I'm pretty much done with my last Gnomon DVDs from this particular teacher. It helped me to lose the fear of introducing zbrush into my work. Also understood a lot about design by doing a deep dive into biological design, I hope I can refine the design side of things a lot more though. I'll do a couple more creature designs without 3D now and with a different theme, I'm sick of looking at a folder full of gross reference
Looking at it all I would only say that you might find massive benefit in doing gesture drawings of the human figure, really learning all the anatomy off by heart (skeletal, muscular and surface level). I couldn't possibly critique on everything, but I hope that is useful!
Now that I look back at the first page, there's certainly a lot of shameful crap, those char designs are awful, looking at old comments that now make more sense too, the portfolio needs a revamp. Thanks everyone so far for your input, as well as words of encouragement, it certainly helped to keep me going
I've returned to designing a few props, I'll be posting them here, I know I was told that I should try characters and other things I'm not comfortable with, but the truth is, I made a new schedule to draw more, this time I think it'll work. I'm following the advice of Feng Zhu design cinema's youtube and set deadlines, reward and or punish myself everytime I succeed (delivering work earlier and a lot more than I expected) or fail (don't deliver the minimum amount expected). I'm waking up early each day just to draw. So I'm starting slow and progressively making the game more difficult.
~~~~
Hologram sci fi advertisement + age and decay variations. As always, critic is warmly welcome.
@lotet was this the type of render you were advising to do? I only had opportunity to commit to it now, I felt I had enough polished rendered-photoquality-cliche done enough, this was absurdly fun to do.
Updating the sketchbook with a WIP. You know, I decided that posting finished or nearly finished stuff isn't really helping, I want to post crap art and WIPs, to just show the foundation behind the work, I think it helps more and probably leads to better feedback.
So here is some crap wip, using base mesh for the human scale. The brief: hacker with VR. (cliche af, right?)
Thanks. you guys make me blush. Truth is, my life has not been going so well in the last couple days, and I feel like posting this here is a step forward to make it better. Because, you know, what I'm about to post is a complete garbage, I failed miserably at putting together a keyshot scene and painting it over, but you know, one can not always win. Posting this like a wall of shame helps me to deal with it better, to not be afraid of failing again and hopefuly don't fail as hard. It's also a way of exposing my true skills, by exposing these mistakes, it makes it a true sketchbook, not just a compilation of eye candy stuff, this sketchbook is not on the recruitment section for a reason too. So now lets really hit the rock bottom today and think that it can't get any worse than this. Stay well
Looking good! dont beat yourself up to much mate, you have improved so much these last months! also, art should be a way to escape from shitty IRL stuff, dont forget that!
as for the illustration: would love to see some more play with light, having the inside of the headset light up his face for example. som nice back light from the screens. you also have a great opportunity to tell some sort of story with the screens in the background which you kind of neglected.
@Doodlok@TudorMorris@Visum Thanks for your visit and the nice comments. @Opilo - Thanks too, I suppose I need to stop comparing myself too much to other artists who've been doing this for as long as I've been on this planet. I wasn't expecting this, it was a good surprise, I'll keep at it and yup we'll all be fine
At the moment, I'm working on elemental nymphs, obviously I started with the fire one! I'm trying to add more gameplay function to my stuff, so I added a bit of a flame on her hands, suggesting fireballs as attack. I'm trying to figure out how to improve it without overworking the wrong areas... Right now, it's maybe too dark on the fire material, I'll take a break from it, start another element, then improve it and post it.
Well, now that you rewrote the text that was on your image, my comment doesn't make any sense anymore, so might as well make it the usual: "Nice work!". Too bad, I liked the burst of (real) feelings you got there. It's a rare sight!:)
@lotet ~ yeah, I know, sometimes I lose my shit, ahah, I forget why I started making these in the first place, it was a real fun thing to do, and still is, if I don't forget what you say and don't try hard. All will be well!
