Week 30: I think I'm gonna die

Last year the week before hand in we I was stressed out, I had to put all my work on a CD and sort my way through thousands of badly names PSDs and backup saves of work. This year I have been more organised, but I just have SO much to do that it feels worse.

The presentation last friday was pretty good, I think mine went quite well. I did end up doing mine about my Bike holiday. I always try to implement some humor into presentations, so I had some cartoons in it.

Me in France.

I think if I had to do it again, I would practice more in the mirror as I really didn't feel comfortable performing it in front of everyone, especially as I was first. I think I should also have better notes to work from, my handwriting has gradually deteriorated over the years, so what made perfect sense at the time of writing, was a blurry mess of words on the day of the presentation.

But its never as bad as you think it will be, I did survive.

Still working on my character this week, hopefully will have it finished by friday (Really hopefully.) Im just working on textures at the moment. I don't want to hand paint the textures from scratch so I am using some photo textures and blending them in with some painterly textures.

I did some more development with the concept, here is the final concept for him along with the almost finished model.

Renders of the model at the moment

Final concept for the character I modelled.

I think the symmetry on the model is a bit too noticable at the moment, so I am gonna have to tone it down a bit. Also last time I think I got in trouble for not using PBR, so I will use it for this guy, even if it is meant to be a mobile character.

So excited to hand all this work in, can't wait to get back to OTM now.

Week 29: Back to school

Back from Easter now and I'm already missing my lovely bed and my lovely dog and my lovely not having to cook for myself. Also, I have been so busy with other work that I completely forgot that I have a presentation to present on Friday. I started it over Easter but I don't have much to go on.

I had a few different ideas for this presentation, seeing as it could be about literally anything. I thought concept art would be a little obvious and maybe slightly boring as I imagine everyone else will choose a game related theme. I am planning a holiday in France at the moment where I'll be stealth camping and cycling from North to South, so I am most likely going to do one about that.

I have to re do my Characters, so this week I worked on some concepts for them. I mentioned in another blog post that I was inspired by Chilean folk music for a character, I decided to work this theme a little more.

I am doing a kind of Mexican Wrestler/Chicken set of characters. I have been looking at cock fighting pictures for reference and some posters and wrestler costumes for colour and shape inspiration. First up I plonked loads of reference into a big PSD.

Some people spend ages on this stage of a project, but I try to not spend too long gathering reference. I just need some cool pictures to spark my imagination, no need to get thousands of worthless images just to make it look like you have done more work.

Here are some of my concepts for the characters, I am going to model 'Caesar' the fighter. (Chicken caesar salad, Julius Caesar get it?) 

Final designs of the fighter and manager characters

Silhouette development

Orthos I'm using for Caesar.

Not really looking forward to modelling this guy, just know its gonna be stressful, but I'm really going try not to panic too much, it never helps.

If I do run out of time with this, there is always the night and coffee.

Neglected the OTM project recently, but I really have to prioritize other work for the hand in on the 24th. Not got any new Alice work unfortunately. I really need to crack on with 3D work now, so I will stop now.

Easter 'Holidays'

I was ready for some me time after working hard this year, but deep down I knew I wouldn't be getting much rest. I had a character project to re do and OTM still to work on and once again I have let the work mount up on myself.

Although it being the holidays I had to at least do some personal work for a change.

Character idea, inspired by Chilean Folk Music 

I have been implementing 3D more into my workflow, and a friend recommended Mud box to me, as I haven't delved far beyond the navigating window of Z Brush. I got the free student version and played around for a while with the pre set head models and had fun creating and posing these rough character concepts.

I exported the models straight into 3DS MAX and took some renders in there (just with the standard lighting, as I can do the lighting in Photoshop later). Working on a pixel locked layer with soft light layers over the top was a really fun way to quickly create these weird characters, with a minimal knowledge of the Mud box package.

Here are some 3D paint over sketches done with my new Mud box-Photoshop workflow.

I am definitely going to work with mudbox more in the future as it was completely different to my current workflow and produced some rather fun results.

Another big event that happened over Easter was getting some Freelance work, actually my first paid art job ever! I worked about a week and a half on some concepts for a mobile puzzle game. I had to provide an art test and do regular Skype calls with a couple of people for feedback on the art I provided.

I am proud of myself for working so hard and getting the job. It may be a humble beginning, but I can kind of call myself a 'concept artist' now, seeing as that's what they hired me as. From the experience I know it is what I want to do for a living. I felt so comfortable working from home 7-8 hours a day, getting paid for it felt like an added bonus.

Cash money $$$

I've still got a lot to learn though. 

Week 25: Oh dear...

Well I had a review this week, not too good, I think I'm gonna have to re-do my character project, not sure why as I thought I did quite well with it. Kind of annoying that we don't recieve feedback after the project is done, or even properly during it. Hey ho, I'll just add it to the ever growing to do list.

Oops! I forgot to do all of my work!

Anyway as I promised last week, here is the underground work I have so far. I wanted to introduce a little more story telling with this environment and make use of the rabbit character as an NPC. The idea is that you follow the rabbit through a huge underground crystal mine. (hence alice's armour.)

You'll get to the end of the level, which hasn't got a concept for it yet but is going to be a big excavation pit. You'll then fight the Crystal character I posted last week in a cool boss style battle. Really glad I don't have to do the blueprints for that...

This kinda thing.

Heres what I have so far: 

I really liked the idea of having rabbits as builders underground within the universe but the ones I did at the start of the project weren't really fitting into the style guide i set myself. These ones are a little less camp but are still the same idea.

Thumbnails for underground places, pretty ugly rough stuff, I find that although nothing pretty comes out of these sketches, I can generate a lot of ideas from them.

