More Zbrush Hilarity

Man, with the way updates are going, it seems like all I do is sit on Zbrush...

Actually, I am gonna be uploading a sneak peek soon of what has kept me busy, but that probably won't happen till tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a fun glimpse at another go at Zbrush...

I decided to try and do a mock-up of Ahab. The face itself was pretty quick to rough in, since most of the stuff like his head, neck and such wouldn't be seen. I started to do a rough of the armor, then quit. I might pick this one back up to flesh out the armor again...

Then again, with how quickly it is to set up something in this, I might just start over and do an ever better representation. Anyone out there do armor before in Zbrush? I got a good base by masking the part I wanted in armor and extracting it to a new subtool, but I wonder how well it would work for segmented stuff...hmmm...

Zbrush Hilarity

I took another day to sit down and fool around in Zbrush more, and after watching one or two videos, I can now roughly block in a head in about 1-2 hours. Not too shabby on my second try! The head was done without reference, so there's probably oodles of problems just permeating on the surface, but for a quick glance, I think it works pretty well...



Of course, I didn't stop there, so I added some horns and weird decoration onto it, then used my beloved alpha channels to make him scaly...

Photoshop Palette

Here's a fun tip for you! I recently came across a new blog called Art and Influence (Link over to the right.) It's a wonderful blog run by two oil painters who are sharing their wealth of knowledge to the world. Anyway, I came across this Pic they have of a palette they recommend using, one that's devoid of secondary and tertiary colors:


This got me thinking, since I'm not a traditional painter (or even a painter to begin with, Hah!) Could this be replicated in Photoshop to achieve the same effects? So, I booted CS3, and pulled up my winsor newton swatches, and matched the colors best I could. Here's the result:


As you can see, I think it might work pretty well. The background for the palette is a neutral gray, and the brush I used was a simple round, no shape dynamics, opacity set to pen pressure, and the spacing on it set to 1% (The trick is to get a smooth even brush where you see no stamping. Anywhere between 1-10% will show this pretty well, just make sure you computer can handle it.) For the curious, here are the colors, and their respective color slider combos, in CMYK and RGB.

Titanium White: C: 0 M: 0 Y: 0 K: 0/ R:255 G:255 B:255

Cadmium Yellow (Pale or Lemon): C: 4 M: 0 Y: 89 K: 0/ R: 255 G: 243 B: 40

Cadmium Yellow (Medium): C: 0 M:31 Y: 88 K: 0/R: 253 G: 183 B: 57

Cadmium Red: C: 0 M: 94 Y: 98 K: 0/ R: 238 G: 49 B:36

Alzarin Crimson: C: 26 M: 97 Y: 91 K: 23 /R: 153 G: 35 B: 38

Winsor Blue: C: 100 M: 99 Y: 31 K: 21/ R: 41 G: 39 B: 98

Cobalt Blue: C: 95 M: 69 Y: 1 K:0 / R: 0 G: 91 B: 170

To actually mix these colors, you lay out one of the two colors you want, then start to lightly lay down the next color ontop of the previous one in the middle of the palette. When you start to see the color you're after, eyedrop it and cover that little mix you made with it, then take another primary color and work it some more, and so on and so forth. The trick is you mix the colors only with the colors you start with, not with any in the mix palette (though like with any rule, it's meant to be broken.) The reasoning is because you want to limit your choices to your starting colors, which should help unify your colors. For all the people that feel overwhelmed by photoshop's insanity of color, this should be a boon to have only 7 colors to work from.

Warm-up and Paint study

I know I said I'd show off my Nintendo DS treat, but I've been lazy in taking photos of it. So instead, here's a warm-up done today before I finish coloring the pitch today. I tried painting without any opacity change and only having flow on, and I gotta say, I kinda liked it. I'll be trying out this further, since I think this'll get me to start using colors smartly to define forms. This was done only with the hard round with flow and shape on, and opacity off.

But what do I know? I'd be curious to hear some other people's approaches to digitally painting.

