Just Draw

[Tooth]

Oh wow the colours in the landscape are really beautiful, Rich. I like the value structure too.

Your character designs, to me look really original and interesting. If I was an employer, which I'm not :) I'd be far more interested in something which looks great without perfect anatomy than something with perfect anatomy and looks boring! Of course having both is great but anatomy takes time, the 1-2min gestures are great I find for practicing proportions and posing.

Keep it uppp!

[kidult]

Stacks of improvement going down! keep it up

[Othrandir]

Hey!Thanks for stopping by my sketchbook mate! Your environments are really nice!Characters looks really cool , although I think you need to watch out for proportions!(Somethnig , I've been struggling with forever :D )
Keep 'em coming!You've got great taste :)

[rich4rt]

Tooth - thanks man, means a lot :)
kidult - Yes sir!
Othrandir - Cheers mate, you too!

Today I went to a Museum to draw. There were so many amazing things, I'm going to have to keep going back! It's great to get out of the house and interact with real people as opposed to staying in drawing alone lol, especially when kidletts and museum staff take interest in what your doing and pay you compliments, it's really a nice feeling. I made a few sketches and some photos that you can see below. Feel free to use the photos for studies, or commercial stuff -

Sketches. Why do pencil drawings always look terrible scanned, anyone know how to get them to look like they do in life? The dodo was not impressed.



Photos -







I wonder if anyone can guess what IP my grad project is (this is a redesign, but still should be obvious) ;) -



After doing some studies and I reworked some older chars -




New chars -



Artax colour thumbs, currently taking it to finish -



Some environments, I've been experimenting with the Sparth shape workflow. Really a fast way to work -

[CKL]

Hell yeah! I'm loving the Neverending Story stuff. My only beef at the moment is with Atreyu's head design, the construction feels a bit awkward and generic. The newer designs are executed with a much better eye for shape and construction comparatively. Also, try to find ways to vary up the hue on the green skin in key areas like the nose, elbows, cheeks, etc.

[rich4rt]

CoreyKLamb - cheers man, Atreyu was the first I made in the series, and it shows! I really want to re-design the head and just polish it up in general. Thanks for the love :)

Gonna try to update daily from now on, character from today -

[rich4rt]

Stuff from today -

Char design, watched Brad Rigneys vid so was playing with dodge and burn, never really used them before now. Definitely has some benefits tho -



Some sketches and bat studies -

[rich4rt]

annndd todays stuff

Fashion thumb things and started a bat rider illustration -

[Ursula Dorada]

Cool stuff man :)

[rich4rt]

Sulamoon - You too!

I hope you all had a lovely easter, now back to work! ;D

[Vimes]

Hey, great stuff. I really like your speed paint high opacity block in things. Do you practice drawing basic forms a lot in order to paint like that? I always try and paint in basic forms then build up on that but I find when I'm not using references that I have a lot of trouble determine how far the value of a plane goes.

Like if I'm painting an arm for instance and I start off as with a basic cylinder, I'm never sure how far do I take my light plane before I start going into the dark plane, I only seem to get it right with a reference otherwise it never looks right. it's quite a specific thing but hopefully you get what I'm saying. I'll give another example just incase :). Like the clouds in that bat painting there, how did you determine that the light plane ended where it did before you started turning down into the darker areas.

[rich4rt]

Vimes - I understand what you mean. It's partly knowing the forms, and partly just searching for what 'looks right.' The form will of course depend on the lighting direction, the value will be based on light intensity. My process is very organic, my advice would be to just experiment and don't be afraid to make mistakes, in fact make as many mistakes as you can. Through the process you'll see how far to take the plane. The beauty of photoshop is that you can create so many layers, and try so many different things, in theory nothing can go wrong ;)

[CKL]

Ooooo...I'm really loving the design on this last update!

[rich4rt]

CoreyKLamb - thanks mate! I had lots of trouble with the hips tho, need to go study some anatomy and come back and redo it so it makes sense instead of hiding it behind some fungus lol

stuff from today -

The mirror gate (space odyssey-ish) for my neverending story project -



Since I mostly have concept art I'm starting to create a few illustrations to buff out my folio a bit. This is a composition for a zombie book cover I'm going to paint out -



Classic western compositions and a few silhouette concepts for the new bloosports. Doing them in a cartoon/animation style since I also don't have anything like that in my folio and it's fun to try and experiment with new things!



Annd I found these images laying around, and I thought I'd share them. They are some of the first concepts I made for a game architecture class at uni around a year ago. We had to create a Banjo&kazooie level around the theme of fire -

[rich4rt]

Art test I did yesterday to try and get some freelance, need money for a new pc so I can play guildwars 2 lol -



Ivory Tower Enviro wip-



Study that turned into a stylized portrait -



Red Sonja wip -

[rich4rt]

moar-

Red Sonja pinup, I think I may have gone overboard with the blood lol -



Sketch of a previous char I did -



and a real sketch, on paper!! Been doing pages and pages of linework the past couple of days, must have gone through a forests worth! Really needs work - everything stems from drawing, and I'm falling in love with the traditional process. Nothing like messing up paper!

[rich4rt]

enviro thumbs from today -

[rich4rt]

Just 3 enviro thumbs today and a quick skin tone study -

[rich4rt]

Hope you all had a lovely weekend, here’s some sketches from today -

[rich4rt]

Happy koninginnedag ;D Here's some new stuff -



I took an environment from my previous thumbs and fleshed it out -



I downloaded google sketchup (free!) as a basis for scene set up, takes only 10mins to learn the basics. It's really fast, user friendly and easy to get used to, my only issue with it is navigation can sometimes be a pain compared to other 3d tools like Maya. I also found out whilst working with it you can import architectural models/props from a library of tens of thousands as you can see with the 2 textured Tudor houses below. Which is really really cool! You can also assign textures that come with the program and scale them to your liking such as roof tiles or floor tiles, oh and you don't have to make any UV's (heaven!). But maybe my favourite thing about it is the realistic day/night lighting and shadows simulator. You just move a slider and you can experiment with a range of lighting conditions instantaneously, oh yea and also play around with distance fog. This is a fantastic tool for conceptual artists, by level whiteboxing and paintovers. You don't have to worry about perspective and this can all be done very quickly. I downloaded sketchup and learned how to use it whilst creating the scene below in around 2 hours, which is crazy fast for not knowing anything about it. It has many advantages over drawing the perspective lines yourself with all the in-built experimentation. I recommend doing thumbs before so you have an idea of composition, and yea you shouldn't forego learning the fundamentals. This is just a tool, and I'm looking forward to what other people can create with it. I know for example Kemp Remillard and a few other concept artists use it for props and vehicle creation because of the things mentioned above.