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!

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.

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!

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

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

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!

Widowmaker Illustration

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