Color Studies

My last L5R remake is going to be another environment.  I haven't finalized what it'll be yet, but I do know that I really want to really punch up the colors so that it's more vibrant and exciting than the Oyo Seido piece.  Color has always been my weakness, so I decided to do some long overdue color exercises. It's a pretty simple exercise that most any artist can do, and it only takes a couple of hours.

First I looked for a bunch of mountain landscapes on Google images, picking a variety of scenes and colors. Next I prepared a set oh nine thumbnail sized canvases.  Then one by one I attempt to recreate the color scheme of each photograph, making sure to never use the eyedropper tool (unless the color has already been laid down).  It's a trick I learned from someone else's blog (I forget which), but the idea was to train your eyes to really see color and decide which colors to lay down instead of just picking a swatch and/or picking a color from a photograph.  I don't know how successful the exercise was, but it was a lot of fun, and I'll probably do a couple more of these before hunkering down and working on the next piece.

Character of the Week # 258 : Chess Knight

This is my final entry for last week's Character of the Week Challenge.  Actually "entry" isn't quite right because I didn't manage to finish on time, meaning I wasn't able to submit this for voting.  It's hard to appreciate the detail in this one without seeing it larger, so click on the image to zoom in.  I've also included a close up of the face below.  I think I'm going to call it quite on these weekly challenges for now.  They're just a little too stressful and time-consuming now that I'm working on game projects again.



I haven't given up my illustration dreams though, and I'll continue learning and working on my illustration skills over the next few months.  I'm actually going to set some goals publicly in the hopes that it'll both force me to commit to working on my skills and also to help others who are interested in getting into the illustration biz by learning from both my successes and failures.  Boy am I going to regret this.

Feng Zhu's Free Tutorials

While Feng Zhu's School of Design may be out of the price range of many aspiring artists, he's kindly put up a series of free online tutorials available for anyone to view.  Of course these are partly meant to be promotional material for his school, but he doesn't skimp on the details and with sharing his thought process and workflow.  These tutorials probably won't be as in depth as the stuff I downloaded from the art department (7.99 sale still ongoing btw), but these should provide a good (free!) complement to them.

Creature of the week WIP2 : Kangazelle

Quick update.  The rendering process has begun , this is about two hours in after scanning the sketch into photoshop.  I laid out a background color then used a large custom brush to give it some texture and block in the important parts, afterwards it was just painting over it with a regular round brush in incrementally smaller brush sizes.  You'll notice that the elf riding his back is ridiculously small.  By the time you read this he will have been erased and hopefully replaced with an elf of more proper proportions.

Creature of the week WIP : Kangazelle

The topic for the CoW challenge on conceptart.org this week was to pick a fantasy race (elves, orcs, etc.) and conceptualize a war mount for them.  I actually didn't intend to join this week so I could take a break, but for whatever reason I ended up doodling and getting ideas and eventually I figured if I can finish this in a day or two, I might as well join the damn thing again.  I won't try to replicate the scale of Turtle Island again, that's for sure.  I wasn't feeling TOO creative, so when I came to the idea of a Kangazelle (half Kangaroo, half gazelle) I just decided to roll with it.   This is the sketch I cam up with while doodling yesterday, which I plan to develop a little further in the coming days.  This will be pure conceptual art, just enough to get an idea across but not necessarily a full fledged illustration.

Squidshrimpleg (or Legsquidshrimp?)

This here’s my entry for conceptart.org’s creature of the week contest.   The concept was to take a human body part and reimagine it as a creature of its own.  I didn’t quite have as much time with is as I wanted, since I’d made a previous version and dumped it because I wasn’t feeling it.  Not sure how this idea came to me exactly.  I just thought that a bent leg looked a little bit like the body of a shrimp, so I rolled with it.   As an extra, I’m also posting the lineart for this piece below so you can compare the two.  I obviously have a lot to learn about the transition between lineart and rendered artwork, but the tutorials I downloaded from TAD are really helping.

Spacechem concept art

Since we just released some DLC and Spacechem is also being offered up as one of the prizes in Steam’s Summer Camp sale, I thought this would be an opportune time to talk about some of the concept art that went into Spacechem,  Now I know what you’re thinking, Spacechem isn’t exactly a graphical masterpiece, so why would it need concept art?   Well the truth is that one of the things that drew me to spacechem originally was the story, and the opportunity to design a world and characters around that story, which was intended to have a more central role in earlier versions of Spacechem than it did in the final product.  For example, the story was going to have conversations between characters with avatars, similar to a standard JRPG.   Zach wanted an aesthetic that was different and eye-catching.  I’m not sure who suggested it, but I eventually went to early/mid twentieth century sci-fi as my peg for the universe.  Stuff like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc.  I was also influenced by a book on arms and armor in the metropolitan museum, and tried to meld that into the scifi world.  Below you can see some of my helmet designs.  None of these actually made it to the final game, but there is an echo of design #1 in of of the panels we used to help tell the story in the middle of missions.

While none of these actually made it to the final game, but there is an echo of design #1 in of of the panels we used to help tell the story in the middle of missions.  Here investigators are looking into Spacechem documents.  I wanted to make the investigators look a little more mysterious, so I enclosed their faces in helmets.

Zach also liked to say that he wanted to make the players feel heroic when they played the game, and so I designed Spacesuits for them that made Reactor Engineers look more like spacefaring heroes in the mold of Han Solo.  I took lots of inspiration from all sort of places like Star Wars and even old diving suits, but I think I borrowed most heavily from the design for Captain Harlock.

I liked design# 2 best here, and that image ultimately wound its way into the Story Panels as Bruce Novak’s signature outfit.  Below you can see him hacking at foliage in a jungle planet and entering his massive spaceship to embark on an adventure into parts unkown.

    

While a lot of the concept work behind Spacechem was left out of the game due to time and budget constraints, I think it still helped to flesh out an interesting world (which is part of what attracted me to the game in the first place) that I would love to return to some day.