My Team Fortress 2 Illustrator art
So while doing a Borderlands t-shirt design thingy I decided to work on my favorite TF2 character, the engineer. (Actually my fav class is the medic for being a team player but I love the face the engie can make turrets an teleporters and stuff. I have about 300 hours as the medic class so technically that's the class I play more but whatever!)
I'm posting all my works, scraps, etc for TF2. This is just more busy work until college starts in early August.
I see he only has one glove on! Strange but I think it's ok.
I have another engie I want to do then it's heavy time!
I'm posting all my works, scraps, etc for TF2. This is just more busy work until college starts in early August.
I see he only has one glove on! Strange but I think it's ok.
I have another engie I want to do then it's heavy time!
Replies
........yellow.........
For anyone that might want to use your picture without permission, they will easily delete the watermark, and for everyone else it's just an annoyance.
Do you see any of the people around here posting high quality stuff, type their URL all over their work? No, most just type in a small URL or name at the bottom left or right, and even try to make it not very obtrusive.
Anyway, the drawing itself looks cool. I don't play TF2 so I don't know about the color glove, but I guess you should change that asap :P
No offense.
(Quite rightly)
fixed his glove yesterday.
I will work on the second engie [will go faster, it's a simpler design] and hopefully post up. If I'm lucky I'll get a blockout of the heavy done, he's pretty complicated to draw.
Yeah, would take about 10 minutes at the very most to remove your watermark. Compare this to an image of a texture or a full environment that's not made of flat colors.
Anyway watermarks are useless and annoying. As Disco Stu said, usually people use them because they feel like they're art is amazing and everyone is going to try and steal it to use on their portfolio or whatever but they really just end up annoying anyone who looks at it. Besides, if someone really wants to steal you're art they're going to be able to remove the watermark no matter the complexity of the image.
Also, I'm not saying that you are that type of person.
I can't wait to see the finished piece.
whatever I see the argument and I won't do it anymore. I have some pieces on my site that the watermark is pretty heavy so I re-export them without one and they'd look a lot nicer.
Craftsmanship issues aside, the linework is just really, really uninteresting, and the bezier work is poor. Look at the sentry for instance, I see all the clear signs of poor bezier work, blobby shapes, skewed shapes, spikes...
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but what I'm saying is: focus on one thing. If you're not yet good enough at using bezier curves to accomplish what you're trying here, it'll be near impossible to create interesting linework. If you want to learn to create interesting linework, work with tools you know, perhaps less technical tools such as just a pencil or pen.
If, on the other hand, you want to practice your bezier work, don't go for a sloppy recreation. Choose a shape consisting of both angular and curved shapes, and recreate it exactly. Don't do it for the sake of making a nice picture, do it for the sake of recreating the shape and then throw it away. Don't become attached to it, it's just an excercise.
Generally speaking, the lines that make up the main features (the silhouette, the main divisions of clothes/materials) will be the most important, and deserve to be the thickest. Lines like cloth folds and face wrinkles are less important, and should be thinner. Also, individual lines should vary in width, and should generally be thickest when they're outlining a form that's in shadow and thinnest in the light. It's all a balancing act to find a good outcome, but there are many possible choices.
Take a look at this guy's work for an example: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/img/products/dvds/JWE01/artistGallery/jwe_06.jpg
You may not be able to translate all of that into a vector image (which usually by necessity are much more simple) but paying attention to the way this artist is using different line thicknesses to achieve a good effect will probably help.
Also, one of the biggest mistakes I see here is making all the lines black, and the interiors coloured. Black is a default colour, and good when the image is greyscale or b&w, but it's usually much too harsh when applied to a picture with such bright colours.
In this still from Aladdin, notice how the genie's outline is dark blue, where the outline around Aladdin's skin is dark red or brown.
http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/060801/142249__aladdin_l.jpg
And in this one: http://top-10-list.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Aladdin.jpg -- where the outline on the princess's clothes is blue, but the outline on her skin is dark red. And on Aladdin's feather, the outline is actually slightly lighter than the interior colour. Smartly using colour like this tends to soften the image, and make it a lot more pleasant to look at.
I concur with others -- watermark = annoying. You should always put your website on the image, but only so somebody who sees it in the future and likes it will be able to find out who did it. People on the internet steal images all the time, and when it happens it's mostly just sad. If it happens to you, just email them and tell them to knock it off. In my experience, they pretty much always do, because they're cowardly people too lazy to get their own genuine recognition.
Good luck with it!
Saying you wanted it 'simplistic' is one thing, but the sentry itself is just messy. Simplicity doesn't turn metal into clay, and with simplicity, SO much of it falls onto silhouette, which is the area that needs the most work here, I think.
For an example of nice linework that keeps rendering relatively simplistic, take a look at Herg
My design is simple and I tried to make it bold as well but sloppy was not what I wanted so I'll work on that some.