Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Force Awakens fan art

Decided to do a Star Wars fan piece. Did this relatively quickly compared to the other illustrations I'm doing right now and decided to do it in a different style than I'm used to. This was fun!


Thursday, December 17, 2015

Book Cover WIP 2

Second WIP of the book cover. Had to revert back to greyscale after messing around with the colors. Still not used to juggling both color and value at the same time yet. To be honest though, a lot of professional artists apparently start off in greyscale as well and I've been using this process for my previous illustrations. Why fix what's not broken right? Need to tighten up some areas and render out the knight.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Book cover WIP

Here's a WIP of a book cover I'm working on. Don't really post WIPs often but thought this warranted it because of its bigger scope. Went about doing this a little differently process-wise. I usually refine the line for quite a while but I jumped a little earlier into painting with this. Also starting straight from color. I guess in some ways I'm going about it in a more traditional painting sense. We'll see where this ends up!


Thursday, December 3, 2015

Sylvanas!

Went back and redid the sylvanas piece. Kind of amazing how unfinished it seemed when I looked at this again. Main critiques I got initially were that all the materials were similar and that I was using too much white light which gave it a blown out photoshop look. Went in and rendered the materials (which took a while) and introduced a yellow light source to complement the purple armor. 

Some feedback I got from the current version of her is that the skulls on her shoulder pads should be larger, her ears should be lower and pointier because she's a high elf, and that the bottom of the image kind of gets confusing because of the soldier at the bottom (who's missing an arm).

Might go back in a few months and address these issues but for right now, I need a break from this piece. Time to move on to something new!

Here's the before/after: http://i.imgur.com/swefu3D.gifv


Monday, November 30, 2015

Revisiting old work

Spent several hours working on this piece. Main problems I had with the original was that the materials weren't defined and that the colors were getting very muddy. Alex Konstad told me at CTN to just color pick a pure color and paint it in with high opacity. Went in and rendered out the materials a bit more and thought about the color contrast between cool and warm. Will definitely go back and work on my previous stuff (probably sylvanas next) to flush it out a bit more. 

Here's the comparison: http://i.imgur.com/undJKXD.gifv


Wednesday, November 25, 2015

My CTN Experience

Holy cow. That's all I can say. CTN was way better than I thought it'd be! So many incredible artists gathered in one place! I had my portfolio on my surface pro and I was walking around showing my work to as many companies/artists as I could.

Got a lot of awesome critique from the artists there. A few big ones that people kept telling me:

1. Show more process in the concept work
2. Expand upon the story of the characters more
3. Use less white light. Paint color in opaquely
4. Be more loose with my sketches
5. Polish up my renders just a bit more

Other than those things, people tended to like my work a lot. I feel that next CTN, I have to present myself as a professional and not as someone seeking portfolio reviews. I think it gives the impression that I'm not ready for work yet. Cant wait until next year!

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Widowmaker Illustration

Here's the finished illustration for Widowmaker! Starting to feel a lot more comfortable with this process.


Friday, November 13, 2015

WIP Widowmaker

Here's the Widowmaker piece I've been working on. Thinking about more interesting lighting and material definition. I'm gonna see how far I can take this today (Background, color, gun render, etc.) and will probably have this done before CTN \o/


Thursday, October 29, 2015

LoL Skin & Splash Art

Was talking to Kenny Carvalho, the art recruiter over at Riot and he's wanting to see a LoL Skin in their style and a splash illustration. I was thinking of doing a new Kindred skin based off the Chinese Pheonix and Dragon who are traditionally paired together. Here's a drawing of Wolf with his dragon skin, will work on Lamb's Phoenix skin next week!


