Peter Parr Tribute

This is not the greatest painting in the world. This is just a tribute!

This year my university tutor, the legendary professor Peter Parr, is retiring. He has been the living embodiment of the animation course at the AIB and has been a fantastic tutor for me. I am inspired by this elderly chap who has shown more enthusiasm and energy than all the youths in class. It was really eye opening. He led by example a successful and enjoyable life and career that I can only hope to emulate his achievements. So heres to you PPP for showing us the ways of the bouncing ball, we wave our poorly animated flags at your departure but we look forward to a new chapter for the school you have built a steady foundation on. Happy retirement!

EDIT: Found a link to an article about the man himself with some samples of his work. This guy NEEDS a website to display the trillions of drawings and paintings he has!

EDIT: Apparently some of my blurb here was quoted in a speech delivered to him on the last graduation ceremony he attended as a teacher. But I wasnt credited!!!!!!! Plagiarism lol! :P

Expose

A wip for ChoW 200 and a tiny update on the previous landscape.
Last month I made a post where I said that I might have an announcement to make soon (original post). Well now that I got the confirmation I can announce it today.... I have an artwork accepted into Ballistic Publishing's Expose 8! I am very excited, actually today I was wondering if I did get in or not as the last time I heard that I got into the final rounds was ages ago and I was thinking that I didnt progress further. If you are wondering what the image I have in there it is going to be the one that is currently made my banner (the watercolour and photoshop hybrid). You will be able to find it on page 197. It feels surreal to be on the same spread as Andrew Jones :P Expose 8 will be in stores next month.

Ive been to visit my good friend Harry Wormald this weekend to celebrate his new job as a matte painter at SFX giants The Mill. It didnt seem long ago when we were both noobs in our Foundation Art course in 2005. Harry was actually the one who introduced me to digital painting and it scared the crap out of me, I was shockingly bad at it! We were both fresh out of high school but we had big ambitions. I look back at those days fondly because we set our goals then and spent the next few years in pursuit of them. I wanted to be a concept artist and he wanted to be a matte painter. In our foundation degree we were only beginners but we were willing to work and we were ambitious. I dont care what level you are at at the moment, if you consistently work hard and strive to learn and improve then you are on the right path to your goals. Our tutors used to tell us off and discourage us from going after these goals saying that there is no place for them and nothing would amount from it. What do they know eh? ;P

Oh... and turns out the Cintiq isnt the answer to all my problems :P There is annoying little things with the colour that is slightly off my normal monitor that throws me off. However I have a solution! It involves my precious Graphire 4... I can draw with the Cintiq, then use the Graphire to block in colours (on the monitor Im used to) and take it back to the Cintiq to paint!

New Toy

Heres an old speedie I did. I was hoping to finish it but then got distracted by the ChoWs and lost track of this. Will have to revisit later. Its hopefully the start of yet another personal project of mine. We'll have to wait and see when I do more of it.
Heres a sneak peak at some of the thumbnails for my next ChoW... Its the queen of music using her conductor baton to orchestrate and bring to life the inanimate instruments around her to form her throne and the lifeless subjects starts to play their songs.

And here is a snapshot of my desk with the new Wacom PL-521 :D Isnt she a beauty? The gray tablet on the left is my 4 year old A6 Wacom Graphire 4 which has served me in battle throughout my art development from my noob days to now and it has done well for me and seen me through the highs and the lows. I will miss the stickers Ive decorated it with and the finger groove worn into the rubber grip of the stylus! Here's to the old and to the new, Im sure my new weapon will see a lot of adventures over the coming years!
In other news... Im helping to promote my university course at the AUCB to Blitz and we might be adding them to our academy scheme! More on that when it happens.

Courtier

Chow number 199. I really wanted to participate in this one because it marks 100 Chows on from one of my first entries. December 2007 is when I took part in Chow number 99 and Ive been planning to use the latest one as a chance to look back 2.5 years ago and see where Ive gone. Looking back at old work is good for me to find comfort that I a improving. Seeing mistakes and ways to improve old pieces that I used to be the best I could produce shows you are on the right track.
If I was to give some critique to younger me from 2007 on his piece I would point out: The silhouette is not that strong, the pose is stiff, the anatomy should be thought about more rather than just imagining the figure on the surface (imagine him without his clothes and he is quite deformed!), everything is too flat on and there are no variety of depth (like foreshortening), the lighting isnt consistent and is quite generalized (doesnt give you an exact idea of where the light source is and it can be used to enthuse a mood), and the background is carelessly done without thought (what do the crazy patterns and marks have to do with the subject?).
Anyway back to the actual piece. The topic is Courtier. For a long time I wanted to take my designs in a direction that is rooted in fantasy. What I mean by that is trying to come up with designs that might not be so mundane and limited to reality (but is still believable). So the kind of reaction I am trying to encourage from my designs are intrigue and curiosity. Hopefully there is enough recognizable elements to connect the viewers to reality and enough juxtaposition and bizarre things to make it look other worldly.
Coming soon: A tribute to Peter Parr (my tutor)
EDIT: The Parr tribute may have to wait. ChoW #200 is upon us and Im too excited to back down from it XD

Master Chiu Remastered

Another repaint. Will post some actual new work up soon!
I recently completed Dead to Rights Retribution! Im very pleased with it and happy for my peers to have pulled together a solid game. I also found my fellow concept artist's website. Check out Bob Cheshire's work here.

