Here are some of the illustrations I created while I was at Groundspeak for the Geocaching Souvenirs program. Souvenirs are kind of like a digital postcard you could unlock by Geocaching in a particular area. Two other artists and I created souvenirs for each of the 50 states, and quite a few other countries. The South Carolina and Florida ones were my favorite.
Some friends of mine asked if I could contribute something for a gallery show that's tied into a sketch/improve group that they're involved in. Not really thinking of myself as much of that type of artist, they told me the theme (which is Hope for Sale), and I came up with the idea of doing a short story as a comic page. I also figured it'd be a good learning experience and practice going into a short comic I'm doing for an anthology with some friends.
One of the biggest challenges was getting all of the right storytelling poses and breaking them into panels that would all fit onto one standard size comic page (I just liked the idea of using that type of guideline). After finally getting it laid out, I once again learned that my roughs tend to be far too rough, which means I have to do a lot more decision-making putting down tightened pencils. Also, I tend not to realize how many hands I'm actually putting into shots, and halfway through I start cursing myself for leaving myself all these tricky hand poses I now have to design. Despite spreading the final pencils over two days (1/3 the first day, 2/3 the second) , I notice that I didn't really start to loosen up until maybe the 10th panel, after which the drawings look a lot more loose and confident, I think.
What else did I learn? No matter how loose/light you may lay things down, there's going to get to a point where it won't erase if you redraw it too much. Panel 5, I'm looking at you.
Strongest Panels I think are the bottom row, and the two in the middle of row 3. Weakest? the first two in Row 3, and the first 3 panels in Row 2. Which is funny, as they were some of the strongest poses I thought I had when roughing it all out.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Here's an update on the Bugbear monster I've been working on in 3d. I'm at a point where I believe the modeling is mostly done, and it's at 6871 tris. That's a bit higher than I wanted, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I've done some basic rigging/jointing tests and I was pretty surprised with how well it was working. Some of the difficulties I found were trying to strike a balance between an overall graphic shape, and how much anatomical detail to put in. I'm going to attempt to do the fur the same way it was handled on the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus; multiple layers of painted fur with alpha channels; so that will require a good amount of work on texture painting.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Just something I did in a figure drawing class tonight that I was pretty happy with. There are some areas that can use some work, but since this is my first figure class in a few years it feels good to be getting back into it and improving from where I left off.
I've been making an effort to learn Flash a bit better the last two months or so; I'm taking a class in it, which keeps me busy and gives me things to try new stuff out on. As a kid I really enjoyed making Haunted Houses with the doors and windows that would open, and I thought I'd work that into a sort of Halloween card. Just in case it's not clear, click the flashing orange stuff. Happy Halloween!
I've been wanting to design a "monstrous"-type creature in 3d for awhile; and when I started kicking around ideas one of my first thoughts was the old D&D staple, the bugbear. Looking around on the web I wasn't too impressed with some of the other designs that have been produced for this creature. I did a few pages of rough sketches for head designs last year; and one always stood out as creepy and somewhat goblin-ish, which was a right step in the direction I wanted to go. I pulled it out again recently; and started making some tweaks on the design, and after making some silhouette shapes, I put the two together and managed to pull out the final concept. I'm pretty happy with it, and I think it'll look great once it's fully realized in 3d.
I grew up on too many cartoons in the 80s, too many comics and anime in the 90s, and videogames came somewhere inbetween then and now. I draw a lot but not as much as I should. I believe Gackt will save the world with the POWER OF ROCK AND ROLL.
