Movie studies :D

An assignment inspired by another artist, I seem to have lost my link to his site :| when I find it I will update it here, he did some studies of the movie Predator. I just picked some movies I have enjoyed seeing or want to see, screen caps courtesy of Evan E. Richards' fantastic blog.

I spent a bit more time on the faces than some other things, these are meant to be rather quick, I probably spent 10-40 minutes, a bit slow in some places, but a good exercise I will probably do again. :D

3d work and a unicornlady

Trying to take a bit of a break from the mermaid thing by working on other projects.
Here's the WIP of the Hades Breaching Drill I've been doing in 3ds max, the texture still needs a bit of work, as does the spec map (and the normal map a bit), the drills aren't as defined as I want them yet. But yea! I'm pretty proud of the glowing lights, figured that out on my own. :D

ALSO a WIP of naked unicorn girl, this is actually for an animal anatomy assignment if you could believe it. While working on this one, I was thinking that maybe style of doing lineart is kind of convoluted...I do a quick sketch with a thicker brush, then erase and fix on the same layer, instead of tracing over the sketch on a new layer. :| I just can't seem to get the same quality when I trace over my own work, I dunno.

more on that mermaid

So maybe that last post I was lying a bit, after some critique I decided I should probably work on this mermaid thing more, if not for some piece of mind, I could just leave it in my folders and try again later but I would really like to see how far I can finish this before I go crazy. Also I thought I should post some artistic references that I've been using on this thing.

art clockwise from top left:  hannahmermaid.com, James Gurney, Jason Chan x2,
ref images: rose (can't find it again D: ) & crystal  (zgsjw.com.cn) 

So I am a huge fan of James Gurney and Jason Chan and their respective approaches to painting (traditional and digital respectively). I have been heavily referencing Gurney's Color and Light, a book I highly, highly recommend, as well as his other book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist which actually has that top right mermaid painting in it, another incredibly useful resource. I was looking at these images for really just basic ideas of how these different people approached the subject of a mermaid, as well as how to handle hair underwater, and how they bring their paintings to a finish, as I have a difficult time doing that.

So, on reflection, what my painting needs, is more of everything, haha, I worked on it a bit here, thinking maybe to add some more colors (they will be light sources eventually) I'm also going to change how that cave wall hits the picture frame on the right, it was also mentioned I should really figure out where the focal point is, I'm considering turning the mermaid's head so you can see her face, as the human face tends to draw our eye the most. Or just put more light on her, or something.

At this point I really have the itch to scrap it and start again, so I may just do that, we'll see.



BONUSSSSS

an assignment for my animal biology class, depict the skeleton and anatomy of a fantasy animal, I went with a unicorn, naturally. 

I tell people I was going for 'insane scientist' with the writing....but, my handwriting is really that awful. :D

mermaid progress (final??)

Here's the progress so far, I'm calling it done for now, but I hope to revisit it later to refine things even more.

took out the fin, it was rather distracting, refining things a bit, and fixing anatomy (again)

added some highlights to the hair to make it stand out more from the rock wall behind her

flipped to check anatomy, and stuff, not bad not bad

removed some of the flowers it was kind of overkill to have that many, added some magic bits.

refining a bit more, removed that rock in front as it read weird. Calling it good for now, still need to fix the hands, my weakness, overall I think I may have finally somewhat successfully painted a dang mermaid.

mermaaaaiddd

Here's what I did on this thing up to to last night.

Decided I wasn't a fan of the way the crystals were going on.

messed with the idea of some reflected light on her tail

Added the end of her tail, I still really don't like how her tail looks in general, I might actually make the composition longer to fit all of it in? Maybe. Anyway, thought that maybe it would be cool if it was some crystal flowers in there, a bit more mystical, we'll see how long that lasts. 

mermaid painting progress

More on that painting I posted about about a week ago, I decided to go with the mermaid as I have a personal vendetta against mermaids and so far failed attempts to paint them, learning, yay!
These are some screenshots of my progress from this past week.

the comp!

 decided the skin looked very dead, attempts to liven it up, the crystal's shape wasn't working.

experimenting with the shape of the crystal, and the skin's palette more, thought maybe the top of the ocean should be visible.

I got frustrated with attempting to get the anatomy right through just color and here attempted to figure it out with line, something I'm a bit more comfortable with.

thinking of maybe putting her in a cave full of magical crystals, hopefully to vary the colors a bit, almost there anatomy wise, I hope.

just about there with the anatomy, at least to the point I can move on to those accursed crystals.

More to come! :D

COMBO BREAKERRR!!!!!!

The other comp I liked, a bit more worked on, I kind of like how rough it is right now.

new painting progress :D

So, here's some progress stuff from some Photoshop paintings I am currently working on, so the idea was to take a pose from a life drawing, in my case, these were pretty much gestures.

I chose the middle top as the pose seemed to have the most story options to it.

I then placed it into a composition/scene:

These are some rough ideas, obviously some I liked a bit more than others.


Here I took the roughs and chose one to work with further:

 I messed around with some colors and outfits a bit.  However, I wasn't happy with the direction these were all going and thought I should branch out a little, but I kept the same general pieces of the composition.

Here are the comps in their current stage, the favorites seem to be the bottom left and bottom right, although I'm partial to top left, we'll see where these go in the next week or so. :D I might do all three! :DDD

Beginning 3d concepts for an excavator from earlier in the semester.

A fully rendered concept sheet taken from the above concepts, I ended up choosing something else to model, as this was a bit too easy, and I really wasn't happy with where the design was going.

BONUS, what I am currently modeling. It is a Forgeworld model for Warhammer 40k, credit for the badassery goes to them, however I created/drew everything in the below sheet.

Some stuff from my cg class, 3 self portraits referenced 90% from life and some movie still studies :DDD

BONUSSSSSSSSS, character sheets for my project animation class, these are kind of rough and will be changed later! :B