Davy

Well I had started another space soldier character in zBrush about a week and a half ago. It's not done yet, but I was working at school on it Friday and zBrush or the computer wouldn't let me get very far without crashing every few minutes for whatever reason. So to blow off my frustration I decided to sketch him out instead. I needed to fine tune the final look of his boots, gauntlets, and gloves anyways. Funny how none of that came to fruition when I got as far as I did with this. I'd like to work more on it, and I might in the future. It seems decent enough to stick in the back of my portfolio or website somewhere when I get those ready. Not really sure about the pose, it was just how the original sketch ended up, and I wasn't really thinking about it when I started. Also his name is Davy, one of my friends decided that was what he should be called, and from that point on it was so.

I even managed to work on this in a way that kind of looks like a tutorial, so I figured it couldn't hurt to upload that. So here's the process behind Davy:

1 - Rough Sketch

2 - Block-In Lights and Shadows

Did this in a new layer under the sketch.

3 - Refining

The longest part. Just defining each part better, adding finer details

4 - Atmosphere

Rendered out some easy clouds with Photoshop and stuck 'em over Davy. Erased the area over his arm to make atmospheric perspective more apparent. Easy to remember as well, darker = closer and further away = lighter (actually by lighter I mean closer to the background color ex. the sky)

5 - Fancy Lights

This is just me trying to get more bang out of this, I already had highlights but I felt like he needed some more. Just went around with the soft brush and painted in the lights. Then went back with the brush at around 10% opacity and built up the glowing aura around each light. It was the same process for the highlights I intensified on his visor and shoulder.

Here's a little GIF of the whole process above, enjoy. 

Hope this helps somebody out there.

Winter is Coming

After my last post I just had to make another one just so I could use the line from Game of Thrones. So, here we go with Winter.  I'm not too happy with the pose, I tried to get more of an extreme twist from her torso to her waist. I ended up scrapping that because I didn't want to end up spending hours noodling the pose till it was just right. I didn't want to copy the pose I did for Summer, but after putting them together in the second image, I don't think it would of been too bad. Colored Winter just like I did Summer, also colored lines are make things pretty nice lookin'.

Anyways I quickly stuck Summer and Winter together in one image. Kinda surprised that it worked so well, at least I think it kinda looks neat. I also didn't realize how much taller Winter would end up being. Wasn't my original plan to mash them together, but it works. Who knows I might just finish up this lady/swimwear/firearm/season theme I've started with these two. I mean I'm halfway there already haha, just Spring and Fall should be fun to do.

Summer's Bookend

Well I meant to post this at the "official" end of summer on September 21st, but I kind of forgot.  Anyways, I embraced being a male of my species for an hour or so and drew a pretty girl without much clothing... So, I wanted to try something different when I did this and just played with the gradient, lasso, and hue/saturation tools in Photoshop to color this. I thought it looked neat and graphic-y, and was simple way to color. Kinda has a military-girl vibe to it, in which case be careful she knows how to use that gun haha.

Red Wizardz

Here's another one of those 30 minute speed paints. Topic was Red Wizard. This was as far as I got in about 30 minutes. Probably would of been further if I hadn't kept changing my mind about it. Made me waste a lot of time, lesson learned.

I think I said this before in another post but I'll say it again. Going into a project headfirst is not always the best way, planning things out or at least figuring out your goal before starting really really helps.

Anyways I spent about another 30 minutes trying to do something with it, then I scrapped that and put in another 30 minutes and ended up with this.

I think it's better, but it has a non-existent pose and I should of just started from scratch all over and saved myself an hour messing around. Doing these paintings has really been forcing me to think about stuff a lot more than I'm used to.

Something Cartoony

Just wanted to get something out there that wasn't 3d. Plus, I couldn't sleep. So I drew Marie without her helmet. I wanted to do it all fancy-like but I couldn't spend too long on this. As I type right now my eyes want to close so bad haha. Off to bed as soon as I post this.

Sketchy Suit

Been busy lately, starting a massive group project. Should be really badass when we finished. Anyways this is a cartoony version of the zBrush sculpt I'm working on for the short. Wanted to figure out some form of color scheme. I originally wanted her armor to be some sort of color, and her accent lights to be white. It never wanted to look right though, so I ended up with the reverse of what I wanted. Which I don't think looks too bad, I like it at least. Her 'eye' I should also explain is a holographic display thing, I guess kind of like the Cylon eyes. Except this one doesn't always move from side to side, I guess a cyclops would be a better example. We were thinking about maybe doing a kind of inside the helmet shot like you see in Iron Man to see her face as our short goes on.

Hopefully I get the actual model done soon as it is much more impressive than this lil' sketch I have here. Learning a bunch of cool zBrush stuff for hard surface modeling, and I think it looks pretty darn cool so far.

In other news, Happy New Year, and I've also gotten an internship doing some stuff for a local PBS station. Doing pre production work for a short they're planning. I'll be sure to upload that stuff too if I can.

Monk-y Redo

Hey all, long story short my trusty old tablet finally broke and just got a brand new Intuos5. Hadn't really had the chance to break it in until now. Finals have started for me this week and I just wanted to get that off my mind, so I decided to retry the female monk from Diablo 3 again without lines. I had taken a couple old demo files from one of my professors and tried to figure out how he painted them. Reverse engineering a painting is rather fun when you manage to achieve similar results. She did kinda get stretched since I wasn't really paying attention to anything but how to paint.

Anyways this came out better than I had hoped, considering how unwary I am of using so much color, like the blues/purples in the shadows. It really does make the end result feel... nicer, not really sure why yet.