Sketchbook: GoodAsNew

GoodAsNew

Hello everyone,

So far i've only been lurking around here. I decided to start from a sketchbook.

Before i graduated from an art school I was doing mostly traditional painting and drawing. After that I began self educating myself in digital world. for digital painting I use Photoshop and 3d work it's Maya and Zbrush mainly.

I will be posting mostly 3D work here, more or less unfinished.

Killer crits are welcome!


Here's the first one. Some sort of mermaid/octopus creature from the sea. Her gear needs lot of detailing.



Here's a wireframe from her head. Is the topology any good?

GoodAsNew

Some mental ray test using GI, FG, Caustics, portal lights and phys sun/sky.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTGvOEwDqKQ[/ame]

GoodAsNew

Here's some suspicious looking random creature i made today just to test some SSS shader with all kinds of maps. Rendered with mentalray.

I used mesh with around 45k polys for the render + normal map. I couldnt bother remeshing to get lighter base mesh.

wake

I find this latest creature surprisingly disturbing-- a combination of the tumescence, and slightly off skin tone and vaguely phallic look of the appendages. Nice work.

As for your first creature, the head is ok and the body is ok, but together I don't think it works-- you're pairing a relatively believable anatomy with a cartoonish face resembling Stitch (from that disney movie). The dissonance throws me off.

GoodAsNew

Yes, you are right about the cartoonish look and the stitch. But maybe i could tweak it into more realistic and less stitchyness. Not sure what i'll do with it tho.

maybe the head looks too heavy for the torso and the chin needs to be bigger.

What do you think?

as for the second one i wasnt thinking while i was sculpting it. totally random.

I'm going to do some more SSS testing soon so there will be some more disturbing blopsters here.

Thanks for the comment.

marlfox8

i think for the sea creature the problem is that you have a nose there. he lives in the sea and wouldn't need a huge nose. maybe just like little holes or somethin. right now he kinda looks like an alien with a sea animal body

wake

Taking it in either direction would work-- start exaggerating some of the body forms or shrink the head a bit and start resolving it with more human proportions. Part of what's throwing it off is that you have a very sexualized female torso, and then you go and have this disney cartoon head and tentacles for appendages, which is more than a bit jarring. A third option would be to just remove the overtly female anatomy from the torso.

Good luck man, I'm interested to see how it comes out.

GoodAsNew

Some 2d stuff.

I was going to draw something wise today but lost my inspiration during a boring work day so i started scetching mindlesly in photoshop.

Then i got a bit carried away rendering it.

Here's the result.

Don't ask me what it is. more something disturbing..

(edit) now watching this at work with better monitor i see the dark backround looks like crap. I'm still working with slowely dying CRT which doesnt show the darks very well. I definetely need to get new monitor. I don't have much money to spend :O

GoodAsNew

hmm.. i kinda feel like im stuck with the head. i might just design totally new head for her. But im going to keep trying to avoid human proportions. ill try something more Lizard type this time maybe.

I want to break the rule that sexy female body need to have human head and hair.

GoodAsNew

She's an alien with sea animal body .

Nothing really that lives in water has ears either so i'm kinda breaking rules of nature there. I dont have a problem with the nose except it gives a little bit of that Stitch look.

I think the head lacks the detail that more realistic head would have and it appears a bit too big that makes the cartoony look. the chin looks like there's no chin bone at all. I'll try to work on the facial anatomy more.. maybe model a skull of her head for help.

If i make the head slightly smaller it looks too small for some reason. either because the legs are so huge or I've just got too much used to looking at it like it is.

redpandafire

You give yourself some good self critique there. I think all those things could help. Maybe even merging the nose into the face so theres no folds at all could help too. And the tenticle legs look kind of isolated, I think she'd look more awesome with sort of a cuttlefish tenticle arrangment.

wake

I second what redpandafire said, and that render is delightfully foul

GoodAsNew

Little bit of progress. didn't have too much time but i maniged to change the whole topology of the face. not sure if its better or worse but now it flows a bit more along the anatomy. Was easier to sculpt on.

I rotated the head a bit up and closed the mouth. Much easier to see the proportions this way.

The nose blends more in the head now but i'm not perfectly satisfied with it yet. Theres bunch of other things aswell that look a bit odd to me aswell. It just needs some further tweaking.

You are right about that the legs looking a bit isolated. The arms aswell. I might do some radical changes there. I'll probably give her more human like hands so it would be easier to make her use some tools for example.

For the legs im looking for something mix of legs, tentacle and fish tail. Not so elastic and stretchy as cuttlefish. The legs would have a cardilage spine where the big muscles would attach. More like some eel or something. That would give her good strength, flexibility and control so she could swim very fast.

I got some ideas for the cuttlefish arrangement aswell. I might use it in some future design.

Now the body fits with the head even less so im definetely going to do something about that. I like the direction where the head is developing so i'll be reshaping the body instead of the head.

Her head looks more delicate and warm now. I kinda like the contrast between that and the monstrous legs.

GoodAsNew

I started a little anatomy study with the mermaid creature. I'm a bit surpriced how well i was able to fit the skeleton with the body

I used a lot of reference but some parts were a bit difficult to understand for example the vertebras.

Next is the arms and skull. the attachment point of clavicle and scapula is going to be a bit tricky.

GoodAsNew

Moar Photoshopping.

Some mystical and scary looking swampscape. That weird looking lizard chick is a second life avatar i made looong time ago.





Here's a little bit of detail from it. Feel free to crit cos im not very experienced in landscape painting. My biggest problems usually is to get the right contrast to give some more depth.

TLishman

Really nice work, loving your drawings to bits!

Would you mind going over a quick workflow for the drawings? Im trying to improve my skills aswell. :P

GoodAsNew

Glad you like it. thanks .

Better if I make somesort of tutorial thingy sometime soon cos im not using very linear workflow so its hard to explain.

But here's some tips for landscaping:

I start from very rough line sketch. then i choose 2 main colours from light and dark and start planing the basic values. When the picture starts making some sense i can start adding more Hues in it. Values are the most important when creating illusion of space. Have to play with contrast. backround has less contrast cos the hard value changes blends together. also big shadow areas has less contrast than light areas. (look at Frank Frazettas paintings).

This takes long time to study, very slow process. just need to practise and read colour and light theories. Observe and think what makes us see the space in reality.

If you make mostly 3d work, all the knowledge can be used to make better renders aswell.

I recommend to make a lot of speed landscape paintings from photographs for example and focus on getting the space and composition.

GoodAsNew

I also recommend to hang around in Conceptart.org forums wip section.

It's focused on 2d stuff.

TLishman

Thanks GoodAsNew!

http://tlishman.darkfolio.com

Here is a thingie of my current stuff, but i feel my art overall is missing the fundementals

Would be awesome for your opinion!