Random Fun with Nonexistant Clay

Here's something I did last night. I decided to start learning 3D modeling about a week ago, and was able to get a hold of Maya and Zbrush3. Maya, while initially was daunting to me, actually got pretty easy to figure out quickly, which is always a nice thing with a program since it makes my brain start to work furiously to think what I can do with this newfound power.

I had actually tried Zbrush before, but it was Zbrush2 and the experience was...less than fun. Like grating your teeth along a chalkboard fun. I'll admit, it was mostly due to the fact that I wanted to keep approaching it as a super-special 3D modeler when in reality I guess it is designed for 2.5D work (I've yet to figure out what that actually means besides making me believe I'm messing with 3D when I'm really fooling around with 2D stuff gussied up to look like such.) So, I was a bit leary of the new Zbrush, since my memories of Zbrush2 were of abuse and torment.

Happily, that's changed! Zbrush3 is a huge improvement over its predecessor (at least to me,) and despite knowing nothing again, I was somehow able to dive in and start throwing clay (for lack of a better descriptive word) onto a ball and form a random creature. I'm going to start looking at some tutorial videos now to actually figure out the ins and outs of the program so I know what I can and can't do, but the potential it seems to have is pretty exciting...

Holiday Aftermath...

Hope everyone out there in Internet land had a good Thanksgiving, or if you're from out of the States, a good week regardless.

I thought I'd give a treat and show off some pages from the pitch I'm working on right now. I'll be starting the coloring process tomorrow, and if I keep my nose to it, it'll be done by the week's end and ready for pitching!

I also celebrated my birthday recently, I got a neat little toy for my Nintendo DS that I'll share in my next post.

Cooldown

Here's a little thing of sketches I did once I finished my work for the day. Always good to unwind and just let your mind wander.

Tuesday's Warmup

Here's Tuesday's warmup. Guess I'm on some kind of alien kick, huh?

These stretches are pretty good for me, I think. Hopefully it'll help me in my digital painting skills as time wears on, but time will be the only judge, eh?

A murder perhaps?!

Who knows?! This is a rejected cover from the comic pitch I just handed off to the writers. In truth, looking at this again, even though I like it, could you ever imagine it on a comic shelf? Maybe not. At least not until the trade. The other cover we went with I think fits it much nicer. Thanks to all the folk that helped me with my type dillemma!

Morning Warm up

Here's a warm-up I did this morning before I go to hit the art desk. Got to get to work on another comic pitch (for those that didn't know, and I can't remember mentioning it before, I was working on a pitch for a comic book that hopefully I'll hear some news about soon.) In the meantime, if you want an idea of what the next pitch contains, check out the zombie and the tree Troll thing in the previous post. Yeah, we use those kinds of critters in this one. Should be a blast!

Also, I sent out my portfolio to the big 3 animation companies this weekend. Here's hoping something comes outta that...

Some more Dumps!

Sketchdump! Watchout!

Unloading from ye olde sketchbook.

Muppet!

So here's the result of the drawing jam from this week. You can see I took ALL the time in the world on it *cough cough*. I think it looks odd enough to work as a muppet, and since it's in clothing that any Scaddite would recognize me in, it ought to work.

Thumbnails...

So here's some thumbnails I've doodled the past day of environments. They were just little sketches, at best 2 x 3 inches in width and height, but they were nice little things to overlook detail and focus on the big shapes and values. I might take one of these to a finished piece, more because I feel it might help my painting jitters I get with having something a lot more solid than what I normally do before I go jumping in.

Whoops...

And I just realized that was a WIP I posted. So here's what I actually came up with at the end. Seriously, for real.

Drawing Jam! Update

So here's what I've got at the end of the jam. Yeah, I know, it's not done, quit yer complainin'.

In all seriousness, it was one of those moments of "biting off more than you can chew and not finishing it, but learning a lot as a result." I'm actually fairly happy with the enclosure aspect of the painting, but the viewing area was giving me major trouble. Super huge trouble. And let's not even talk about starting on the dinosaurs.

Well, this week's jam ought to be not as bad though, since it's not as complicated. Here's to next week!

Drawing Jam!

