process work

For a change, I thought I'd put up some process work on the last piece since some people have asked how I work. For me the first step is simultaneously working thumbnails to try to match what's in my head as close as I can, sketches of principal characters or props, and reference gathering. At this stage i'm working pretty small..maybe 500 by 500 or so.

here are some explorations of the staging and lighting. At this point I know what the scene will be, and I pretty much know I want a low vantage point. Now I need to figure out in a sloppy way how it all fits together...here's a sampling of pose work and character exploration sketches



and finally the final lead up to the finished piece. Laying down the perspective grid is a pain, but necessary for something architectural. I'm working at about2000 high by whatever wide, because my final piece is going to be twice that, and there's a huge amount of layers at this stage which would choke my machine to death.

after blocking in all the elements, it's just a matter of polish. Ordiniarily there would be more thorough color studies in here, but with the night lighting i knew what I wanted so I just went with it.

Well, hopefully this is something interesting...

The Portly Thief

who would think to look up for a portly thief?

If there's any interest I can post some of the process stuff on this in the coming days. It was a fun piece to work on and very challenging to put it all together.


I don't know what's in that bag, but it's really really valuable.

Guard

This piece is for an upcoming scene I'm working on where a guard is looking for someone who's just escaped. Interestingly, I originally had a totally different emotion in mind when I started this. Initially I was going with a ' I'm gonna keel you!' feel for the guy, with a sneering, teeth bared look. But as I was working on the face, the personality of the character established itself and ' I keel you' was replaced by ' alright, where did that bastard go?'


and hopefully in the end that's the right call for the piece.

On another note, if I had to pick just one group of guys to teach you everything you needed to know as an artist, I would say to look at the Orientalists. No foolin. With Sargeant, Bouguereau, Waterhouse, and Gerome amongst their ranks, you could sure do worse for mentors.

Monstro

Sometimes I wonder if the earliest concepts artists had it easier. If you needed to design a troll or something, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted and it would probably be pretty original. Big ugly guy, maybe a club in his hand, maybe giant feets, and viola! Everyone else is painting flowers and popes and whatnot, I'm pretty sure this hasn't been done before...

The reason this came to my mind is when I set about to do a fantasy character, how difficult it was to avoid making something that had been done a hundred times before. If you think about it, the fantasy genre is pretty hasn't changed all that much in the time it's been around..and if you don't believe me take a look at Rackham sometime..if you ask me that's ready to be modeled rigged and animated.

Anyways, with all that bla bla out of the way, here's my latest character piece. The narrative I was trying to build around this guy is that he's been on his own wandering for some time and has to cobble together his armor from guys he defeats..I layered the armour in such a way that you could see a progression of styles over the thousands of years he's walked the earth..from bronze greek armour to plated horse armour ( on the last variant )




also I just gotta say it's still a bit of a thrill for me when I get metal to look just right...

New Character Work

So in my ongoing effort to refine my body of work, I'm going to be switching to characters for a couple posts, in this case with some model paintovers. First up, a couple of post apocalyptic survivors. I wanted to see if I could get away from the 'mad max' look and try for something a little more utilitarian and plausable for a near future scenario. For a good but depressing read on a scenario like this , try 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. ( actually, I think reading that got me thinking along these lines to begin with )

For the first character I pretty much knew what I wanted but for the 2nd guy I knew I wanted something a little crazier. I knew I wanted to incorporate license plates ( keeping with a theme of common items being used for survival purposes), but I wasn't sure how far to go with it..in the end I figured the most practical use for them was as a sort of a stab proof vest. There may be further guys appearing in this series if I think of anything good...

In the ghetto

an attempt at a bit more polish and atmosphere

Soldier design

In the future, soldiers will be far sexier than we could have imagined

Scene at Sunset

Trying out some new brushes here

Tanky Robots

or Roboty Tanks? you decide.

Guns and ammo

a couple of recent gun designs.

pew pew