One from Way Back

Mom is moving to a new apartment, so she's been going through stuff. I guess she's found a few of my old drawings, she just emailed me this one from 1979:



I guess you can kinda see where I was at back then, huh. :)

Side Project

Here's some art I did for a personal side project recently, sorry I didn't put it up sooner:


It's some kind of alien energy amplifier installation that's piggybacked on a hydroelectric dam in the American Southwest. They're stealing our power to build a hyperspace bypass! At right is our human stealth soldier who's trying to infiltrate the plant and destroy it.

Here's the initial set of value thumbnails:


Then I did a larger value pass:


And then a fairly tight line drawing over that:


From there I combined the line art and value pass and painted it. It's kind of a rough paint, about halfway between a speed paint and a polished image.

Also, I did a some more detailed drawings of one of the big weird machines, first a couple of orthographic views:


Then a 3/4 view lineart and color:




This wasn't an assignment for the environment class, but it was kind of related to it. I don't think it counts as homework, because it's not in the theme of the class... oh well. :)

Latest homework

I didn't wind up doing any more homework for week 3, but I had some good time to do my assignment for week 4, which was to do 10 value studies of scenes from favorite movies - stopping the DVD on a particular shot and doing a grayscale paint trying to match it.

I was able to take the time to do some of them from The Incredibles in gouache, which was really relaxing:




And I did a few more digitally in Painter from Star Wars:


These were fun and I learned a lot of things from them about lighting and value arrangement, and there's a lot of really interesting details of how the shots are staged and lit that were fun to discover. You may not like George Lucas's scripts much (and they have some appalling moments), but the guy really does (or at least did) know how to compose a shot. And of course Brad Bird's work on Incredibles is absolutely flawless, so it doesn't hurt to learn from the master.

Environment Class Week 2, and then some

Here's a couple drawings I did for class, line art design sketches of a couple of the ideas from last weeks thumbnails. First is a flying city cobbled together out of large aircraft and various parts; it would be assembled "on the fly" in midair and could never land:



The second is a hovering city that's built around huge turbofans that hold it up in the air:


And here's some of the homework for next week, just doing silhouettes and shapes to come up with more interesting designs:



Updated: here's another page of silhouettes:




And a speed paint trying some techniques from classmate Jason:

Environment Class, Week 1

I'm taking an Environment Design course at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, taught by Brian Yam from Insomniac Games and John Wu from SCEA. Just trying to sharpen up my work a bit, do some different things, learn some new techniques and approaches, and maybe put together a few more portfolio pieces.

Over the course of the class we'll be developing pieces for a pretend game development project, which involves enormous mobile cities that travel around the world via land, air or sea looking for resources and fighting with each other.

First week's assignment was to thumbnail out some very rough ideas:



it was supposed to be just line art sketches, so I sorta did it wrong by doing these little value paint sketches, heh. I do line art stuff all the time, I wanted to do it a little differently.

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!

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!

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.