May 27 Paint

Started working on another one tonight. This time I'm doing incremental saves at different progress points. I started with a favorite thumbnail I've had laying around for more than a year:


Open in Painter, lift image to its own layer, set to Multiply, then block in base colors on Canvas layer:


Block in foreground balcony and some rooftops in the midground, create slight gradient on ground (darkens with distance):


Add more rooftops out to shoreline, select rooftops with Magic Wand and repeat gradient to distance:


Add some ground light sources with Glow brush - brightest spot will be the focal point of the image:


Add light to foreground balcony, also some to distant tall buildings:


Final step for tonight, add two figures on the balcony


The brightest light in the image is only about a 25% value - not even close to white. None of the other lights is brighter than 50%. I'm trying to make my #1 read be the character whose head is in front of the bright light, #2 should be the other character near the doorway approaching the main character, and #3 should take the viewer's eye on a little tour of the city lights before coming right back to the #1 read.

I'm thinking that with the #1 read being fairly close to the horizontal center, I'm probably going to want to move the distant tall building right above him over to the left some - getting too much of a vertical line there I think.

May 22 Speed Paint

Did this last night in about an hour:



After buying and watching Whit Brachna's environment video from Massive Black, I was bummed that he changed the submarine to a boiler by the end of it, so I decided to give the sub its day in the sun. Or in the dark sub maintenance bay. I like submarines, they're pretty cool.

Needs more detail. I'll have to put in another hour or two this weekend.

Tonight's paint

This was a busy weekend, but got some paint time in, which is good:



This is from a thumbnail I've had laying around for at least a year. I wanted to get the values down before going color. Trying to prep myself for an environment class I'll be taking starting in a few weeks. It's some kind of large reception room; there's a procession coming in to meet someone by the windows.

At the Airport

Speed paint from life, about 1 hour:



I don't get to do this often. Actually, I've never been able to do this before! I had a long wait for my plane in Manchester NH, so I set up in the Sam Adams pub there - where they not only have a whole wall of convenient outlets and seats for computer users, but free WiFi in the whole airport, bravo! - and painted. Very complex lighting situation, multiple daylight and artificial sources, I didn't quite nail it, but for the first time I think it looks okay.

Of course, then I see stuff like this, and like this, and I wanna bang my head against the wall...

Oh, also, my entry did not make the top 50 cut for Dominance War. Oh well. Now I can do some tweaks to it that friends have suggested, and make it better for my portfolio.

Survivors

Did a little speed paint this weekend, just finished it up. About 2.5 hours or so cuz I stopped to look at it and think a lot:



Those guys are probably in big trouble.

Gotta do more of these. Grind, grind, level up. Trying to do more of them for work even when they don't ask for it.

Dominance War: All Together

Here's all three final images in a single post just to make it easy.

Model Sheet Complete!

Aaaand, I'm done! Here's the model sheet:



I'm happy with this entry. Hope the judges like it too... but even if they don't, it's a nice piece for the portfolio.

Ahh. West and wewaxation at wast. :D

DWIII Concept Sheet

Here's the concept sheet that the contest requires.



I kinda did it backwards, I made this sheet after I finished the painting, though I had most of these sketches done separately. As long as it's done, heh. :)

Now, lunch. Then right after, I gotta do the ortho-view modeling sheet. Almost there!

Painting Complete!

Here's the final image:



Rock. I like being finished. Oh, except that I have to put together a concept art sheet and a modeling turnaround sheet for it. I'm gonna do that tomorrow though.

Finally, I'm actually happy with a painting.

Gaining Momentum

Today's progress:



You really have to click on the image to see how the cracks and refraction work on the sphere. Took a while to figure out how to do it but once I did it went very fast. Not that much left to do, really... from here, it's all downhill.

Polished my Gnomes

OK, now I feel like I'm getting somewhere:



The gnomes are all done. This is a good thing. I only have a couple more things to do to finish this piece - the girl is pretty much done too. I need to put some things in her hands and then do some crystal effects to the sphere. Last will be a little bit of lighting effect, and that's it. Maybe another 3 hours total work, on top of roughly 8 so far.