Some more developed 3D paint over stuff. I think you would class these as mood paintings as they are pretty rough and there isnt a huge amount of information in them. In the final shot I tried to make it more of an 'in game' style shot as I need to get a feel for what the universe looks like from a birds eye view.

Also I have been using the polygonal lasso tool for pretty much everything recently, its great for giving you hard edges in places you couldn't achieve them with just a paint stroke on it's own. Its my best friend at the moment.

Populating the underground level will be very important, as I want to make it seem busy and hazardous. More 3D paintover work here and some ideas on how the mining could take place.

Just remembered I really need to start the reflection task. I am kinda nervous to start as I am not particularly good at writing in a formal essay style. I would rather paint 2500 pictures than write 2500 words about paintings.

So yeah, more ideas and more paintings to come!

Week 24:Still having fun!

Once again this week has felt a little harder and the work hasn't quite been up to scratch. I think I have been pushing myself a little hard though, as I have made some cool stuff and played with some really fun ideas.

I tried to research what it takes to make 'cool art', and tried to really isolate the cool factor in concept art. I looked a lot at Zedig's work, who has been a constant influence over the past few years. His work is so fun and colourful, I always find it very refreshing in the sea of grey spaceships and boring character concepts.

I don't like posting other people's work without their permission, but here is a link to his very sexy tumblr: http://alexandrediboine.tumblr.com/   Its really worth a look.

So trying to jazz up my concepts a bit this week, heres some drawings:

The character above is my current idea for the boss of the underground level. I haven't shown any of the environment stuff for that level yet, but I am working on it now so next week's blog will hopefully explain him a little more.

Was really fun designing the abilities he can use, had to make all of them relate back to his design and shape. 

Another 3D paintover. Last week's 3D paint over was just too fun I had to do another.

Mushroom robot ideas? It doesn't have to make sense.

Armour concepts for alice when she is in the underground level.

So keep your eyes peeled for next week's underground level stuff, it should be ground breaking!

Week 23: Get sad about trucking for a bit and then resume trucking

Last week has been kinda hard, I have been churning out work for the OTM project like a crazed, concept art hermit. At one point over the week my sleeping pattern became so bad that I didn't see any sunlight for 2 days. Its kind of fixed now but its bad compared to most people's.

Its great getting stuck into the work like this but I really suck at time management, it seems to really be all or nothing when I work. I regularly laze around and wake up late and then counteract that by working 5-6 hours a night on the project.

Its probably slowly killing me, but its working.

I say its working, but this week I worked on a big painting, kinda trying to make a kinda 'finished piece'. The brief I decided on was to produce a 'concept illustration' that showed off some combat, some characters and an environment. Here is it below:

I really hate how it came out which and, as usual when I paint something I don't like, I feel crap about it for the next few days  but I learnt so much during it that I think it was a success, despite the end result not being up to scratch. I recently realized that as long as you learn from the experience that its a success, because if you're smart, you'll never make those mistakes again. I tried implementing some more composition theory, making use of repeated angles and arabesques to lead the eye through the image.

In places I succeeded using these techniques, but by focusing on using these complicated methods, I neglected essential things like value grouping and basic colour theory. Its all part of the learning process though.

More work on NPCs today too, trying to think up boss characters for each level has been really fun. Some are obvious like the Queen of hearts being the boss for the palace level, or the caterpillar being the boss for the forest level. As I said in an earlier post, I want to make cooler work, so I am trying to avoid using cliche characters in the levels and trying to use them in funner ways.

Anyway heres some stuff from the week:

This guy was really fun to do, tried out some more subtle approaches to

photobashing.

Super quick ideas for the bigger painting above.

3D paint over.

The 3D paint over is definitely something I am going to do more of for this project. Once you find an easy way to paint over the geometry and learn how to get a nice render to work from it really helps with perspective and composition. 

More to come!

Week 22: Keep on trucking

I woke up, my six alarms all shrieking at once. I slammed my finger down on the power switch of my computer and scrambled into some boxer shorts. 3 minutes until tickets go live. Refreshing every 10 seconds until finally, I’m in, desperate to hand over my £190 for an industry workshop ticket.

!

So yeah I got a ticket to Industry workshops 2015, I went last year and had a fantastic time, I learnt so much and made some cool new friends. I realised that I was actually taught more in those 3 days than… (Sorry I don’t want to hurt any feelings here, but you get the point.)

I’m looking forward to it a lot, and following this week’s feedback, I really think I need it! The feedback was mostly positive, but I really want to create ‘cooler art’. My tutors seem to be happy with the work I’m doing, I just kind of feel like I could do better.

 I’ve been working on designing environment concepts and some characters to populate them with .

I am creating the concepts for 3 levels:

·         Underground

·         Mushroom Forest

·         Queen of Heart’s Palace

Queen’s palace is what I really need to work on at the moment, I think it has so much potential and I haven’t really explored it fully. Back to the drawing board!

Here is some of the work I did this week ( and some last week.)

Really fun actually coming up with CONCEPT art, not just illustrations and paintings. Ideas being the main focus gives you a whole different approach.

 I kind of feel on top of OTM at the moment, and I am still having a great time with it. I feel so free being able to concept environments, characters and props with no team mates yelling at me to get back on with texturing a rock!

Oh also I have started work on a collaboration with a friend of mine who is studying animation at Bournemouth. He wants me to do the backgrounds for a short animation he and a small team are working on. Exciting! I’ll post a little of the stuff I have been doing for that too, but I probably shouldn’t show you everything.

Thumbnails on thumbnails on thumbnails.