Monday, October 12, 2015

Visual Storytelling

Did some value sketches for my visual storytelling class. We were supposed to tell a cohesive story with these so I based it off a questline from the game world I'm developing for the class


Saturday, October 10, 2015

Sandy

Rendered one of the characters up a bit. Still think I can spend several more hours on this before it's portfolio ready but here's what I got so far


Thursday, October 8, 2015

Visstory development

Some more ideation sketches for the game were making in visual storytelling




Friday, October 2, 2015

Food Fighters Refined

Cleaned up some of the sketches from last week. Teacher wants them to be standing though to show their design which makes sense. Gonna be rendering these out for the midterm presentation





Thursday, October 1, 2015

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

3D Props WIP

Here's my finished first prop and my WIP second one. The sandwich maker is a lot more complicated than the coffee maker. Glad I didn't do the sandwich one first! I'm hoping to have all my props for this semester kitchen themed so I can put them in a scene together by the end



Saturday, September 26, 2015

Food Fighters characters 2

Here's the second iteration pass on my characters for Food Fighters. Felt like I was able to dive deeper into their character/backstory and attitude from last week since we were able to narrow down primary attributes for them. I'll be doing a cleaned up drawing of them for next week!





Friday, September 25, 2015

Jaina and the online community


I'm blown away by the response this piece has generated online. I posted it to Reddit and Twitter and all the comments have been overwhelmingly positive. If you're reading this, just know how much I appreciate you guys taking your time and looking at my stuff!! Thank you!

This piece is probably the longest I've ever spent on a painting from ideation to finish. It's probably because I was forced to work on it over a couple of weeks since school started. I was able to sneak in a couple hours here and there. To be honest, I wasn't completely happy with how I brought the greyscale into color. Still happy with how it came out though! I'm planning on doing either Diana from LoL or Alexstrasza's human form next



Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Swarm crits

Here are some crits that I'm giving Swarm's art team as the art director. Removed the names just in case





Food Fighters character sketches

Character sketches for my concept ideation class. Each character is based around the food found in their region. 

I think I'm starting to ease into a sketching process. You can see that as I go from Lucy to Sandy to Vega to Finn, my lines get a lot thinner and cleaner as I build up confidence. I like the light values on dark background, really makes the characters pop a bit more and makes the drawing seem a little cleaner than it actually is. We'll see how these dudes evolve over the course of the semester!






Sunday, September 20, 2015

Environment asset studies

For my concept sketchbook class. We have to do 3 pages of studies each week of something we're not entirely comfortable with. I don't often draw many hard surface things so I found this to be a good opportunity to take a shot at it






Friday, September 11, 2015

Swarm environment style guide

Environmental style guide I made for the art team. Had to think a bit about this one, more so than the character one. Probably will do a more detailed one later down the line 




Thursday, September 10, 2015

Swarm Style Guide

So I was made Co Art Lead on the Swarm AGP. First task was to establish some guidelines for the characters. Will probably get more specific within the context of the actual game later on since these are fairly general. Onto environments next!




Wednesday, September 9, 2015

First prop

Here's the modeled out version of a coffee maker for my first prop for class. I actually really prefer modeling props and environment stuff over characters. Maybe Zbrush will change that in the future. Kevin's a really great teacher. Dedicated, straight-forward, and professional.


Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Another semester at LCAD


Here are some storyboard type stuff we did in class yesterday for my Visual Storytelling class which we were supposed to do with 3 main values. The PC at school didn't have any pressure sensitivity so I ended up using a lasso tool. I finished some of these up with a soft brush to blend in some of the hard edges.

I really like my teachers so far. Dan Quarnstrom for Environment Design is super awesome and motivational!


Friday, August 21, 2015

Fixing up old work

One piece of advice from Justin over at 343 told me was that it's a good idea to revisit old work and try to improve upon them. In my last post I talked about how I was unsatisfied with this piece. Well, I took it into Photoshop and put a B&W filter over it and found a lot of inconsistencies in some of the values. 

Her upper body and face should be the focal point in the piece yet her legs and lower part of the painting had to most contrast between the bright background and dark leggings. I kinda messed around with it a bit and feel like it looks a bit better this way.

I'm still not completely satisfied with it, but I think it's a step in the right direction. I'll probably go back to some of my other concepts and rework them before I apply for internships this Winter!