Punk, Steam and Robo

For the AIB Jumble. I try to make my entries for that blog a way for me to experiment and try different techniques and approaches. Something I dont want to do is find a single method or style that I make my one strength and become a one-trick pony. It helps me to evolve a bit and think about things in different perspectives and I think these kind of experimentation help me to grow.
It is coming up to the end of the school year and people might be starting to look for work. I just want to share a bit of my experience having graduated last year and managing to get a job as a concept artist as I wanted. Well, it can be tough but very doable. There is no secret, actually your grade doesnt matter (for art based work anyway) nor does it matter if you are the best in your class as your competition when you step out of the classroom is the world! Students from all around the place as well as industry veterans. This might sound scary but in the end all that matters is your portfolio, that does ALL the talking. So this is what I focused on in the end.
Sorry for the long story but hopefully it is useful and someone can learn from my mistakes. Sooo... this time last year I was about to graduate and I sent an application to a big games studio in the UK. They got back to me expressing interest in hiring me and sounded keen and gave me a test to do. Im going to be honest here and say that I was complacent and lazy! And I didnt give it my all as I should have and blew the chance. Having then graduated I couldnt find much success with my applications since. I spent time to research and send work to as many places as I could find but to no avail. It can be quite tough mentally but this is natural, not everyone is hiring every single time so it can be down to just bad timing but you want to be prepared fully when an opportunity comes up so you should always try and improve your folio.
Anyway... what was I doing immediately after university? Not much. I was sitting on my ass waiting for an opportunity but then (thanks to some wise words from Bobby Chiu's videos) I changed my attitude and realized that if I want to compete against the big guns I will have to work like them and probably work twice as much so I could catch up to them. When I adopted this mentality of "screw it, Im tired of waiting for an opportunity Im going to get it myself" I spent every day painting and drawing and after 2 months I got my first interview. From that I got my current job as a concept artist. Did I stop working and trying to improve? Heck no! Not after how I let the earlier opportunity slip by because of complacency when I had a chance. I have beaten myself up for slipping up then and ever since I have made complacency my enemy hehe :P Its hard when your future looks uncertain but I managed to stop wasting time worrying about it and just do it and trust that that will get me to my goals. That is also why I strongly believe in hard work over talent (which is a silly word because talent comes from hard work). In a way I was pleased to have been knocked down otherwise I would have got my goal a lot easier and would not appreciate it. I would probably still be complacent about my work but now that I have gotten somewhere through hard work I am beginning to imagine what else I can achieve if I continued and so there are new goals set up and more reasons to kill off complacency! Its a hard road but if you are the one who dares to walk it then you are on the right path for sure.
Good luck everyone!

OK some PLUG for my friend and colleague Martin Johnson's work. Awesome guy and no nonsense XD He uploaded some of the art he created for Dead To Rights: Retribution. Check it out here.

Sammo Reloaded

More repainting and theres more to come :P Work is getting a bit busy so Im going to spend a bit of my spare time into it. But Im sure I will get time to continue more of my own work.

Sketchbook Update

Some selection of sketchbook pages. Hahaha I omitted the really crap stuff out! But it is there somewhere in my real sketchbook. Its been a while since I drew in good ole pencils and getting back into it was scary when all that came out of my pencil was crud. It was a bit of a heartache to think that Ive taken a few step back after neglecting my pencils but now Im feeling Im on the track again to regain some form. There is a mixture of studies of other artists, scribbly thumbnails (you can see the first page is for the Oz character contest) theyre usually messy yeah :P Its just meant to be seen by me, you can also find some imagination drawings and observationals like the pen gesture drawings.
Dead to Rights: Retribution was released on Friday. We enjoyed reading the press, what the media wrote about it and seeing the game in store was great. Its quite an odd feeling really, I saw how the box art was painted on the computer right next to me, seen the artwork for it before playing it, and to see familiar names in the credits takes some getting used to :P Im actually genuinely enjoying the game too. Its scary fun and satisfying to brutally melee a guy, disarm them and shoot them in the face slow-mo style with their own gun and curse them before they hit the floor :P Here is some promotional material (This is the only copy I could find. Its been banned):


And... Good luck to all the animation students at Bournemouth who are pitching this week!

