My Road To Mastery

#341

Heh nice stuff!

If you really want to loose control in Alchemy 7, just tap on the color variation thingie… :arteest:

#342

Great works!

I love your figure drawings and your enviros. Though the last color enviro seems to have inconsistent lightning - where all those red lighting in foreground came from? But really great mood and composition it has. I am watching your thread with passion, keep up mate >:)

#343

Johan - Ooh, I’ll try that. Cheers sir.

Siiilon - Thanks man. The last enviro? Yeah, it was a bit of an experiment. The red is from the clay underneath the water. I did the painting from reference, so I could post that, but I’d have to go looking through hundreds of random galleries on pbase.com, so it’d take a lot of effort… I’ll just take it as criticism that I need to paint water/light better, because if it looked like the photo, you wouldn’t have brought it up! :stuck_out_tongue: Cheers, and thanks for the crit mate.

Boarded the Lord of the Flies scene. Everything is just improvised from my head, so naturally I messed up some anatomy and would have switched a couple shots in hindsight, either going in tighter or changing an eye level, etc. But on the whole it was fun. I’ll probably go back to the poses that kicked my butt and study them from references to make sure I can do them right if I ever need to again (such as walking - duh. I don’t know how to draw people walking)

#344

Sweet storyboarding, Static. Each one can stand alone as a strong composition too.

#345

I’ve thought it before and I’m thinking it now again… you’re really good at storyboarding.
At least I am always instantly sucked into the story.

I’m wondering, perhaps you’ve come across interesting articles/tutorials on storyboarding and you happened to bookmark those url’s. Could you post one or perhaps a few links in that case?
Would be awesome :slight_smile:

Is the word “cut” between each frame suggesting the transition method between frames?
What about timing? I can imagine some frames are shown longer than others. How do you indicate that? Or is this meant to be determined in an other stadium than the storyboarding phase?

Sorry for all the noob questions but… well, I know nothing about it but it looks very interesting to me :slight_smile:

#346

Daniel - Thank you kindly, friend.

Johan - Many thanks, man. I appreciate the encouragement. But no, I can’t say I’ve ever come across any tutorials or articles on storyboarding. I have a couple books back in California, but most everything I do I came up with on my own from watching movies or what have you. I can however point you in the direction of some working storyboard artists to give you an idea of what they look like in the business. Dan Milligan has some Beowulf boards near the bottom there, in sepia. John Watkiss has done some boards, but I couldn’t find them on his site. Josh Sheppard is probably the best one to go to, as he has piles of boards for anyone to look at. Good luck! It’s a lot of fun.

As I said, I messed up on several of the storyboard frames. I’ve been drawing walking poses tonight, and I just did a study of an “I’m gonna faint” face, as I wasn’t happy with the one from my imagination.

#347

Thanks for those links Jason! Gonna check those out now!
Edit: Holy smokes these guys are good!!
That Beowulf board for example :drool:

#348

Johan - Yeah, it’s fun looking through those. Cheers. :slight_smile:

I finished my Blizzard Short Story Contest submission. It’s here if any of you care to read it.

Now that that’s out of the way I can start focusing on the Dominance War. My character is a cyborg, so he’s not allowed to use magic. I figured the last concept didn’t really look like it had any weapons of good use, so I tried another concept.

#349

Tried another approach, adding some more elements. No real details yet. Just trying to get the structure looking good.

#350

A little muybridge to help me with my walking poses.

#351

I wanted to try another route, showing more demonic fleshy areas to better illustrate the “Cyborg” type of this character. Right now, I think the arms fused onto the shoulders have been infested by demon bug things, which everyone knows are dangerous. Also, the one good arm he has left is mutated with demon tissue, so it’s super stretchy, Dhalsim status. And finally, I think he can charge up and shoot a beam out of his eye… maybe.

#352

Muybridge photo studies! Work those pencil muscles!

#353

I never really do anything for fun or out of my head anymore, so I thought it might be good for me to do some character sketches every once in a while… Man, I’m way out of practice, haha. Nothing elaborate here. Just trying to get back into figure invention and stuff. Backgrounds, oof… Couldn’t do it. Suppose it’s not necessary for something like this, though.
I’m ok with the figure, but the face looks kind of dead. I was only working at like 500px width, so it was hard to get any detail in there.