More Dominance War

Here's where I'm at on the DW piece:



I'm still too damn slow. But it's getting closer. I decided that rather than painting all the gnome faces from scratch, I'd duplicate the one I had and then make changes to the copies. Much faster. I sometimes fail to remember all the sneaky "speed it up" tricks that one can use in digital, and wind up noodling too much.

At this point the gold thing is done, the girl is nearly done, and the gnomes are taking shape. Once I get the gnomes done, the final stuff will go very fast as it's mostly FX.

Update: HOLY CRAP, somehow the news never reached me that I had to do more than just start a thread on CGTalk to actually enter the contest. I was poking around the DW home site and saw that my image was nowhere to be found among the entries... then found some instructions that I had never seen before. I've followed them, uploaded an image and info... hopefully it will get set up properly.

Whew, I'm sure glad I saw that. Woulda really sucked to do all that work and have it not count.

Dominance War

Here's where I'm at on my Dominance War piece:



I've only had the chance to put in about 3 hours total but actually I think my progress is good. I'm not going to render this to super-pixel perfection, because it's to be submitted at a pretty small size, 1000px square. I'm working at 3X that size so it will rez down nicely. It's gonna be a lot less work than the Artspace entry... thank goodness.

Here's the first progress shot, after 1.5 hours:

NVArtspace Entry

I got my Artspace entry in, just in time:



Here's the full entry thread with some comments and progress images.

Next: Dominance War III!

Lots of Airplanes

Yep, still doing airplanes.

This one's a bigger version of one of the little ones from the older sketches. It's a little off at the front, but practice practice practice...

Also still continuing my quest for the supersonic propeller plane:

These props are much more like what you'd actually need for a supersonic propeller. My research says that it's pretty much impossible to go supersonic with a piston-engine plane, so all these need to be turboprops, powered by jet engines spinning the propellers.

These are drawn much bigger than my usual sketches, I got a pad of 14x17 newsprint so I could sketch big. It seems to make a difference, I can use my whole arm to draw so it feels good and I can do precise lines more smoothly. Can't scan 'em tho, so these are photos with my digital camera. They've got some lens distortion... ah well.

I also played around with Sketchup this weekend. I started drawing an environment sketch, and kinda liked one of the buildings, so I decided to try modeling it. It's kind of a futuristic elevated train station:


Heres a view from one end into the platform:


Sketchup is fun and quick and pretty easy to use, mostly. There are some things that are a bit odd about how it works, sometimes it's not snapping to the points you want it to, but you can't tell until you've created a bunch of geometry and you realize it's just SLIGHTLY off - like you delete something that shouldn't be attached to anything, and something unexpected also disappears because it is actually attached. Seems like it pays to hide any geometry you're not actually working on.

Still, it's powerful and fast and you can make pretty complex stuff with it. And you can't beat the price - FREE!

Master Copy

Over the holidays I had some art time, yay! I did a bunch of sketching. Also, I did a fun thing, a "master copy" of a Syd Mead piece, the one that's featured on his Gnomon DVDs.
Specifically, I followed along with the Step 3: Color Preliminary DVD.



Here's a shot of Mr. Mead's final for comparison:


You can see I didn't nail it exactly, the color of the stone is off and the vehicle proportions are wrong. I wasn't really trying to perfectly duplicate this, I just wanted to try painting with gouache, which is what Mr. Mead has used for his whole career. It's a very different thing, painting with a brush on art board, compared to digital, and completely new to me; I've never used gouache before ever. Rather than try to learn the paint while also struggling to design a nice image, I decided to copy this one.

It's a standard practice among art students to do master copies, and I sure learned a lot from it. It was fun! Gouache is reputed to be really difficult to work with, but I didn't find it too hard once I got going. The key thing is the consistency or thickness of the paint. If it's too dry and gooey, it doesn't spread well and gets lumpy. If it's too wet and thin, it can lift up any color beneath it and cause bleeding. There's a definite sweet spot where the paint is just right, and that's sort of hard to hit unless you mix up a big batch of whatever color you're using, rather than mixing small amounts on your palette.

Here's some details:


Compare to a similar detail from Mr. Mead's piece:


A couple more of my details:



So that was really enjoyable, I have to do some more pieces with gouache. Next time I'll try something I design myself.

