Hand Painted Portfolio - Review

anglorum

Hey there everyone! My long arduous journey towards a job on the WoW team is continuing as fervently as ever. With GDC coming up though, I was wondering if you guys had any more critical comments or recommendations for someone aiming to get in Blizzard's doors.

Here's the link to my portfolio!

http://cargocollective.com/artofwilliamtate

Any feedback or C'n'C on layout or content itself is more than welcome!

Joost

You've got some great stuff, cool site too. I think you've got a good chance!

Chiffy

First of all let me say, you've got some gorgeous work on here. I really admire your hand painted skills. Any advice on where to begin learning how to do it? As far as critique, when you click the about me section, you should have the picture of yourself underneath the about me text. In your resume, the objective section is not really necessary, everything else is pretty good though. For your Gourmand and barrel pieces you don't include the tri-count. Oh for the person sleeping under the blanket, it comes up pretty high haha it's funny though. I think the clouds in your valley piece are a bit too yellow, kind of hurts the eye and distracts from the overall piece.

oxblood

The work is really nice, not much to critique there tbh, I really do like everything.
One thing I didn't really about the site is the layout, the fact that everything is already on the front page, its difficult to enjoy each piece individually because there is so much good work all on one page (its allot to take in). But that's just my personal preference.. So don't take it too seriously, because you clearly know what your doing.

Fenyce

Ok. Some critic.
(Sorry for my poor english)
First thing I see once I've entered your Portfolio is a Video which's still screenshot is of that goblin character you did for the hero's lodge, which is kinda unfortunate I guess (if you're focusing on environments at least)... I'd put an still of an environment there. Something like a really good beauty shot. Or a collage of some diffrent beautyshot's from one scene (Like a beauty of the scene plus some details) put that video afterwards.

All in all you have some nice works there. But you should keep in mind that Blizzard is aming more for sculpted textures and characters now. At least as far as I know. Since they starting redoing WOW models and are working on some next-gen MMO. And there's that article of Fanny (I hope that was her name!) in Vertex 2, a great article by the way.

Shrike

It looks pretty good overall, but there is a huge issue with color usage, and if you do hand painted stuff, that is even more important than for normal 3D folks, which is very important already.
You are pretty much randomly using colors and do not seem to understand the relations behind. I cannot tell you the fundamentals now in a post, maybe check out ctrl paint.net or others, there should be enough resources.

You cannot just put some super saturated warm lime green into your scene, or put a cold tree to a warm grass side by side, that just dosnt work. Or in the attic you use super warm wood pillars while the rest is all cold from the moonlight as other example. The sky color does not fit at all, the cloud and moon color does not fit with your sky, and neither with the rest, etc
Theres a lot more, and color is very vital to have a harmonic scene, and good (not just not wrong) color usage can make your stuff really shine

Be careful with warm and cold, and do not use too many colors at once

Using a random palette right now



Theres a lot of visual quality you can gain without learning any new modeling or painting techniques

Also, why is there a menu on the left if I have to scroll down anyways ? Really confused me : P

Fenyce

Shrike seems right, the colors felt off to me, too.
A great tool for coming up with a color palette: https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/
(Simply do a screenshot after figuring out a palette and paste it to photoshop)

anglorum

Thanks for the feedback guys! I'll definitely be taking this all into account in the coming weeks, and will hopefully have a pretty substantial update post to follow.

In the meantime, keep the feedback coming!