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!