Another WIP of another Nymph, I decided to make the water nymph next to relief a bit of the pressure and I found it overall easier to pull off than all other elements, which are fairly more complex. They are all still a WIP though, I'm taking turns on them and then go for a final polish when all of them are on the same render level. Critics welcome, as always ~ because polycount pwnz
So, I can't say the feature on the front page did not inspire me to create more. It did. I've finished the water and fire nymph, I was ready to make a earth and wind versions, but at the end, I didn't like where the earth design was going. There was stuff I did not figure out in the sketching stage and I thought it'd be fine, but it wasn't. My teacher would be telling me to make it work, no matter what and don't give it up, and whatever it turned out to be, would be a trophy for finishing it, but I really was not feeling like pixelating another two nymphs from a blank canvas to existence. It stopped being fun, so I stopped while I was pleased with the results.
I did a bit of overpainting with a very soft low flow brush to blend stuff more, but that was it, also played with a few gimmicks to make focal points pop more. And attached the early photo manipulation sketch, which is my favorite iteration method.
~~
The part 2 of this dump is two portraits inspired by the former Massive Black's Shangai artist, Zhang Lu I doubt it's relevance for a concept art portfolio on the design side, so I tried to add strong design shapes to the language of the portraits hold, such as a blury emotion on the kid, inspiring shyness, danger, instability. The second one was just a playground time of silhouettes. Maybe I'll add them as sketches to a portfolio.
Now I just come here on daily basis to see if there's any update
Awesome stuff! I really like the neck / shoulder area of fire nymph. Especially how half of the head is covered with fire and elements is almost ominous and beautiful at the same time.
I know it's a rough work at the moment and not fully finished, but if I were to suggest a lil bit of critique your water nymph seems quite weak compared to your other works. Her face is gorgeous and draws nice contrast to fire nymph but her body looks a bit too amateurish in its rendering and anatomy (again, compared to your other works)? I'd actually take it out of the portfolio at the moment if I had any saying in that. But then again, Im sure it'll look gorgeous if you put in more time and render and all that.
Beautiful stuff! Your improvement and workload always inspire me. Keeep them coming...
Thanks @Doodlok You may be right, I'm not sure, the water nymph turned out how I wanted it to look like, but I'm open to suggestions? Some times I miss stuff for looking at it/caring for it too much and am not able to disconnect from it right away.
~~
On another note, I'm exploring character design on a simpler painting scale, it's an absurdly fun experience. I was going to do it in vector style, but that was just not going to work out well, so I did the next best thing with it. It's a style I've been wanting to try for a while, I'm glad I finally did. The anatomy is obviously custom made, but I tried to respect joint positions enough for them to move around with no problems, like in the normal human anatomy. Working more to post, if I don't post till then, see ya'll in 2017!
Concepting/iterating supernatural samurai in photoshop. Making sure that I'm not just painting over stuff for a painter look sake. I never understood that idea very well
Trying to show off iterations. I didn't resort to a lot of thumbnailing, just trying to see how far I can go without it and kind of just winging it by what I know of design. I trust that if I had brainstormed a bit, even just a bit, these would of turned out better, in the design language side, that is.
Thanks for your omni presence! The Scifi is actually falling a little bit behind, now that I look at it. ~~
I'm back for another post for my wall of shame with a screenshot of a WIP. Writting this while I render. After looking at some of the concept artists from splash damage, brink, deus ex and thief games, I was really moved to try to do something along the same lines. I explored their methods but as always I was lost in details. I realize that these artists do a very rough block out, and then paint over the main forms, but my rage to model and rococo like obsession to detail kicked in and I went way too stupid with it. This block out did not need to be as detailed, I may lose the painterly, brush stroke look that I wanted to try to go for.
It's a failed experiment, I'm stressing this, I totally did not need to block so much 3D detail, but I'll have a pretty large kitbash library if I keep at this. I should have done a much lower poly, blocky blocks, I thought about giving up on this one about 4 times now, but as I was taught in college,I will (try) 'make it work'
I really dont think you spent to much time on that block out tbh, either that, or I go waaaay overboard myself =P I would love to see some direct light in there though, so its not just the AO. one of the biggest strengths with a block out is trying out and playing around with lighting.