More Sketches

Yep, more sketches. I have a lot more than these but I can't really put them all online. Most of them are pretty boring exercises in construction or light and shade (or both), kinda like this one:


Doing a lot of airplanes, because I've been watching the Scott Robertson DVD on aircraft. Mine are not so fanciful as his. However, airplanes are excellent practice for drawing 3D forms with accurate perspective.


Pulled one of these planes out and cleaned it up on tracing paper:


I traced this plane off a very messy scribbly sheet of sketching, I liked the shape:


So I went ahead and did a more elaborate drawing, which turned out with parts that aren't right:

Somewhere during this drawing, I came up with a sort of story idea where this plane is going to try to be the first prop-driven aircraft to break the sound barrier in level flight. Actually I think that may be physically impossible (though it was apparently done a few times in steep crash dives during WWII), but it's a fun sort of romantic extension to the old prop-plane/barnstormer sort of tradition. So this is a plane that's got a really huge powerful engine with two counter-rotating props to partially offset the massive engine torque, and some fancy swept-serrated wings like a jet fighter, with control surfaces that are more like modern supersonic fighters - the older control surface systems don't work well up around and beyond 1.0 Mach because the physical airflow forces are much different from subsonic flight. But I digress...

Anyway, I could see that the drawing was off, so I laid out a more formal perspective grid and got it more accurate:



I guess it's hard to see since this isn't a completed line drawing, but the wing on the right was too long in the first drawing, and some of the details at the front weren't in proper perspective. I tried to correct all that. I spend a lot of time trying to get the prop ellipses right drawing by hand; I don't have ellipse guides that big (this sketch fills a sheet of 9x12 marker paper) so I'm gonna have to check them in Illustrator or something.

Eventually I wound up with this side view, which I rendered quickly with marker:

I'm still gonna go back and work the previous sketch, most likely doing a layout in Illustrator and then ink drawing in Painter. Might go on to do a full photo-real rendering too.

I was also watching my Syd Mead DVDs again, and among other little drawing notes, I made a couple of "master copies" of the "Sport Hypervan in the DuPierre Equine Courtyard" image value comps:




The Hypervan isn't really drawn in the right proportions, but these were still fun, quick and good exercises. Someday I'll have that kind of layout and design sense...

Sketchy Dumpy

As you know I'm working hard on rebooting core skills, so I've been doing a lot of sketching. Basically I'm working from the Gnomon Scott Robertson DVDs, the ones on basic perspective drawing and shading. This week, mostly on the perspective stuff. Here's some of the better pages:





Getting the ellipses right in freehand is really hard, but it's something I have to master. You can see the wheels on the car above aren't quite right, and the prop on the shaded airplane in the next image up is off. I'll take these into my programs and correct them so I know where I messed up.

All circles drawn in perspective become ellipses; so for things like wheels and any other circular item you have to master nailing exactly how the ellipse looks in that view or it's just off. Even people who know nothing about this sort of drawing know that the wheels are off, because we all see wheels every day... so this ain't something you can slack on. Of course I can nail them digitally, but that's too easy. :)

I really like the plane on the right in the next-to-last image, that came out really well. For that one I drew the prop ellipse first, using an ellipse template; see how much more "right" it looks?

Thursday is Art Night: More City Gates

I decided that tonight was going to be "Art Night," and that I was just gonna come home, eat a quick dinner and then crank on some arting. Here's the results as of 10:30pm:

First, a bit of warmup...

Working on making 3D cubes and then lighting them properly. It's good warmup for my hands. I recently noticed that I hold a pencil or pen differently from how I hold my digital tablet stylus; the stylus is thicker so I wind up with my first and second finger both on the barrel, as opposed to only the first finger. I find that I grip a pen or pencil much, much harder, but if I instead hold it like my stylus, my grip immediately loosens - which smooths out my lines considerably. Too much muscle tension is bad, can even cause carpal tunnel.

Then, I put about 90 minutes into the City Gates color pass, while running the Syd Mead color preliminary DVD in the background...


I think it's starting to look a lot better. Now that I'm putting in these saturated greens in the foreground, the middle ground of the gate structure is looking a bit too sharply defined and saturated. I'm gonna have to knock that back to give some distance, some atmospheric perspective. It needs to look halfway between the far buildings and the foreground. It's actually quite some distance away, the inside of the tunnel roof is something like 30 or 35 meters high so it's gotta be around a kilometer away from our viewpoint. Each of those horizontal bars to either side of the rounded gate is a balcony, so the walls are about 7 or 8 stories tall.

