BeccatheRose: 2D Art Thread
ngon master
Hi guys!
I'm a game artist in Chicago that mostly does concept art for props, creatures, and characters, along with some hand-painted texture stuff and occasional modeling. Feel free to say hi to me, and I'm always open to C&C.
You can find me at my Artstation: http://artstation.com/artist/beccahallstedt
and at my website: http://beccahallstedtdesign.com/
and my sketchbook thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/160534/sketchbook-beccatherose-becca-hallstedt#latest
One of my recent pieces:
Thanks for checking my thread! Follow me wherever for more art, I'm constantly working and uploading.
I'm a game artist in Chicago that mostly does concept art for props, creatures, and characters, along with some hand-painted texture stuff and occasional modeling. Feel free to say hi to me, and I'm always open to C&C.
You can find me at my Artstation: http://artstation.com/artist/beccahallstedt
and at my website: http://beccahallstedtdesign.com/
and my sketchbook thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/160534/sketchbook-beccatherose-becca-hallstedt#latest
One of my recent pieces:
Thanks for checking my thread! Follow me wherever for more art, I'm constantly working and uploading.
Replies
or use it for characters for that matter?
also you should post your Inktober stuff over at the Inktober thread.
But I think you could make your thread a bit more friendly to viewers. PNGs make very large files here. That last one is 3401 x 2550 and about 4.5mb. If you used JPG and a more reasonable web size like 1920x, your thread would load a lot better. (see PNGs Suck on Polycount).
Went ahead and uploaded a lower res of the moss mother at least!
This relief is a pretty good stand-in for what is going on in your work currently
Have a look at the arm on the character you painted, and notice how at every point there is a gradient going on, there is no core shadows that indicate the lights direction, and there are no cast shadows from any of the parts casting onto any of the other parts.
To wrap your head around lighting, you need to know exactly where your light source is, and absolutely stick to it. I think the best way to train this is to actually get really good at cell shading. Get your lighting working with nothing but two values, and once you get that down, start focusing on the areas in light and how to turn those planes with light.
Hope this makes sense!
Do you have any specific points on what's going on in that last one, like adding a rim light or defining the core shadows more? Maybe specific kinds of studies to try? Mostly as information to apply to the next painting, it'd be helpful! Thanks again
I think the most important thing is to change how you think about rendering, as i said in the previous post, i really believe that cell shading is the thing to practice right now. But you can practice from photos like this.
these are really good practice, as it gets you thinking about form in the simplest of terms and getting things reading with the minimum amount of info.
Once you get that down and you can confidently block in a shadow pass on a drawing, then you need to start thinking about plane shading.
The best way to learn this is sadly to go the academic route, and work from life with statues and casts. Objects with just one material, and hopefully just one light source, so that you can really isolate and really understand the idea that value change = form change.
Hope that's enough info for now.
Great works!
Thanks for the kind words!
1. Do studies of other artists' works! I have a Pinterest board here: https://www.pinterest.com/bhallstedt/hand-painted-texture-stuff/ that should be able to get you started. I really recommend making your own Pinterest board (or on some other sort of image-handling site) to make sure that you have a visual library. Start looking on Artstation and Pinterest for professional-level handpainted textures, and then try to imitate them! In order to begin finding some specific artists, I recommend going to the source links of the images on my board and following them. Follow them on Twitter and stuff. Keep updating with what they're making.
Along this note, remember that imitating someone else's textures is just making a copy of a copy. Experienced artists can tell when that's happening, so it's important to make your own work for your portfolio instead of just imitating something else. That's just for practicing your painting skills and getting better at understanding the visual dialect of a particular style language. The even more important part is the second piece of advice, which is to...
2. Do studies of photographs, and then make a handpainted versions. This will give you a much better understanding of color, shape, and form of the source inspiration: real life. Pulling reference from real materials will make your original work better and give you a richer, more interesting result. While you're creating a visual library for handpainted textures, also make one for photos of materials. It's not much, but I started one recently and it's been really helpful: https://www.pinterest.com/bhallstedt/photo-texture-stuff/ so hopefully it'll give you another good start! Then last but not least...
3. Play stylized games and begin to notice the level of detail they use. As much as I love WoW, there are TONS of other great stylized games that have their own nuances and dialects. Diablo 2 is one of my favorites, personally. Check out mobile games, VR games, and other genres that are using the handpainted style and try to imitate that, too! You can take screenshots of assets and use that for studies. Just keep painting, good luck!