There's not much light in this, it's a night scene. Hmm, I was more worried with the placement of the elements, to help the eye flow around.. by the rough blockout, I mean, I was looking at the works of these guys, and how they start with a super rough block out and paint all the rest: https://www.artstation.com/artist/matlat https://www.artstation.com/artist/phandy
I'm thinking about including a few pointers too, based on what I learned at school, for a while I rejected my multimedia/graphic design school teachings, what I learned in it, because I think it wouldn't matter, it was not concept art, so it wouldn't help... but I'm finding that I was wrong and wrong as the days go by. Being humble is key. We used to present our work, blueprints and other misc pertinent info before the finished project, to the whole class as if we were introducing a product to clients and investors, it was quite productive, really. This is my attempt at emulating that.
I was going to add a Messages tab, occasionally a player could get enough signal to receive and send messages, but I found it to be too tertiary to the gameplay, so I just added a discrete plus button for a dropdown menu of sorts, and kept the two main things in focus.
again, as I said, now I just come back here occasionally to check on your progress. Your drive really gets me forward too
I was wondering, did you use some photo texture or photobashing in your samurai work? It really flows nicely in all 3 versions (I figging love the last version pesonally) and I think it'll look beautiful with colors too.
For the 3D work, absolutely amazeezseseszeszez and lovely too and I'm super careful when I give somewhat a negative feedback to others because I know I suck really bad, but I was wondering whether the UI thingy on the left bottom is working as a distraction at the moment? Everything else flows really subtle and I love trying to read off that subtlety, but UI sorta stands really hard and takes the focus too much to left bottom.
But then again, what do I know, like seriously. Awesome works.
Hey, thanks dude! I'm glad I inspire you, polycount is a great place to get inspired and inspire others! No matter the level we are at! You may be right about the UI being distractive, I was wondering about that too, I wanted to introduce an orange color, to let the viewer know the battery was running out and thus make it a gameplay design choice. The orange is very bright too and distracting, you're right, I may get rid of it. (I don't like to think too much about design choices and be this mechanical, so I was never happy with this I did with the UI)
All samurai work is photobashed this time. I started with a photo and built on top of it, I was trying to see what is faster, painting vs photobashing, and it served to analyze ups and downs of both methods... the last samurai was fairly quick compared to the other two http://www.deviantart.com/art/Caucasian-Samurai-STOCK-II-367293058 <- original pic
And something I've been working on, I know this is inconsistent, but I like realism and also like abstraction, I can't stop liking one to do other more. So this is something more geared towards Mirrors Edge (an humble attempt to) and their DICE realistic concepts.
Maybe later I can try to find one style and keep it, but yeah, I like a lot of different stuff and probably always will. WIP
Still lurking, I'd really love for you to write out what you're trying to solve with these. On some of your pieces I can give feedback on, others I don't know what your'e trying to solve so I can't offer advice on how to think about it differently. If you're building your IP then the iterative and variation based designs you're doing will make more sense if we can figure out where you're driving towards.
It's a good format to try for the next posts. With this, I wanted to take a illustration I had and turn it into a full body portrait presentation, similar to what I found from EA Dice Mirrors' Edge. All these may seem like a de-route, because I reference multiple styles, but now I'm trying to add a head shot variation, to breath some more project into this.
For the brief, I was looking to build a cyberpunk hacker, a non playing character for a game, a quest giver of sorts, so I tried to make him interesting enough for the player to talk to him but not to play as him, I made his face structure regular, not handsome, not ugly, but skewing a little bit towards ugly. (video game ugly) It was also a excuse not to go overboard with a design language, I thought about giving him casual clothing, like one who stays at home playing games all day, would wear, added the anonymous tank top to inject some pop culture to it and emphasis what his profession is. I'm playing with the adidas like stripes on the pants to add continuity with the sneaker stripes, just for fun. Overall it seems too much work for a NPC character, but I need some project like quality exports for my portfolio, I'm playing around with technicalities in Zbrush and Keyshot, and seeing how far I can push a character process in it, without looking at tutorials like a slave.
At the moment I'm guilty of not having a clear intention (graphically), so these may seem like a de tour from project work. I often have a folder of works from other people I want to try and see if I can reach the same level of quality. Lately these are about that. So a lot of different exports here may seem like I don't know how to drive this truck Im just experimenting Ultimately, my goal with all this is to put together a portfolio of Junior/intern level to apply to a studio or company, showcasing I understand what it is needed in their environment.