It's nice to get some stuff done. I'm gonna spend a little more time tonight just sketching.

City Gates, some headway

I was able to get a bit done on the City Gates painting in a couple of sessions, one 2 weeks ago and one last night at the CAPS meeting. Still quite a ways to go but at least there's some progress happening. This is the one that I'm doing in a digital version of the Syd Mead method, previous posts here: sketch & grayscale, detail line art.

It was nice to get some stuff done on this...

Return to Volcano Temple (Part 1?)

I decided to go back and do some fixing to the Volcano Temple painting - after all, it's digital, I can do that anytime - because there was a problem with it that was really bugging me. I didn't know what it was, and I was very annoyed that I couldn't figure it out, until a cow-orker pointed out that the image had no atmosphere. Everything in it was clear and sharp, no matter how far from camera. We've got an outdoor scene with some long views, that has an erupting volcano and a bunch of fires in it - with no smoke, no haze, no atmospheric effects. So I'm like, well DUH *headslap*, no wonder. Compare to the original:



I like it better now.

However, it's still a little dead-looking to me, because there's no people in it, and thus no story, no intrigue, no suspense. Not every image needs people to have that, but I think this one does, it needs explorers! Hidden natives! A sense of jeopardy! A zeppelin! (Zeppelins are just really cool things.) What's the Mystery of Volcano Temple? That's what we should ask ourselves when looking at this, but there's nothing in the image now that spurs the question.

Portfolio Update

Volcano Temple is finished! Finally!



Full resolution JPEG, 3300x1500, 484kb

I decided I'd had enough with this thing, so I let go the idea of adding people to it. That would be a nice addition, but I've got too much to do to spend another 10 hours on this thing. I need to apply the same kinds of deadline standards as I do at work, where I've got X hours to do a piece and that's it.

I actually finished this last week, but I wanted to leave up the film stuff for a while. BTW, we got 6th place in that contest, which is 1st Runner Up, not enough to move on to the Top 5 Finalists. Bummer! So close! But at least we can brag a bit. I'll be putting a copy up in my portfolio eventually.

And now, I have just about zero excuse for not getting personal art finished, since I have this excellent new MacBook Pro and blew this year's budget buying Adobe CS3 Premium... this laptop is now a fully operational battle statio-- uh, I mean mobile art production studio HAHAHAhahaha... ha... ha. Well anyway I have Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Dreamweaver and Acrobat Pro, plus Painter, and I have them with me everywhere I go plus I'm wireless, so I can just work... anywhere. Seriously, anywhere. I'm still a bit mind-boggled about that.

Oh. And it has WindowsXP on it too. Isn't that weird????

Gettin' Somewhere

I think I'm pretty much done with the left side of this image, yay. On the right side, I've gotten onto the clouds, which I'll be done with pretty quickly. I need to do a little work on the water, maybe a couple of trees, and finish the stone arch. I still haven't decided exactly how I'll add people to this yet.

One thing about using photo overlays for textures and things like plants and stonework is that once you start doing it in an image, you really kinda have to keep doing it, because it's usually difficult and time-consuming to duplicate that kind of texture to the same degree of accuracy with brushes. However, trying to do that duplication, you learn a lot about how things actually look. I'm trying to only use just enough photo texture to bring the photo "look" in, but then I'm painting as much of the rest of the texture as possible. I did this on the clouds, both the orange volcanic plume (where I overlaid an actual explosion) and the white clouds on the right, where I laid a cloud photo over the rightmost cloud tower, and then hand-painted the other two towers using the first as reference and to sample colors.

Tonight's work

Tonight I did a bit of work on the shipyard painting. I decided to widen it a bit, for a more movie-like aspect ratio. Then it's all just little detail work. There's a lot of detailing to do on this one... probably will take a long time.

City Gates: Line Drawing

Here's the fairly tight line drawing which is the next step in Syd Mead's process, after doing the grayscale value study. I left the file at 3000 pixels wide (it's reduced here to 800), but I used a pretty fat pencil tool in Painter and didn't zoom in too far to simulate drawing on a smallish piece of paper. Everything here is drawn by hand, with no guide curves or Bezier-path-generated ellipses.

