Hey folks! Well its been on hold and kept in storage for such a long time but I dug the old Yoshimitsu redesign painting I left unfinished and attacked it with a brush! I think I learned a few things from this piece, it was good to move away from this painting for a while and come back with eyes and mind refreshed.
Welcome to my room... ok I made that up! I have been experimenting a bit here with incorporating photos into my work and also keep the painted elements on a par with the detail level. Enjoy the rest of the day :D
Since I haven't posted much of these kind of concept art on my blog I though I'd shed some light on how this creature came into existence! Something you probably did not know is that I had made a previous attempt at showing off this technique but failed because I was too eager to dive in and get working that I didnt even have an idea what it was that I was concepting. So that was quickly thrown to the bin and I did a quick drawing to give myself a direction. Most of the time its important to plan what it is you are working on, it will save a lot of stress and brain power on the long run :P The only exception to planning is speedpainting where you set out to discover the piece as you go along which I think makes it harder to pull off than people think (maybe I will talk more about speedpainting in a future update).
With the drawing giving us a plan I start gathering some photo textures and cut and pasted them together to make a texture base. I was looking for textures that has a flat lighting so that I can control it later. I used the warp transform to shape the textures to follow the contours of the creature's form and to make some monstrous deformation as seen on the head piece. A lot of the textures had to be desaturated and colour balanced to give all these different cut outs unity. There was hardly any painting done at this stage but you can see a few form shadows I couldn't help but drop in, but nothing huge.
Once that is done I flatten it down to one layer and set it to 'overlay' blend mode. I then add a new layer below it and paint the lighting in, adding shadows and a tiny bit of highlight (dont go too crazy with the strength of these or they will look really fake). Its easier to make a mask around the creature so you can paint freely at this stage.
With all that done I then flatten the image down begin to paint on top of the image. This is where I will fix oddities in the photo comp like where there are odd transitions and if I just want to change something completely like the mouth piece. I added some red patches around the body using a 'hard light' layer to echo the reds on the head, again this is to ensure there is a unity to the design so that you dont look at head and think it doesn't belong to this creature.
Trying out a new technique using lots of photographs knitted together to make a texture base then set it to an overlay layer and painted the lighting on the layer under it. Then I collapsed it all and painted over the top. Quite a handy trick for quick concepts.
Hey folks! I saw Kung Fu Panda 2 the other day and felt inspired to do my take on a potential bad guy character. I was telling my friends how I liked that the villain in the new film was not an obvious animal choice. In the first one you had an intimidating beast but in the new film the baddie is a peacock but somehow I think it works. The peacock at first might look harmless and physically incapable of challenging Po but he is always out there diligently trying to kill him which makes feel a bit psychotic for placing his mission to defeat our hero ahead of his own capability to match him. From a talk with my friends I suggested trying to come up with another enemy lined to grapple with Po. I wanted to go with another animal that naturally doesnt fit the bill of being a bad guy and is rooted in Chinese tradition too. I had a Chinese figurine of a three-legged frog on my desk which gave me this idea. There are elements of a kirin with its head design and piercings that echo the rings on the 9 ringed broadsword. One of the difficulty with this character design was working around the toad's sunken head. It would have been preferable to give the head a clear silhouette which can help the character emote but I tried to work round this and frame the head as much as I can.
Last week I was at the Annecy animation festival. It was my 5th year in a row there! As always I loved being there and meeting people with a common interest and ambition. One of these days I shall have to learn the language since I frequent France so much! Will next year be a 6th year in a row?
Some more speedpainting. Ive been working on a few speedpaints lately but some of them I think I managed to either overwork or jumped in without any idea of what I want to do which meant it turned out below what I wanted. But these crap pieces were essential in reminding myself to not over complicate things and this turned out better because of that lil lesson. More to come :)
Reworked this old piece and added a background to it as well as some rim light diluting :D
An album cover commissioned by my friend's band Motorcade. Happy listening :)
Oh.... and if you are up for some drawing and socializing with fellow artists from around the country we have organized a sketch meet in Oxford on June 18th. Its a nice and friendly event for professionals, students and enthusiasts alike. Theres been a lot of turn out over the years and a lot of network and friends made so its worth a look in. For more details follow this link.
Gotta keep up with the studies my friends :) Ive been pointed to some of the drawings of Erik Gist and felt they had a lot of quality in them that I would like to capture myself. Sooo I did some studies to investigate what I like about the way he interprets his figures hoping to add what ever I liked to my own method of drawing. This is like Jeet Kune Do in the concept that you try out different styles and techniques and absorb what is useful, add it to yourself and discarding what is not useful. My tutors and education encouraged me and my classmates to study other artists and I share that opinion that it is a great way to learn to draw.
We all have a arsenal of shapes in our memory to call upon to construct our artwork (a visual library). And the more we observe and use reference the informed our visual vocabulary will be. I don't believe we are a lesser artist if we do use reference and have to observe nature first because those observations will be with you all the time and stored in your head ready to be used for the next drawing you make. The less informed you are in your drawing the more you make assumptions of what something looks like (which makes us liars :P). Do not worry that reference will be a clutch to you, it will be a clutch if you let it dictate you rather than use it as... well... reference... a guideline. Just look at the artist Gil Elfgren's reference shots compared to his paintings. After lots of observation maybe you will find your drawings from memory without reference will get a boost. Let the reference inform you but not control you :)
Funny enough... when I was thinking about this post there were other blog posts talking about the same thing but they probably said it better than me so here are the links: Learning to Draw (Art Center) and Muddy Colors. Oh and a friend pointed me to this site full of arty podcasts: Paper Wings Podcast. I havent gotten round to giving it a listen myself but I thought I share this as I am sure it will be interesting to kind of people who visit here hehe. One final thing. I thought I'd start sharing with you the artist or influences of the day like I used to way back. For today I looked at Erik Gist's work of course and also those of Charles Gibson. He is another person I did some studies of (back in my first and second year of university) and I liked the way he draws noses which I have adopted myself :P
Since its been a while and feeling a bit empty in here I scanned in a few of the last pages of my life drawing sketchbook. I looked through the rest of the book to find something to scan but since they are all old drawings I kinda hate seeing them now hehe. There is still a few things (OK, actually there are loads) I need to work on like line quality (stop with the indecisive and harsh lines already!), and conveying depth a lot better too (tonal weight from foreground to background and line weight). There will be more slow updates as I am off on a few holidays the coming few months.