For the next projects, I have decided that I will commit to a more serious archetype, stick to a well thought theme and design environments like safe zones, weapon trading routes, and characters like class designs all for the same project. Thanks again for your comment, Greg, I used to do this long ago but I had greater things to worry about in my process, and I was typing more than working.
It's been a while since this was last updated. I've been busy with commissions and before I make another big leap, I have to update my wall of shame (this sketchbook) with studies I'm not particularly proud of.
To the eyes of some these may be great, but to me, I see too many imperfections that I still need to work on.
A study of Marina Nery I started while reading Alla prima book:
Because I've been hyper hyped for Ghost in the Shell, I did some art habits while I was waiting for feedback and from freelance work. I really think I'm starting to hit my signature and style on these drawings, maybe because the environment I made them at was relaxed.
It's great to see you back in action! I've been refreshing around this page for any updates you've been making recently
GOod to see you're back for the update, and I definitely love your new style. I can see the quality of lineworks you are using is definitely improving and becoming more neat, and as @lotet said only thing I'd suggest is anatomy issue on the last one.
+
I just checked your online portfolio, and they're all absolutely gorgeous. Welcome back!
Aha, thanks guys. I've not been as active as I'd like, real life duties keep reminding me I'm a grown up, I have to look for a job now, no matter the skill level I'd still hope to get. Hopefully I can make a portfolio revamp that is more consistent, I'm hoping some freelancing gigs can be of opportunity to pimp my online quality some.
Replies
It helped me to lose the fear of introducing zbrush into my work. Also understood a lot about design by doing a deep dive into biological design, I hope I can refine the design side of things a lot more though.
I'll do a couple more creature designs without 3D now and with a different theme, I'm sick of looking at a folder full of gross reference
Looking at it all I would only say that you might find massive benefit in doing gesture drawings of the human figure, really learning all the anatomy off by heart (skeletal, muscular and surface level). I couldn't possibly critique on everything, but I hope that is useful!
I'm waking up early each day just to draw.
So I'm starting slow and progressively making the game more difficult.
~~~~
Hologram sci fi advertisement + age and decay variations. As always, critic is warmly welcome.
@lotet was this the type of render you were advising to do?
and to answer your question, I love the detail and though you put into those latest concepts, all of them! keep up the good work.
Additional GIF stunts
would love to see some more stuff the cyber punk though, just to stretch your confort zone a bit
Because, you know, what I'm about to post is a complete garbage, I failed miserably at putting together a keyshot scene and painting it over, but you know, one can not always win. Posting this like a wall of shame helps me to deal with it better, to not be afraid of failing again and hopefuly don't fail as hard. It's also a way of exposing my true skills, by exposing these mistakes, it makes it a true sketchbook, not just a compilation of eye candy stuff, this sketchbook is not on the recruitment section for a reason too.
So now lets really hit the rock bottom today and think that it can't get any worse than this. Stay well
dont beat yourself up to much mate, you have improved so much these last months!
also, art should be a way to escape from shitty IRL stuff, dont forget that!
as for the illustration:
would love to see some more play with light, having the inside of the headset light up his face for example. som nice back light from the screens.
you also have a great opportunity to tell some sort of story with the screens in the background which you kind of neglected.
I remember stumbling upon this page when you first uploaded your works but coming back now the rate at which you improved is actually insane
@Opilo - Thanks too, I suppose I need to stop comparing myself too much to other artists who've been doing this for as long as I've been on this planet.
I wasn't expecting this, it was a good surprise, I'll keep at it and yup we'll all be fine
Keep up the great work!
I'm trying to figure out how to improve it without overworking the wrong areas... Right now, it's maybe too dark on the fire material, I'll take a break from it, start another element, then improve it and post it.
Thanks for the visit @AaronBarnett !
Another WIP of another Nymph, I decided to make the water nymph next to relief a bit of the pressure and I found it overall easier to pull off than all other elements, which are fairly more complex. They are all still a WIP though, I'm taking turns on them and then go for a final polish when all of them are on the same render level. Critics welcome, as always ~ because polycount pwnz
I've finished the water and fire nymph, I was ready to make a earth and wind versions, but at the end, I didn't like where the earth design was going. There was stuff I did not figure out in the sketching stage and I thought it'd be fine, but it wasn't. My teacher would be telling me to make it work, no matter what and don't give it up, and whatever it turned out to be, would be a trophy for finishing it, but I really was not feeling like pixelating another two nymphs from a blank canvas to existence. It stopped being fun, so I stopped while I was pleased with the results.
