Requin

 

I'm back again at portraits but this one has more character design, he's based off a character from the book "Red Seas Under Red Skies". Here's what I based most of his look from....

 

"The statue like the man had prominent curving cheekbones that lent the narrow face a sense of mirth - plus a round protruding chin, wide eyes and large ears that seemed to have been jammed into the head at right angles. Requin, whose features bore a fair resemblance to a marionette put together in a haste by a somewhat irate puppeteer.

Bristling curls of steel-grey hair atop his head receding more sharply. He wore optics that glowed a translucent orange, giving a demonic cast to the wide eyes behind them.

His narrow frock coat was crushed black velvet, and his hands were covered with brown leather gloves."

I think I have kept to the original description pretty while still putting in some of my own touches, the glasses is purely how I envisioned them, so may not look how the author intended them. I thought they would look like his eyes were burning, as if to stare into his eyes was to stare into the eyes of a demon. I must say though I am struggling to render the crushed black velvet coat, it's such a weird material!

 

I've put the greyscale version in here too, so you can see how much I render out an illustration before moving over too colour. Greyscale for me has become more of a way to make sure everything reads correctly and looks like it should in real life, I find that when I jump straight into colour things can become very muddy quickly. It's something I need to work on. Till next time!

Forest Spirit

 Big bumper update for you guys today! I have been playing a lot of Hearthstone lately and even gotten back into World Of Warcraft, I know, shame on me. However these games have inspired me to create an illustration that you could possibly see in one of those games. My first stop, as is becoming common with me, was to just doodle out a few ideas in silhouette form.

 

 

I quite liked the crouching guy so simply threw him on his own canvas and started rendering in some details and giving him more form on a greyscale layer. A simple gradient map and colour layer later and it was time to start rendering him in colour. His face was something I really wanted to push with this one, I generally paint grumpy looking evil guys, with a stern expression. I thought it would be more interesting to make him look a little innocent/scared.

 

As you can see I came back to him a few days later and did a lot of re working, I thought his pose was a little stiff, so added the staff arm. The rocky parts also got reworked, to have a new design on them which hopefully looks a little more interesting, finally I did a lot of changes to the background to make it a little more readable and help draw the viewers eye to the character himself. There a still a few more things I want to add however, such as small animals scampering around him, to really reinforce him being a forest spirit.

 

I recently got some feedback on the most current version, so I am going to address those and hopefully finish him up this weekend. Till next time!

 

 

 

 

Nautical Golem

 

I finished my Cubebrush golem entry! After much messing around with it, I finally got it to a place I was happy with. The main goal with this piece was to try and push more of his story into the overall image. Who is he?? What does he do?? What's his purpose?? I might not have pulled it off overall but I definitely learned a lot about this process.

 

I feel like I am beginning to get some of the much sought after texture in my work now to. So everything feels like it could be something from the real world and not something that looks overly rendered, making it look very smooth (like my work used to). I hope you guys like him though, he has a sort of dim charm don't you think?? Till next time!

Cubebrush Golem Entry So Far

So it's only a few days until the deadline for the Cuberush golem competition, so I thought it was high time I started designing something for it! My initial steps were to make a bunch of simple silhouettes, to try and find a theme or basic look for my golem. I soon began to start playing around with a nautical theme, thus the chains, anchors and bits of ships jutting out from them.

 

With a rough outline of what I wanted from this character I then did a second pass on a few of the silhouettes, exploring the nautical theme in a little more detail. His story began to develop a little more with these sketches, I didn't just imagine him as a simple golem but a bruiser for a pirate ship. The ships magician could've created him while they were out at sea, so all he had available to combine together was stuff from the ocean itself. Ominous, powerful but not particularly intelligent,  were themes I was trying to get across.

 

After that I picked my favourite out of those four and did a much more rendered pass at a design for the golem, making sure to have plenty of inspiration and references. He certainly evolved a lot from the loose sketch, replacing the metal banded rib cage with a buckling barrel. Looks like a little friend has also taken up residence in there! Huge pirates of the Caribbean influences going on here but I hope they still look their own thing. What do you guys think of my nautical golem? Do you think I'm going an interesting direction? Till next time!

The Journey Begins

 

It's been a week and I haven't uploaded a single post! I do apologise but not a great deal, I was too busy enjoying the sun in Spain but I'm back now and I have a new painting for you guys. Even though I couldn't get my hands on Photoshop while on holiday (purely a desktop man you see) I did do a few sketches and thumbnails and the above image is the product of one of those.

 

I actually have ideas for about five more paintings, all of them chronicling the journey of this man, almost like a mini series of paintings. This first one is him taking his first steps on his journey, the great statue is marking the borders of his home country and he has no idea what lies beyond those hills.

 

 

The top image is actually my second pass at the painting, the second one is were I was originally going to leave the piece. I hope you can agree that the top one pops a little more. I used predominately phot textures for the basis of this piece, which I think makes it look a little more "alive" than my previous environments, what do you guys think?? Till next time!

 

Dishonored Portrait

 

After spending the past few weeks studying environments I was itching to get back to creating some character art. My original plan was to start on my contest piece for the Cube Brush golem challenge but I got distracted with my excitement for the Dishonored definitive addition coming at the end of the month.

 

The above piece is an original character, however he was done in the style of the Dishonored concept art, I love how loose the brush strokes are in those pieces, they give a lot of energy to a piece which I think is somewhat lacking in my work. Hoping to transfer what I've learnt from this piece over to my own work and it's definitely got me wanting to create more portraits. Till next time!

 

P.S: Here's the link for the Cubebrush challenge if anyone is interested.

https://cubebrush.com/forums/topic/august-2015-art-competition-golem/

Biome Studies

I'm back at university it feels like at the moment! After the feedback I received on the forgotten pool I really wanted to take a step back from creating fully rendered images and wanted to focus on the fundamentals.

 

My first port of call was to just grab a load of reference images, for particular things I wanted in these scenes. So for the desert environment, I need to see how sand works, how it reacts to light and how it holds it's shape. I also needed to see what types of plant life grow in desert environments, it's not going to be lovely rose bushes now is it. With all the reference collected I spent about four to six hours on each scene trying to remain true to how these things work in real life but trying to avoid spending hours rendering a rock. I learned a heck a lot from these and hop to apply this to a new environment painting, hopefully that will be an improvement on my last one. Till next time!