment.) I got lucky with my design being geometric, since it was mostly a matter of laying the texture into perspective with the Distort option and doing a few paint overs, but for the most part it seems like a messy process to me and more work than needed to get it polished.

In the end though I was happy with the result, though Erik was awesome enough to point out some improvements I could have made to it. Once this class is through I'm planning to go back and tweak it with those improvements in mind.

Imagined Studies

I completely forgot about posting these here - these have been posted before on CA.org.

Above is a collection of studies I have been doing from the imagination - I've wanted to push my ability to try and draw these things from out of my head on the knowledge that I'm familiar with from doing life drawing and studying the forms in day to day observations and photos.

I've been approaching it systematically, taking each major portion of the human body and isolating it to some degree, before I bring it back into the fold of the whole human figure. I'm right now about to start arms, followed by head and shoulders. Most likely after I'm done with these I'll do another round of them, but this time from life.

Week 2 of Digital Painting - Environments!

This is the second assignment from the digital painting class. We were given the task of designing either an environment or character, and paint it using the lasso and pen tool almost exclusively. The goals were to make it simple and graphic.

This was a fun assignment for me - not only was it way out of my comfort zone (Both content and style-wise), but at the end of it I had a blast! And I learned quite a few new tricks regarding masks...

Zbrush noodles and movie studies

I've started to get back into Zbrush after a long long hiatus from it. Surprisingly, I just needed to get quickly reacquainted with how to make a basic bust with zspheres or a polymesh sphere. The rest of it came back naturally. So now every few evenings I've done a quick sketch in zbrush (by quick, I mean somewhere around 1-3 hours.) No preliminary doodle, I just make a standard bust shape with zspheres and try to make some interesting shapes.

I'm also taking a digital painting class through CGMW (whose workshops I wholly recommend.) The first assignment was value studies from film stills. I've never done something like this, so the first few I struggled with - place down some values, double-check, see I'm ridiculously off, and readjust. After awhile I became pretty good at recognizing the value relationships, and it certainly taught me a good deal. Why I haven't done these before, I don't have a clue - they seem really invaluable.