It’s a start!

#354

Some more ideas.

#355

Man, it is amazing how good this feels… You know what it is? Drawing for pleasure! I said two posts ago that I was going to do some character sketches for the fun of it, but the truth is I was trying a bunch of different, concept art-y techniques that made it kind of frustrating to paint.
I noticed tonight as I browsed creativeuncut.com that pretty much all western artists paint and all eastern artists illustrate. What do I mean? Canadian, American, German, English, etc artists paint concept art like you would an oil or acrylic. All of the eastern concept art on that site, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc use lines, and often add color in a flatter, narrower value range, like a watercolor. I also noticed that they are less concerned with perfection, and instead focus on energy, as almost every image had a stray line or swath of color running around for no reason but to look good. Very different from the western trend of matte painting for games, where photos are used in under/overlays to create the utmost impression of realism.
I have an incredible respect for the western artists that paint the way they do. I’ll say that here without hesitance. I wouldn’t be spending this much time studying them, trying to learn their techniques and styles if I didn’t wish I could paint like that myself.
I’ve just been STUDYING painters and photos and things from life for so many months on end now that I’ve effectively stopped drawing for fun. I looked through my sketchbook the other night and noticed that I have NO drawings from imagination in it. My older sketchbooks from my teenage years were nonstop creation and imagination, and I feel like I’m missing something by separating myself from that part of drawing these days.
So after being reminded that not everything has to look perfect, or even be painterly at all… I drew this guy. Just for fun. It was so much fun to be messy again… Maybe I can get some of that mojo back soon… :O!!!

#356

Too right!

Fun is why we all started digging deeper for better drawing skills in the first place.

The thing with studies from photographs and other master pieces is that it can even get annoying when copyright laws are involved. We publish our studies to show the progress that we made, to ask for critique or even just for ourselves for later reference, even if it is just to see how we evolve over time.

I recently found out that some of the reference for paintings I had published in my portfolio were copyrighted. Since my goal with those studies was to copy as accurately as possible, the resemblance was there. In such cases, copyright laws protect the owners of the copyrights and even though I have written permission of the photographers who took the pictures, I could only publish my “derivative image” if I bought a licence. (just fyi, for displaying it in my portfolio it was one 50€ fee, for being allowed to sell prints, it was 450€ per year). That being said, there are organisations like Art Renewal Centre, they are non-profit organisations and if you ask nicely, you can do with your studies whatever you like, so it’s a matter of selective source usage.

All this just to say that it is probably best not to have any studies from photographs in your portfolio, unless you took them yourself and you haven’t sold the copyrights.
These (and the reasons you mentioned in your last post) are the very reasons that clicked something in my head, making me think more about creating my own portfolio, rather than a portfolio full of studies (which I have today).
It will take a while, but yes… it’s the path to go.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts like that!
They keep a guy like me on the straight path LOL.

Have fun creating!

#357

Johan - Yes! Thanks so much for the insight about portfolios and reference copyrights. I always heard about that stuff but never had anyone explain it to me before. I’m really gonna have to do a lot more from life and imagination, for sure… Thanks again! And yes, don’t forget the fun! It’s what will keep us around.

Messing around with a mechanical pencil. I was drawing on copy paper this time, which is much smoother than the sketchbook I have. I prefer how the lead/graphite slides around on the smoother surface, so I think the next sketchbook I buy will have less tooth. I actually have a bunch of moleskine back in California… maybe I can find them when I go back next month.

#358

sweet progression in here Jason. can see your having fun with it, keep it up :thumbsup: !

best,
Jan

#359

Jan - Thanks for the support!

I tried doing some pencils and then coloring in photoshop again, but without the pure whites resulting from a clean scan, everything just ends up too muddy. It was fun, though.

Also tried a watercolor of the DWIV concept, including a few design switches. Trying a new “face” and a lack of extra arms. The character requires my team colors, so I really just improvised them on. I used rose madder, payne’s gray and permanent green.

#360

I like these bot-like characters you create. They look too boney to be made of pure metal, but they look too stiff to be human/flesh as well… the insects are a nice touch.