Landscapes

Been creating a bunch of landscapes lately. Must get better!

Plus a warm-up alien!

Historical Fighter

I downloaded the vertex book for gaming related topics. At the end is a competition to create a historical person as a fighting character. I'm going to do two. Can you guess the first one?

A little cliche, but hey, embrace the cliche!

Very Busy

Finished an art test for prospective employers. We'll see what happens.

Two Finished

Beaver button finished and I decided to color the wizard sketch. Went a little crazy on the color choices, but I think it pulled together.

Ice Mage

Trying to stay loose and go with what feels right. Turns out when I do this it takes less time.

Sketches

Warm ups before I get to business. Can you guess which one I did first?

3D IS HARD

So I've finally decided to start learning 3D. I made a quick sculpt in mudbox of an alien head.

Mudbox is actually intuitive, especially to someone whose had a lot of formal training. The head took me about 20 min and then I spent the rest of my day scratching mt brain on what unwrapping the UVW and baking the occlusion means. Yeah, I don't understand what I just wrote. I've watched a lot of videos and they seem to make it look easy and it's not.

I want to texture this thing in photoshop which used to be an archaic dead language to me and now I speak it everyday. 3DS Max is the same thing. I know I'll eventually begin to speak it, but that's probably weeks away. Maybe I need to take a class.

This is all to beef up my skills. I want to work in games and I think wearing as many hats as possible will accomplish that. I'll go crazy for a little while, but it'll be worth it.

WIP

This is what I've been doing for the past day and a half. It shows a little bit of my working method when dealing with perspective. It takes a while, but you want it to be right.

Mega Man Fix

Remember guys, always always always flip your image so you know for sure it's not lopsided.

Mega Man

I've got the job I always wanted. I'm a lead concept artist for a game studio. The only problem is I'm not getting paid for it. I don't even know the real names of the people I'm working with. We'll see how far this goes. Enjoy Mega Man

More Work

Important Lesson

WARM UP.

Sketch. Loosen your shoulder. Get the juices flowing. This is very important.

I never gave any credence to this lesson because I never needed it. Things would flow from my brain onto whatever media I was using at the time. BAM! Voila! It's great!

I recently moved and I had to take a little over a month off from doing anything art related. I was very unhappy. I attempted to try something a couple days ago and it was complete shit. It's like I forgot what I was doing. It made me not want to try it again for a little while. I can see why people would be afraid to pick up something they haven't done in a long while. They don't want to see that failure staring back at them.

It could be anything. Cooking, music, art, dance, filing, running. It's tough for anybody. I couldn't understand why someone can't pick something back up and want to do it every day. I probably made them feel bad and for that I'm deeply sorry. All you can really do is encourage them.

So stop beating yourself up for making something that isn't perfect. It's a warm-up routine. Nobody has to see it but you. Work on it for about 10-20 minutes and then throw it away or keep it in a sketch folder.

And get better. No excuses.

My sketch. About 10 minutes.

A Way To Work

Here's some examples of the way I concept for the beginning phase of a polished piece. I typically create a base layer so I don't have to draw everything all over again and then change little things I think the client might want to see differently. The zombie one never got off the ground, but Flat Like Fred was finished.

Wallpaper

I've been volunteering some time for an indie game developer where everyone is from different parts of the world. Lets just say it's interesting. And I'm never going to get paid anything. But it's the field I want to break into. Here's a marketing wallpaper I made for one of their games that's in development.

Clothing Practice

Okay. Its been a little while and I've been updating the pro blog like a mad man while neglecting this thing. I suppose I'll try and give some helpful advice.

If you have a digital camera, take a pic of yourself. Try it out naked, you'll be the only one seeing the pics. Make sure you get a front and back.

Open the pics in photoshop and trace your outline and any relevant musculature you like. Fill it in with grey about 70% for the lighter skinned peoples (look in the color chooser people!).

Once you have that, create a new layer and basically draw whatever style of clothes you feel you need practice in. This way you don't necessarily need to worry about the proportions and angles of the body, you can concentrate on the stuff you need to work on. Make it rough, make it sketchy, give it a painterly feel, make it a great addition to your portfolio to score that elusive job. Just get better.

And that's it. Practice.


PRACTICE.

I felt I needed some practice with modern soldiers.