I did a bit of overpainting with a very soft low flow brush to blend stuff more, but that was it, also played with a few gimmicks to make focal points pop more. And attached the early photo manipulation sketch, which is my favorite iteration method.
~~
The part 2 of this dump is two portraits inspired by the former Massive Black's Shangai artist, Zhang Lu
I doubt it's relevance for a concept art portfolio on the design side, so I tried to add strong design shapes to the language of the portraits hold, such as a blury emotion on the kid, inspiring shyness, danger, instability.
The second one was just a playground time of silhouettes. Maybe I'll add them as sketches to a portfolio.
Awesome stuff! I really like the neck / shoulder area of fire nymph. Especially how half of the head is covered with fire and elements is almost ominous and beautiful at the same time.
I know it's a rough work at the moment and not fully finished, but if I were to suggest a lil bit of critique your water nymph seems quite weak compared to your other works. Her face is gorgeous and draws nice contrast to fire nymph but her body looks a bit too amateurish in its rendering and anatomy (again, compared to your other works)? I'd actually take it out of the portfolio at the moment if I had any saying in that. But then again, Im sure it'll look gorgeous if you put in more time and render and all that.
Beautiful stuff! Your improvement and workload always inspire me. Keeep them coming...
You may be right, I'm not sure, the water nymph turned out how I wanted it to look like, but I'm open to suggestions? Some times I miss stuff for looking at it/caring for it too much and am not able to disconnect from it right away.
~~
On another note, I'm exploring character design on a simpler painting scale, it's an absurdly fun experience. I was going to do it in vector style, but that was just not going to work out well, so I did the next best thing with it.
It's a style I've been wanting to try for a while, I'm glad I finally did.
The anatomy is obviously custom made, but I tried to respect joint positions enough for them to move around with no problems, like in the normal human anatomy.
Working more to post, if I don't post till then, see ya'll in 2017!
More updates
Concepting/iterating supernatural samurai in photoshop. Making sure that I'm not just painting over stuff for a painter look sake. I never understood that idea very well
I didn't resort to a lot of thumbnailing, just trying to see how far I can go without it and kind of just winging it by what I know of design.
I trust that if I had brainstormed a bit, even just a bit, these would of turned out better, in the design language side, that is.
~~
I'm back for another post for my wall of shame with a screenshot of a WIP.
Writting this while I render.
After looking at some of the concept artists from splash damage, brink, deus ex and thief games, I was really moved to try to do something along the same lines. I explored their methods but as always I was lost in details. I realize that these artists do a very rough block out, and then paint over the main forms, but my rage to model and rococo like obsession to detail kicked in and I went way too stupid with it. This block out did not need to be as detailed, I may lose the painterly, brush stroke look that I wanted to try to go for.
It's a failed experiment, I'm stressing this, I totally did not need to block so much 3D detail, but I'll have a pretty large kitbash library if I keep at this. I should have done a much lower poly, blocky blocks, I thought about giving up on this one about 4 times now, but as I was taught in college,I will (try) 'make it work'
I would love to see some direct light in there though, so its not just the AO. one of the biggest strengths with a block out is trying out and playing around with lighting.
Hmm, I was more worried with the placement of the elements, to help the eye flow around.. by the rough blockout, I mean, I was looking at the works of these guys, and how they start with a super rough block out and paint all the rest:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/matlat
https://www.artstation.com/artist/phandy
I'm thinking about including a few pointers too, based on what I learned at school, for a while I rejected my multimedia/graphic design school teachings, what I learned in it, because I think it wouldn't matter, it was not concept art, so it wouldn't help... but I'm finding that I was wrong and wrong as the days go by. Being humble is key.
We used to present our work, blueprints and other misc pertinent info before the finished project, to the whole class as if we were introducing a product to clients and investors, it was quite productive, really. This is my attempt at emulating that.
