The best way to make yourself paint? Painting apparently.

You know what the best thing to make you do art is? Having to do art that, while you don't not enjoy it, leaves you wanting to do something else, especially when it's paid work! I've taken on some freelance work I can't mention yet and it's literally sucking up all of my spare time. It'll do so until the end of September and if all goes well I'll make a decent financial return on my effort. It's fun, and good for my work in general as its a larger multiple of smaller pieces, but by the gods by the time I'm finished on a weekend, it leaves me *itching* to draw something of my own. It's after 11 pm on Sunday and after working til about 8pm I decided to just sit and sketch digitally and see what popped out. Doing art all weekend and rewarding myself with more art? You betcha. 

Just before I started I'd been looking at this old piece and marvelling at how bad the execution was but how I miss painting that kind of stuff. 3 hours later. Here's a sketch. I rather like it. It's one of those that makes me feel like I'm actually learning stuff artistically and it's properly sinking in. Also that desaturated colours make for awesome imagery. Providing I don't get some better idea in the meanwhile, I might work it and a companion piece up into a set, to send to Applibot, as I'd love to do some work for them with all the gorgeous work there is knocking around the net for Legend of the Cryptid and Galaxy Saga.

I feel I should also mention I'd been looking at the amazing gallery of GINOGINO over on CGHub too, go check it out. 

Tobuscus Fanart

Never let it be said that I do a lot of the same thing over and over. >.>

So. Tobuscus, or Toby Turner to give him his real name, for those not in the know is one of a rising number of stars who make their living uploading various types of videos to Youtube. I've watched a great number of his videos ever since I found his Amnesia The Dark Descent vids a good year or two ago. Being so busy lately I hadn't had chance to watch many and was sad when I realised I'd missed a chance to help fund his IndieGoGo video game campaign. So I did fanart, as you do. Below are  some of the steps of the image. You can find an animated gif with more steps in my dA scraps here. 

1.Thumbnails: I knew wanted a portrait image with a slightly upwards facing perspective. Point of these is to get a feel for the flow of the image and the over all shape composition. Details like faces or intricacies of cloth and stone get figured out in the line work.



2. Lineart and first colour pass. I use the thumbnail as a guide for the lineart, but I don't stick exactly to it. I confess I didn't have an exact reference for the clothing, which tripped me up a little further into painting. 






3. A few shadows and main colours laid in, trying to think about overall rough lighting layout. Super messy... no point in being neat and tidy, as you're less likely to change something if it's not working if you invest too much time in it. I'm basically looking for it to pass the very squinty squint test at this point. 

4. Neatened it up once I'm happy with basic colours and add in a bit more saturation and some brighter highlights. Note how everything is still fairly mid and dark toned. This is to stop me getting too highlight happy and making everything tonally confusing. I know here that the fireball will be the brightest thing on screen. 

5.Normally I'd advise against going straight into rendering on a face or specific part, but in this case the face is the singular most important thing there is, and I need a base for how much the rest of the image should be finished. 

6. By this point I'd realised my error with not having figured out the arm position properly and I spent *ages* trying to find decent reference. Eventually jedi cosplayers came to my rescue. I've also jumped around the top of the image a lot more once the face is in and finished. 

7.Pretty much done with Tobuscus and his robes. I leave out all the finicky details until the very end, so I can still see that my forms are reading well, not getting distracted by pretty patterning. Gryphon the dog is also more fleshed out, if still a little bright and lacking the right kind of lighting to settle him into the scene. 

8.With Toby and Gryphon finished, the rest of the image comes together much faster as I can be looser and more off the top of my head with the details. They are deliberately not as detailed as the main focus of the image - toby himself -  so the eye doesn't wander around the bottom of the image too much.

9. Most of the last 10-15% of the image is just adding details and textures -  stuff like the rocks, the robes' patterns, the details of the zombie flesh. I actually get bored by this point, and it's often more of a force of will that I keep going with it. 

Eventually after a few tweaks and adjustments, the finished image!

Eidy mentor sketch

Lunchtime face sketch for Eidy's mentor, who really needs a name. Love the square brush in PS!

Another lunchtime sketch!

Eclipse Phase: Transhuman artwork

A couple of months back I was contacted by the guys over at Posthuman studios, about their new player guide for Eclipse Phase, called Transhuman. Sci-fi characters are something that intrigue me, so I took a couple of half page illustrations on. Results are below! Both were referenced from a sort of photoshop mash up of various images, but all painted from scratch, barring the amber necklace on the Human Impersonator. :)

You can find out more about Eclipse Phase ( a sci-fi role playing game) here: www.eclipsephase.com

This work is licensed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to shorten it, hide it in the alt text, or whatever. We're not picky about it.

More thumbs

No long explanation here. Just some more character thumbnails. Eidy's mentor.

Busy Busy

So since I've last posted, I've been a busy bee! I've moved jobs from Cambridge to Warwick, to join a much smaller mobile team. Thus far it's been interesting, and nice to flex artistic muscles in a different number of ways, from the kind of skills you'd expect me to be using (concept, fantasy etc etc) to cracking out my old brand and logo skills. Enjoying the sense of having an actual impact and seeing my work go into actual games, even if they're not the sort of games I'm used to doing! Warwick is also a gorgeous place to work, and the surroundings such as the castle and the Lord Leycester Hospital are actually straight out of the medieval ages. It's very inspiring.

Outside of that, I've had a couple of freelance projects that have taken up my spare time, as I'm looking to invest in some more training, after having learned so much with the Oatley Academy so far. For those who are curious, I'm still working on the course, as it has no set deadline, but busy life schedule meant the painting drama 1 stuff went on hold for a while. In the meanwhile I've been seeing what I've learned put into action, and the difference is still astounding to me. For once in my life I feel like I can genuinely talk about a subject like composition and have the knowledge to know what works and what doesn't. If Chris ever opens his doors to more students for this course, I really can't recommend it enough.

I'm currently keeping busy with some really freakin' cool freelance work that I can't mention for what's likely to be a few months yet, and working on my personal story project and maaaybe a 'little' GoT fanart when I can fit it in.

So at some point this year I should have a slew of new art to show off, but for now, I can share some of the development work I've been doing for Eidy, after a burst of writing creativity led to me fleshing out her back story a little more and getting visually inspired. And an older WIP that was inspired by a Martin Luther King speech that I've picked up again.

Eidy and Alyvia

My last day at Jagex today. Still feels weird thinking my entire life will be different in a week! Still ruminating on this world of mine, here's some more progress on the Eideann piece. Took the style in a slightly different direction after realising how much I really enjoy painting in a more 'traditional' manner digitally and it really reflects the kind of sombre realism I'd like the world to have. 

I've also worked a little more with my Oatley Academy Accomplishment, taking a bit of a mix of the designs I'd done and blending them into a traditional style portrait.