It's actually not as hard as most people (and I used to) think to do smooth accurate curves (and ruler-straight lines, for that matter) by hand without tools or templates. The secret is twofold: speed, and use your whole arm - and of course, a lot of practice. But it's important to practice at speed to learn how to make smooth lines and curves. Pretty much everyone starts out trying to draw such things very slowly, sort of "petting" the line a small bit at a time. This just doesn't work at all, you get a rough or squiggly line; I tried it for years and of course had little success, and thus always fell back on rulers or templates.

This is probably one of the most important things I learned from Feng's class, from watching Feng draw: first, anyone can do this, so you can let yourself (if not force yourself) to believe that you can do it; second, just go ahead and do it a lot and practice and let your hand and arm learn how to do it, learn to trust your brain/nerves/muscles to do this action. It took maybe a couple of weeks of daily practice to get my first absolutely ruler-straight line drawn at an exact length... but after that, I knew I could do it and it ceased to be a problem. Same thing with curves and even ellipses (although I'm still a lot better at narrow ones than wider ones).

And of course, doing it digitally means you can make your curve, and if it's not right, hit Undo and do it again until it is right. But always try to make it right the first time, and you'll quickly find that you're hitting Undo less and less frequently - and your productivity explodes. :)

Anyway, so next I will attempt to imitate Mr. Mead's process for the "color miniature," a small-scale preliminary to figure out the colors of the final piece. I might wind up doing several different passes at it, just to see what happens.

Hey, progress!

Some, anyway, heh. Yesterday and today were slow at work, so I spent some time "leveling up" on these paintings. Just like in video games, if you wanna get to Level 60 Artist, you gotta grind, grind, grind...



Some progress on Western Building. I'd done a bit yesterday but it wasn't that obvious so I waited until I got further before posting. All the work is on the left side (compare with 2 posts down).

After I wrote yesterday that I should do something via Syd Mead's process, I went ahead and started doing it, so now I have yet another piece in the pipeline:

12. City Gates



This line sketch is from the first thumbnail page at the bottom of the art dump post, I thought it had potential to be interesting, so I blew it up and started doing a value study version, to figure out light and shade:



This is a little bit of cheating on Mr. Mead's method, since rather than doing this totally freehand I did use the original at low opacity to trace under, but I'm following the same basic plan. The next step is to do a pretty tight line drawing for what Mr. Mead calls the "color miniature," a "small" version of the image to plan out all the colors. He does it on board at 7"x10" to work up to a 20"x30" final image, but I've already rezzed this up to my final size, 3000x1500 pixels, so I'll actually want to rez it DOWN to 1000x500 or smaller to do the color rough.

I think this has a nice balance of dark to light. There's no pure white or pure black anywhere in it but it's got a nice range and things seem to read well to me, so I'm happy so far.

Massive Art Dump

I'm not feeling so great about my art and talent lately. I see all this amazing art that other concept artists are cranking out for cool games and film, and my stuff, in my mind, really just does not cut it. I hardly even feel like a real concept artist. The main problem is that I've spent years and years doing work in what is now an obsolete art style - the pen-and-marker "industrial design" look that I first saw in the old Star Wars sketchbooks. There's still a certain amount of this going on, for work that needs to be sketched out too fast to paint it, but the predominant style of work is painterly-realistic to photo-realistic full-color digital paintings.

I don't have much stuff in that style, really, and what I do have is... eh. Probably the closest thing I have to what I consider a "pro-level" concept painting is the Volcano Temple painting down in the previous post.

So. Do I want to feel like a real concept artist or not? Do I want to keep myself employable as a concept artist or not? Do I want to try to join all the great artists whose work I admire, the guys at the top of the concept biz like Iain McCaig, Ryan Church, Craig Mullins, Feng Zhu, Ed Lee, Stephane Martiniere, and dare I mention Syd Mead, in creating really amazing work and working on the best and most interesting projects? Well, yeah. Yeah I do want all of that. Can I do it? I don't know at the moment.