~
I was going to add a Messages tab, occasionally a player could get enough signal to receive and send messages, but I found it to be too tertiary to the gameplay, so I just added a discrete plus button for a dropdown menu of sorts, and kept the two main things in focus.
I was wondering, did you use some photo texture or photobashing in your samurai work? It really flows nicely in all 3 versions (I figging love the last version pesonally) and I think it'll look beautiful with colors too.
For the 3D work, absolutely amazeezseseszeszez and lovely too and I'm super careful when I give somewhat a negative feedback to others because I know I suck really bad, but I was wondering whether the UI thingy on the left bottom is working as a distraction at the moment? Everything else flows really subtle and I love trying to read off that subtlety, but UI sorta stands really hard and takes the focus too much to left bottom.
But then again, what do I know, like seriously. Awesome works.
I'm glad I inspire you, polycount is a great place to get inspired and inspire others! No matter the level we are at!
You may be right about the UI being distractive, I was wondering about that too, I wanted to introduce an orange color, to let the viewer know the battery was running out and thus make it a gameplay design choice. The orange is very bright too and distracting, you're right, I may get rid of it. (I don't like to think too much about design choices and be this mechanical, so I was never happy with this I did with the UI)
All samurai work is photobashed this time. I started with a photo and built on top of it, I was trying to see what is faster, painting vs photobashing, and it served to analyze ups and downs of both methods... the last samurai was fairly quick compared to the other two
http://www.deviantart.com/art/Caucasian-Samurai-STOCK-II-367293058 <- original pic
Thanks for passing by!
So this is something more geared towards Mirrors Edge (an humble attempt to) and their DICE realistic concepts.
Maybe later I can try to find one style and keep it, but yeah, I like a lot of different stuff and probably always will.
It's a good format to try for the next posts.
With this, I wanted to take a illustration I had and turn it into a full body portrait presentation, similar to what I found from EA Dice Mirrors' Edge.
All these may seem like a de-route, because I reference multiple styles, but now I'm trying to add a head shot variation, to breath some more project into this.
For the brief, I was looking to build a cyberpunk hacker, a non playing character for a game, a quest giver of sorts, so I tried to make him interesting enough for the player to talk to him but not to play as him, I made his face structure regular, not handsome, not ugly, but skewing a little bit towards ugly. (video game ugly)
It was also a excuse not to go overboard with a design language, I thought about giving him casual clothing, like one who stays at home playing games all day, would wear, added the anonymous tank top to inject some pop culture to it and emphasis what his profession is.
I'm playing with the adidas like stripes on the pants to add continuity with the sneaker stripes, just for fun.
Overall it seems too much work for a NPC character, but I need some project like quality exports for my portfolio, I'm playing around with technicalities in Zbrush and Keyshot, and seeing how far I can push a character process in it, without looking at tutorials like a slave.
At the moment I'm guilty of not having a clear intention (graphically), so these may seem like a de tour from project work. I often have a folder of works from other people I want to try and see if I can reach the same level of quality. Lately these are about that. So a lot of different exports here may seem like I don't know how to drive this truck
Ultimately, my goal with all this is to put together a portfolio of Junior/intern level to apply to a studio or company, showcasing I understand what it is needed in their environment.
For the next projects, I have decided that I will commit to a more serious archetype, stick to a well thought theme and design environments like safe zones, weapon trading routes, and characters like class designs all for the same project.
Thanks again for your comment, Greg, I used to do this long ago but I had greater things to worry about in my process, and I was typing more than working.
To the eyes of some these may be great, but to me, I see too many imperfections that I still need to work on.
A study of Marina Nery I started while reading Alla prima book:
I think posting stuff your not super proud of is a great step to, not only improve, but to not be ashamed of your art as well.
also, dont forget the neck, there is a lot of detail there as well.
I really think I'm starting to hit my signature and style on these drawings, maybe because the environment I made them at was relaxed.
I'll explore them more when I have the chance.
GOod to see you're back for the update, and I definitely love your new style. I can see the quality of lineworks you are using is definitely improving and becoming more neat, and as @lotet said only thing I'd suggest is anatomy issue on the last one.
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I just checked your online portfolio, and they're all absolutely gorgeous. Welcome back!
Here's another exploration.