so, I am going for option 3 for the design guidelines which would be a redesign of a GoT Character but on a different genre : I always wondered how cool it would be if GoT was set in a Dystopian future.
I've picked Jon snow and his pet Ghost for my Illustration.
My first idea was going to be a redesign of the medieval europe of GoT to a political Intergalactic space drama, with whole different Houses or in this case factions. but I've decided to just go with the easy route which is depicting a scene from GoT but completely reimagined in a different timeline.
so here were the Initial thumbnails:
as you can see the first ones are pretty stiff, I wasn't thinking of any particular scene at that time. just playing with poses and compositional stuff.
the last one is what I'm currently thinking of going for. Its where jon snow is battling a white walker.
Im gonna do more compostional thumbs for this, If i could ask for help on something it would be what more can iI add with this Idea?
I personally like the first thumbnail, where Jon has his sword and the white walker is at the ground. If you're going for a more galactic approach, that one could be interesting. Adding ships in the sky, or a ship with a light directed on them. And the sword could be futuristic too. Also perhaps a winter scene could work.
Hmmm, so if you're going with the space drama theme would the White Walkers be aliens, perhaps? I think that could be an interesting concept, and I'm curious to see more from you. Perhaps a mood board, and I think your thumbs could be refined some more as I'm having trouble reading them. I'm excited to see more, though!
At this stage the most straightforward thing you could do would be exploring ideas for the designs themselves. Of course that doesn't mean that you can't think about how the designs could be used to create a compelling composition, but I think a lot of things will become more clear when you have the designs figured out.
Woop thanks for the suggestions and feedback guys im actually taking notes of all of them!
so I'm definitely making the white walker into this alien tentacle thingy so I explored some designs and made much more roughed out thumbs.
so I have gone with thumb 1 sorta, I just keep on having these Ideas as I go along its amazing!
right now though Im having problems with applying my studies into my work, so alot of things still needs to be refined. with only a week left I'll have to decide which comp I should work with and this would be it.
Hey man! Great ideas, studies and research all round! I think if you could get some of the looseness of the thumbnail two images above ^ into your final one you'd be at a great place. Also the poses stiffened up a bit in the more recent final one, the first one you did look really dynamic. You want to really FEEL the force of those blades clashing and see the strain on the character!
SS Winter enterprise is a bit cheesy : ) SS Winter could be good though ^^ fans of the series will get the reference.
Dude. This stuff is great. Well done man. BIG level up to the stuff you were posting in EDRocks. Make sure to pop in enough GoT tie-ins to your designs. The top comp is good, though half torso only, so you need to have enough design to get it over the mark. That environment study and perspective drawing is great.
Chipping away at this.
I'm finding it hard to paint the portrait ironically, as I painted more of those than any other stuff that I tried to come up here. Deadline demon says dont stop!
Refined a bit more. I think This is as far as I could go as far as my willpower is concerned. I'm gonna add color on top of this Spoiler alert: it would go just worse from here on out. XD
but anyway Im finding more and more of my weaknesses in doing these and that's the point.
looking at and analyzing this "masterpiece" I could point them out one by one:
Value - Messy as hell, I'm always aware of it whilst doing the piece, but while I was doing the rendering its kinda hard to maintain my Initial Values (the one I had with my thumbnail) because of the lack of knowledge or I must say Visual library on rendering various materials in this piece. I know that the only way out of this is to do studies.
Rendering materials - again I blame my lack of knowledge with the subject matter that I am painting.
designing shapes - My greatest weakness at the moment, I need to find ways at coming up with pleasing shape designs. I'm looking at the fabric cloth thingy ( I dont even fucking know what its supposed to be LoL) under Jon snow and how its so boring and repetitive those folds are. I believe this is a huge DRAWING problem, that I have yet to overcome.
Visual library - I just dont know how to paint what I'm trying to paint here. Its hard enough to draw them from imagination, so the painting will suffer for it. so STUDY STUDY STUDY next time beforehand.
I hope this would be of some help for others and as to how I struggled to create an Illustration piece . It's very awesome to see everyone else's workflow and I've learned so much already from these two weeks about myself and how I work than I have ever have had doing this by myself (except maybe from amit's EDrocks mentorship, which kinda made me realized how hard it is to take an illustration from start to finish).
Great effort man.
One thing I will say is taking something to finish even if you think it will get worse, IS probably the most valuable part of the exercise in terms of being able to create illustrations. I would like to see you take this to a finish. Even if you don't make the deadline.. (you should submit what you have anyway for critique) There will be at least a week until the next challenge starts so you can do this comfortably. Do the studies you need to. As you said, you know what those are...so just do them. You have the opportunity now, so don't just wait till the next time. This is how you will build up a folio.
@Amit thanks dude for the encouragement! I will do some refinement and see how it goes. but right now this is what I can do.
so atm I'm experimenting with color as I go on, these colors are coming out of my inexperienced brain so this is totally not right at all. the problem still remains, actually knowing what it is I'm painting. Ill probably design those machinations at the background when I do some actual studies of futuristic UI.
That isn't that bad at all. I see big improvements from your EDrocks stuff, and I'm not just saying that.
I think basically you have a good scheme, the warm v the cool, and it draws focus well, so now I would go in and add a little bit of colour variation as your palette is tending to gray quite a bit. Definitely USE reference for colour as well, and do very quick studies and apply. One drawing note, I think the biggest thing to change is the foreshortening of the alien's staff. It looks too flat on to us, and would be better if it looked more like it is going towards Snow's saber. I would also push the bright hard lines on that space ship down, and the contrast on it down, but the value overall higher and closer to the sky to push it back in depth. Keep going man!
