Studies, 2 Approaches

The topic for week 7 of my study group was portraits. I tried 2 painting techniques. The first is a very tight rendering style, gets clean results at the expense of time. The second is really fast because I used no sketch, but I think it would be more difficult for me to pull this off without reference.

Plein Air Forest Studies

On a humid Friday I went plein air painting with Christine and my good friend Khoebe. It's nice to get off the computer, sketch outside and explore nature, had a lot of fun!

Motorcycle Themed Studies

I developed an obsession for motorcycles. Well I've always been interested in them but recently I started sketching them a lot. They're drawn from photos or Google Street View, which is why the quality of drawing is better than my life sketches. Also some loose character concepts.

Downtown Oakville Sketches

My good friend Khoebe wanted to draw in downtown Oakville to practice environment sketching, so despite the pouring rain we went and sketched some fancy buildings.It was a fun adventure.

Dredd

Leather study turned into Judge Dredd fan art.

Another Zbrush Head

Tried doing a likeness study of Cassie. I'm not a fan of her music, but I love her hair! Too bad I couldn't sculpt it. Some day... Until then I just painted it in Photoshop!

Bike Study

I enjoy painting motorcycles.

Michelangelo Study

This is a study of the sculpture Pieta by Michelangelo + the WIP. I got inspired when I saw a 3D artist do Michelangelo studies in both Photoshop and Zbrush.

Maya Experiment

Real time viewport 2.0. Learning tiling texturing and lighting.

Revolver High Poly Model

One of my new years resolutions is to make more 3D art and force myself to post it online. So my first modeling is a revolver because I want to learn how to create basic hard surface forms and texture metallic surfaces before getting into crazy full blow environments. There's some mistakes I didn't notice until I posted the picture so I'm going to clean up the model some more then hopefully get it textured before the end of the week.

Movie Screenshot Study - Sucker Punch

Haven't done a movie screenshot study in a long time. I think the last one I did was in May. So I did one from Sucker Punch (I like the designs in the movie, but I never watched it).

Sci-Fi Tonals

This is the final layout assignment for the semester, heavily inspired by Mass Effect and Halo 4.

Tonal Studies

Power leveling my digi painting skills by trying out Shaddy Safadi's brush set http://www.shaddyconceptart.com/download .

Digi Paint Study - Back

Yesterday I did my first digi paint study in months. I used to do a lot of these studies back in the day, but with school and learning 3D animation I didn't have time to study painting as much. But now I feel like getting back in the groove.

1.5 hour study using Marcus Ranum's stock photo as reference (http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com and www.ranum.com)

Steps:

Caricatures from Video

In character design class we learned to study character types from real people and apply them to our designs. This is a collection of some of the caricature studies I did from Youtube videos.

Painting Interior

The painted version of a layout I did a while ago. I love the simplicity of traditional Japanese architecture, so it was fun researching for this assignment.

Mudbox Speed Sculpt - Alien

Playing with Mudbox for an hour.

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.

Still Life Study

I stole the skull from a graveyard, but don't worry. I returned it after I finished my study.

Video Game Study

It's interesting to study video games because you can choose the composition and gets a sense of the scene from different angles.

The downside is the crazy perspective from the virtual camera and the lighting conditions are not realistic in most cases. I still think it's good practice. The next step is probably to take multiple screenshots of the environment then draw it in a new composition or take an existing composition and draw my own design in its place.

Of course all for practice.

This is from Batman Arkham City:

This is from the Divinity II demo: