Been a while...

I apologise for being MIA for so long, and when I finally do post again, it's old material (this is some visdev work from Sep 2011). Well, at least it's old material I don't believe you've seen before on this blog. <insert placating smile>

We were supposed to design characters for a given story. The story I worked on was about how the vulture became bald. (Excessive pride about his beautiful feathers.)

Designs for the other birds. I laughed a lot at onion bird on the bottom. Sorry onion bird.

Colour/pattern explorations.

The other 'style'. 

General style explorations.

Funky 'dos.

This little series of vultures was completely random. I think I was bored.

This doesn't belong here, clearly, but it's here because I realised something looking at it. I realise I like this so much better than another one that used to be my favourite among my figure drawings of this fella. I realise this is better, now. I did some depth-destroying errors around the folds of the right leg though :/

I miss figure drawing class. 

another matte painting!

This is Tiger Leaping Gorge, or 虎跳峡, a canyon on the Yangtze river in China.

This is the Clifton suspension bridge in England, with an upside down photo of a historical building from Rajasthan, India. This stage was a quick test out idea of something I had in mind.

The final result :) I used more things, ranging from dreamcatchers to an eastern Baha'i temple to the Great Wall of China. A Mayan temple or two. The elephant statues are from Beijing.

:D

Sketchies

Been a long time since I posted anything!

Here are some zoo sketches. And another sketch or two.

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mattepaint!

(Final)

Some form of process...

cubie

This was a matte painting exercise we had in school - where we had to paint three cubes of different materials into a given photo.

snow?

This was the second part of the assignment: we had to convert our painting to a snow scene. 

Comments for this went something like: keep working on the snow on the stairs in the foreground, and add some definition to snow which gathers on edges. Mm! :) For this one I kinda spammed one powdery custom brush.

P.S. Bear with me for a little while, I'm trying out Blogger's dynamic templates :D

freaking mathias verhasselt

Because he is awesome, that's why. I love this painting he did, the treatment of light and how it seems to emanate from within the painting, lighting up your face. For some reason I can't find it online, however, so I'm going to just put it here for easy finding next time ;D

This is a beautiful speed-painting he did, some years back. Speed. Painting. Means probably done in 2 hours or something? Look at the beautiful, intricate design and unerring perspective of this thing :O

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A little background: As far as I know, Verhasselt is a matte painter/concept artist at Blizzard.

alley

Blogger did something funny to the colours. Anyway this is a painting I did for my matte painting module - we were copying a photo.

I used a colour-picker and put the original photo below my painting to trace for blocking. 

Used a round brush with pen-pressure opacity, a hard square brush with zero spacing, and a scattered dotty brush for texture! :> The next assignment is to turn this scene into a winter one....wish me luck :/

some wip

A friend commented I hadn't posted anything here in a while. Thank you friend! :) So here you are.

A little experiment with photos (you may recognise some of them) blended with painting.

colour study!

This is a half-hour colour study in photoshop of a scene from the Iron Giant movie. I think you can tell which one is the original lah hor.

a little haute vulture

The most recent visdev assignment is to do concept art for a given story. Me and CS picked a little Burmese/Myanmar folk tale called 'Why The Vulture is Bald'. I did this rough more for fun but I might as well put it in anyway :D Vultures are fun grumpy things.

We chose the Asian King vulture, Sarcogyps Calvus, and it's critically endangered, but boy does he have an ugly mug. They have little flappy turkeyish-things along their necks, mostly dark brown plumage, and some facial hair that reminds me of wolverine, for some strange reason.

Fun fact: The food critic in Ratatouille, Anton Ego, has a character design that is somewhat based on a vulture.

I don't dare say 'maybe I'll finish it in future'. That said, digital always makes my drawings cleaner.

a little painting

( :B

ARTRAGE

Mm, some WIP (most likely going to turn into scraps and experiments) done in ArtRage Studio Pro, which I happily obtained, totally legally today.

colour keys

Night


Day

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The aim of this was to come up with a colour palette suitable for the time of day and mood, not so much looking at finished-ness of the work. Pretty fun :)

robot & dog.

A simple little panel from a little christmas story storyboard assignment we did for school. We did bigger value studies based on two panels! For painting! Later! I did it in pencil and adjusted some stuff in photoshop.

I really like the feel of the painted over pencil, and the lighting. I like this panel oodles more than I like the other one unfortunately :/

snippet

Was trying out some rad watercolour brushes in photoshop. Yes, that's Icky :) He's drawn with a brush-pen.

Happy new year everyone :D

colour theory and a half-done icky

Hello to whoever visits this place :) Christmas is nearing! :DDD Should probably make that my incentive to do some christmas themed stuff :D Anyway, school just ended. I posted the last colour theory assignment I painted in photoshop below!

This was a study of how warm and cool lights affect colours and their surroundings.
I didn't use reference (read that as 'too lazy') so kinda took a risk. The cubes deteriorate as you go down the row, hahaha. Plus I really don't understand shadow colours, even now =/ Gonna get penalised for that!

Same here!

Not exactly masterpieces + took hella long to do. It is amazing how long you can spend just painting boxes. I really need to work faster :(

This reminds me of Sem 1 when we were drawing boxes- that took really long to get all the straight lines right. Anyhow, the assignment's kinda assured me that I don't completely suck at digital painting, and that's a relief. -_-

And it's quite cool how much you can learn from just two assignments! Below is one of my characters, Icky. The before was what I half-assedly drew in class when I didn't feel like doing work or the 2 assignments (I ended up chionging the cube paintings -_- Notti Grace.). The after was done after the vigour of the assignments. Well, look at the top half anyway. I didn't finish. Heh.

Anyway, I realised the helpfulness of tutorials while doing these. I used to think tutorials wouldn't help me much 'cause I often forgot a lot of things after doing them...but one tip from my past came out of nowhere. Using Filter>Sharpen after you're done painting. Or selectively sharpen. It makes the painting more CRISP (:

Yes so it's cheating but- it's the outcome that matters, apparently, not the process...

Speaking of Icky...TAP is due in like 3 days.

digidoodles

Some small, quick'n'silly digital doodles from a coupla months back:

Um, contemplating the meaning of life - a happy potato chip?

Actually, I spent a little more time on this robot one. It's one of the first things I've ever tried painting properly, even though I didn't mean for it to be more than a doodle, as you can tell by the lineart...

Bawww whatever. Colours! :D

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You know, if everything in my sketchbook now looks 'nice', it could be that I'm not pushing myself enough. Hence not improving. Hmm.

digital paint

No, don't freak out yet, this is the original photo I was painting. PRETTY RIGHT. I love the colours! Pity the photographer wasn't credited as well. This was the photo I first wanted to do, but gave up in favour of a photo I thought was easier, with more demarcated forms. I ended up screwing that up despite it being easier, because I found it boring :( REDO-

I concluded I should just listen to myself in future despite what my more logical side says. Hahaha.


This is what I mistakenly submitted (it's a school assignment, we did a pencil study, a gouache painting, and a digital painting). I didn't realise the colours would become so boomz after converting to png. Or maybe it was like that all along and I was blind from lack of sleep hahaha. :( ZZZZZZZZZ oh well what's done is done. Sigh and let go. HAI

So I came home and edited colour balance and levels and removed some odd hues (don't you just love photoshop cheats)?



Painting is hard. :(

That said, this is my first semi-proper digital painting ever ever. :D *beams* Semi-proper, because I was referring to a photo, I was sampling colours for reference from the photo, because I drew over the layer of the photo for foreground reference, and other noob things noobs do :D (I wanna try out ArtRage.)

Still got a lot more improvement to make, but so far I'm excited. We're painting coloured cubes under different coloured lights next.