What sets all the best people in my field apart from the rest is one thing: all they do is paint, draw, sketch all the time. Or at least they did when they were students and earlier in their careers. In order to catch up... I have to try to do that too. Which isn't easy, given the realities of life at 41 years old as opposed to 20.

Well. So, just to remind myself that I am actually doing artwork and trying to get better and learn and increase my output, here's a whole pile of paintings that I've started and declared to be "Portfolio Projects," that I need to finish:

1. Asimov's New York City



In one of my favorite books, The Caves of Steel, Asimov sets the story in a future NYC that has been completely enclosed, sealed off from nature, in which all the millions of New Yorkers live their entire lives without seeing the sun or sky. I've always wanted to do a series of scenes based on the book, so here I start the first one, an aerial view looking at the southern end of Manhattan Island. I just started this one today, using a real aerial photo as the basis, so just a rough beginning.

2. Forest Canopy



A quick start on an alien forest looking up, following some of the Star Wars Episode III art book environment paintings. Needs a story and people in it.

3. Green City



This started as kind of a stream-of-consciousness scribble in Painter, using the square chalk and only vertical and horizontal strokes abstractly, but it started looking like a city to me to I want to detail it out. This rough actually looks like some of the pro work that I want to get to, so that's good. Need to figure out a story for this one too.

4. Starshipwright Shipyard



Trying to update my existing portfolio somewhat, this is a color version of this piece. I got to this point and kind of stalled; I've got the bright sunlight coming thru the open bay pretty well, but there would be other artificial light sources outside the bright area and I kinda got overwhelmed trying to think them through. Needs some story and people in it too.

5. Western Building



Another one from my older stuff, this one needs some characters, some life, and the left hallway lit properly with the reddish kerosene lantern light. That's supposed to be the paymaster window to the left, maybe I should put some bandits in there robbing the guy and maybe a hero sneaking up on the bandits. That's a pretty Western story...

6. Lantern Carrier



My boss Miguel threw out the two words "lantern carrier" as a sketch-of-the-day idea, and this is what I came up with. It needs polishing, detailing, and a bit more work on the light. Happily, this one already has a story scenario in it.

7. Phinn Starships



Yet another older work update. Needs lots of details and interesting lights and some cool space stuff in the background, like wreckage or nebulae or smashed up planetoids or something. I probably can't put people in this one unless I pull back a bit and show them inside another ship, so maybe I can get story out of the environment.

7. Island Town



Night view of a Spanish-style architecture island town. Looong way to go on this one. Needs people, a sense of story, life!

9. Hallway



Some kind of sci-fi type tech hallway. I did a flat elevation view of the stuff on the walls, which I put into perspective on both sides of the hallway in Photoshop. Now it needs to be made 3-dimensional and lit well. And populated with characters and a scenario.

10. Forest Stairs



Started this one yesterday, doing a grayscale value study/sketch first before trying to go to color. This one will take a long time because I want this image to basically look like a black & white photo before I even think of adding color to it. One of my biggest weaknesses is lighting, and an even bigger one is properly applying color in a way that brings life and emotion to the image.

Okay, so I'm doing some art. Just have to try to finish all of these. Oh, and here's a couple pages of thumbnails I did last night:






OK, I feel a bit better. Still... lots and lots of work to do. It will probably take me 2 or 3 years to get up to the level that I want to be at. I hope I can catch up, I hope things don't change too much in the biz in the next couple of years...

Painty Paint Painting

Here's what I'm working on now for my portfolio:



This is an expansion on a project piece I did that served its purpose at the time, but didn't really come out as well as I liked. I talked to several of my colleagues about it and got suggestions, and this is where I'm going with it.

There are both painted and lifted-from-photograph elements; I'm trying to blend the two so that it's hard to tell what's what. The photograph parts are the sky, some of the foliage, and much of the stonework, some of which is from pix of actual Mayan temples.

Below, here's the original "finished" version from which I started. It's not horrible or anything, but it's just not that exciting an image.



You can see that I'm going for a lot more contrast and drama in the expanded version. The idea is that most of the left foreground will be more lit with the red light from the volcano. Also, I'll be adding some kind of exploration party checking things out, carrying torches that will add more red local lights, with the blue sky and sunset clouds giving the cool offset. We'll see how it works!

I've been doing a bunch of caricatures and other weird stuff, I'll try to get some up soon.