So this week, I have a challenge before me: My good friend Dustin Johnson who has a blog over here, suggested that the two of us should start doing a weekly jam to keep our skills sharp. We used to do this sort of thing back in college, and quite frankly, I miss the times of sitting around with some chums, someone gives a ridiculous concept, and we all start drawing. Anywho, I decided to start us off with our first jam, and since I went to the zoo this past week (I'll probably post up photos soon of that,) I decided to do something along that line.

So our challenge this week is to do a drawing/painting of a zoo-type dinosaur enclosure. Things to keep in mind is that we have to be able to show the dinosaur, have people in the scene, and at least suggest how the dinosaur is enclosed (moat, glass like how Tiger pens usually are or the Reptile house, netting, etc.) Should give us both a workout.

Here's what I have so far. I decided to do my favorite dinosaur family, the Dromeosaurids, and do up a pen for those little vicious buggers. Once this is done I may put up a progress post just to show the steps I took to this, but for now, this is all you get.

Ach! Too long!

For anyone that reads this blog, I'm sorry it's been so long between posts. My girlfriend and I recently moved to Atlanta, so the past couple of weeks have been unpacking, and just getting situated. On top of that, I hadn't drawn in ages, so I've been slogging along trying to get back into the groove of things.

To hopefully rekindle the timeliness of this blog, here's some new and old sketches outta the ol' book. And hopefully new stuff will be a lot more frequent than before.

Really Long time...

Wow. I feel really guilty about neglecting this blog for so long...but it wasn't intentional! These past couple of weeks have been hectic since the girlfriend and I have moved up to Atlanta now for a graphic design job she got. In the meantime, I've been unpacking, doodling, and working on a project that I can't really say what it is yet...

In the meantime, here's a painting I did for Conceptart.org's C.O.W. (creature of the week) challenge. It was arctic dinosaur, so I couldn't pass it up. I learned a good amount of painting techniques with this one, but to be honestly, I think it's a bit of a fail in terms of actual concept, compared to some of the stuff people pumped out. Unfortunately, the next challenge was Catapult Creature, and during that challenge I wasn't able to get to internet or a computer to paint it. But I think I'll still complete it later just for more practice.

Been away for a while...

And I apologize! I'll try and be more regular with this. In da meantime, here's some new sketches, outta a fresh sketchbook I started.

Sketches!

Here's two more little drawings. One is a blind lawyer (M.M anyone?) and the other is an Ahab concept. It's kinda neat, but I think I need to incorporate more of a nautical/sea motif in his armor. Plus, his face right now is a blank one, which for a character like Ahab seems like a design flaw. I still haven't found his "look" yet.

These are Superheroes!

So these are Daredevil and Spider-man.

Ahab!

Well, here's a bunch of sketches of, weirdly enough, Captain Ahab. This isn't a story idea, rather a challenge for me to conceptualize characters in a similar universe. So, I decided to go after Moby Dick, and throw it in deep-space, starting with Ahab. I think I'm gonna go after Ahab, Moby Dick, Ishmael, and Queeqeq (I think that's how his name is spelt?) as my choice of characters, as well as Ahab's ship, the Pequod.

Anywho, Ahab's idea is that he's a species of creature that survives (or has adapted to) inhabiting mostly in deep-space, hunting the beasts that make up the deep-space seas. I decided to go with an idea that he has this organic body armor that also works as a containment suit, and when he steps out into space, it seals up tightly, preventing decompression death and allowing him to work in the near vacuum that is space. I'm still tinkering with ideas, but I want to bring some sea theme to him for sure, so I've been exploring conch shells and other sorts of shells/crustaceans as inspiration.

He's hardly finished, so there'll be more to come!

Aw Crap.

Well, here's a hellboy poster I just whipped up. I've been enamored by the idea of a graphicy way of presenting something, and this just seemed to be appropriate subject matter to do so. At the moment, I'm gonna consider it done, but I might revisit it and tweak mainly the lineart...

This is Batman.

Duh da da DA daaaa!


I saw Dark Knight today...and was very, VERY impressed. This is quite possibly the best comic book movie created yet. But hell, I'm sure everyone's saying that.