Something new!

Thesis is hard you guys...
Soon I will be posting up all the pieces complete with commentary, probably in individual posts, but for now have some rocks!

These are a sampling of markers from the world I am developing for my thesis known as waystones. They began as a form of protective charm on roads and highways, and over the years they have evolved into a combination of road sign and map for travelers throughout the world.

Guy on the left is a warrior guardian on the Soldier's Road. The middle stone is the Serpent Highway. The Marker on the right shows the route to the top of Mt. Aruk (named in ancient runes under the hollowed bit) while warning travellers of the dune wyrms that lurk beneath the mountain.

Fun times!

Something Quick

Did this as a warmup and ended up spending a total of an hour or so on it.

I used a brush pack based on canvas textures, and I really like the way they behave for this kind of thing, so expect to see some more of this kind of thing.

Rush Job

Our subversive teacher gave us a surprise rush job assignment this morning. We were supposed to turn in an illustration based on a recent article about Iran sending a monkey to space, due by the end of the class 3 hours later.

I finished in two and a half... ha!

A quickie

Not much time for any in depth posts recently, but I have been taking time to do some warmup and concept pieces over the last week or so which will most likely end up here. First up is a quick piece (about 30 mins) I did to explore some of the more villainous characters from the world I am developing.

Patrol duty gone wrong

Meet the redhorn rebellion, barbarians and cutthroats all. They are a faction from the cold north who have staged an invasion of the middle territories, but to what end? There will probably be more on these guys later, but this sums up their outlook on the other clans pretty well.

Some Landscapes!

Its been a while! I have just started up my last semester at The Pennsylvania college of Art and Design which is a little strange, but to warm up for the impending craziness I did some environments just for fun.

totally not Dagobah

so much green...

These are both actually prepping for my upcoming Thesis project in which I will be concepting a world full of these goblin creatures. More on that soon!

I lied

I worked on this some more after all, and since it hasn't been officially critiqued yet I will probably end up changing it afterwards again... but I am happy with the changes thusfar.

Process Pt. IV: Now in Technicolor

Hello internet! Barring some final touchups the societty piece is just about done! So it is time to talk about color.

Before I start mucking about with color I always give the underpainting a once over to check for composition or continuity mistakes. In this case I noticed that the old background was creating some lighting problems, and was also directing the viewers eye away from the parts of the piece I wanted. To solve both problems I shifted the whole background to the left and knocked out a wall. Now the hanging lights and perspective on the roof lead us to the robot and the flower, and there is a nice light source to backlight the robo.

The updated underpainting

For the color, I simply chose a scheme, created a new layer set to Multiply, and roughed in the hues I wanted. Since the underpainting is pretty tight this stage can be pretty messy, so this only took around an hour of fiddling once I nailed down what colors I needed.

base color

To add some interest and warm up the robot's overall color I added some decals, originally I was thinking warning strips but they were a bit garish so instead he got whatever these are...

With markings

And a bonus shot just to show how loose the color really is under all this here are the color layers set to Normal.

fugly eh?

Process Pt. III: Detailing

Progress! Slowly crawling towards the finish, next week will be a big update with the coloring and touchup stage. For now some detail shots!

 

Intermission

Happy Thanksgiving to all you in the US!

Due to fall break there has been no significant progress on the piece for the society competition, so I threw together a sped up recording of a speedpainting I did over a lunchbreak about a week ago. For a TLDR version of my process I present you this.

 

Total painting time was a little over an hour in good old Photoshop CS5. I would also recommend watching it in the full 1080p to get all the juicy details if your connection can handle it.

The final image

Process pt. II: Revisions

This week saw a couple of major revisions to the black and white sketch as I slowly tighten it up.

Probably the most notable change is that the Robo now has more defined segments and detail. He was feeling pretty lame as the box with legs he was earlier so I chopped up some of those planes and made him look a bit more bulky while still retaining some of those joints. I also decided that it needed another narrative element, so I changed his pose and made him some sort of battery collection bot. (there will probably be a bunch of those power cell looking things scattered throughout the piece.)

The old background wasn't working for me, it had some weird perspective and compositional issues, so I tossed it, stretched the canvas to the right a bit and roughed this in pretty quickly with chalk and square brushes. At this point the level of detail doesn't need to be too high since most of it will be hidden by the foreground elements so it is pretty sloppy at this stage.

And lastly some messing around with lighting.Stay tuned for the finished underpainting and base color!