Still Life Painting Study

Just a rough study I cranked out in 1.5 hours. From Life.

Some people were interested in my process, so here it is. I start of with a sketch then I block in the local color with an airbrush. The next stage is blocking in everything (which I'm not very good at yet). I mostly use a brush with really low flow so some color shows through and I can blend easily. I don't use pen pressure opacity at all. My brushes are 100% opaque but I turn flow pressure on. After this I would add detail textures and highlights, but this was a quick study so I didn't have time for that.

When I paint from imagination I use a similar process, but I do value and color studies first so I know what I'm doing from the beginning and don't have to guess. The challenge with this process is if you screw up your values and colors in the first painting step it's really hard to fix later because each layer builds on the other. You also gotta be careful not to make the initial color too saturated or contrasting because it's harder to pump out the highlights/accents later on. I'm going to try a more opaque approach and see if this makes it easier to correct stuff.

Cutout Animation

This is the coolest animation I've made so far; an homage to fighting video games. The characters were designed to be cutout, rigged and animated in Toonboom which seemed kind of lame, but it was actually a lot easier than hand animating every frame. The best part is the character stays on model with no effort! Downside is the animation is stiff. The sound and music are from Sheridan's sound server.

Animal Walk Cycle

Yeaaah I can animate now! (wrong) The inbetweening for this assignment drove me crazy because there's so many curves on the tiger. I didn't draw all the stripes but regardless I learned the most about animation from this assignment. What I concluded is traditional animation is a beast and thank god for the computer. I respect people who do this for a living.

Novel Interior - Dracula

Here is the sorta finished painting for the novel interior sketch a few posts ago.

I also started making the environment in 3D. First I created a temp environment in UDK using their custom meshes to figure out the scale. Slowing I'm creating my own custom meshes in Maya and I will import them into UDK. First real attempt at 3D environment art, whoo!

Interior Layout + Process

This layout is for some novel interior painting assignment inspired by the original Dracula story. Thought I would include same rough sketches. I did more than this, these are just samples. I didnt start the final painting yet.

Fighting Game Layout

Originally this was just an extra for my layout portfolio, but after I finished drawing it reminded me of those 2D fighters like King of Fighters, Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, etc. I love those kind of games (even though I suck) and we have to animate someone jumping for another class so I thought it would be cool to make a mock-up fighter of my own using this background as one of the stages.

Character Design - Martial Art cat

We had to design a character from their birth to their elder years. I went through a bunch of bland ideas before decided to make a muscular guy. He becomes even more jacked as he aged which made it more interesting to design. Nuff words.

Unreal

I played with UDK some more during reading week. This map is based a little on a video tutorial series from 3DBuzz, but I went a bit overkill with emitters, sound effects and DoF, haha. The videos were great, I think if I had the time I know enough to create a badass level. The next step for me is to learn modeling&texturing static meshes which will take way more time to learn than UDK.

This sure beats the hell out of animating!

All the assets used in this map were from the UDK kit, none created by me.