Some inspirations for tonight:
Jason Chan - Back in 2006 when my buddy Harry first introduced me to digital art I found this guy's work and it became one of my first and biggest inspiration for digital painting.
Creative Uncut - Good source for game art.
Richard Schmid - Author of Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting. Good book, afraid I havent finished it yet :P Borrowed it to a colleague who went out to get his own copy straight away! But his work just speaks for itself no?
Alvin Lee - Awesome comic book artist. You might recognize some of my studies in the post was off his work :P

Reboot!

One day I looked through some old work.... they made me wince! So here are some repaints. There might be more on the way but I am leaving them to rest for now. There is a space of about 4 months between the repaints and the originals. In the repaints I got rid of some indecision from the first ones. Often colours are muddy, too hastily rendered, too random and without thought in the attention to clothing creases, messiness and general "what the heck was I doing?"
My hope is that I can continue to make improvements. The art journey continues on and on! Actually lately Ive been doubting myself again and so I hope to work more into some weak areas I am finding. More to come soon!

Inspirations: The Art Center - Awesome awesome awesome AWESOME blog! Very useful talks and tips. I made a thing of reading something off there every day. Gold! Read this post especially. I completely agree with whats been said in that post and it was a good reminder for me to read that. It is something I havent done enough of late.

How to Train Your Watercolours

Im backkkkkk!!!!! My internet at home died for a few days... it may have been a week! It was horrible!!!!!!! But Im back now and have quite a lot to tell. First off, this is a watercolour piece for the AIB Jumble inspired by the film How To Train your Dragon (the film I currently cant stop talking about)! OK... now theres a few news.
I have passed my probation period and am now permanently working at Blitz. That is until I get kicked out! I still remember a couple months ago when I was fresh out of university and looking for work. I didnt know what would happen, where I would end up or when something will happen! But after wasting time worrying about it I realized there was no good waiting for it to happen to me and I adopted an attitude that I will have to work everyday as if I am employed so that I can keep improving like the people who are in a job already. Most likely I would have to work double the amount they are so that I could level up quicker. It was a tough journey for sure and there are definitely more to come. I had some failures and made mistakes that cost me but as long as I bounced back they dont matter anymore. Actually, the failures helped me to respond in a more positive way and so I try to see a good sign in any failures I make from now on :P I also remember a few years back my ambition of being a concept artist in a computer games studio. At the time it might have seemed beyond me so it is slightly surreal to have ticked that box off and that has given me a bit of encouragement to go set myself more goals and ambitions to meet.
Anyways I should move on to the next couple of news. We are soon to release our latest game Dead to Rights: Retribution this Friday. I didnt work on this but if you want to see what my colleagues have been busying themselves with please check it out and support us :D
Lastly... Me and a few other people from ConceptArt.Org had work featured on IO9 and Super Punch recently for our participation in the CHOW. Here are the links: IO9, Super Punch. There might be another announcement soonish too XD!

Fellowship of Oz

ConcepArt.Org's Character of the Week (Chow) topic: Wizard of Oz.
Got some time to finish this off earlier than I normally do :P Usually at work everyone has to create the artwork in a tight deadline and so we have to work faster and utilize Photoshop trickeries to speed up the process. Its good to churn out the work but for my most of my personal pieces I like to take my time on it to balance the method I use at work. Having said that, I still think I should speed up my whole process and will try doing some quicker stuff and try not to fall into the trap of finishing everything. The beginnings of a piece is where most of the problem solving takes place and after that everything should be straight forward. So the plan is to produce more initial sketches in a bid to learn more from the problem solving stages. Rendering an image takes a lot of time and I dont think I am learning as much from it as I can off sketches atm. Stay tuned to see how it goes :P

Chiustream topic: Insane Turtle Man

Took part in the Chiustream contest tonight. Thanks to my buddy Owen Williams for reminding me about the event and encouraging my ass to get this done by coming close to winning the previous contest :P
It was a bit tricky cause I normally want to finish pieces off and this forces me to do more quick stuff which is something I need to focus on. More to come soon.

Following the Yellow Brick Road

Wip for the Chow.

Sketches

Was scanning in some thumbnails from my sketchbook to paint over so I thought I scan in a few pages to show here too. The sketchbook pages are mostly studies from the Vagabond manga. Accuracy was crud :P The digi was my first stab at the new Chow topic but I hated where it was going so I am now working on a new one. Sometimes failure is good, it keeps me on my toes and encourages me to keep pushing on. Theres been a lot of crap drawings along my journey that I now try to think of them more positively as a sign that a better one will come out of my frustration. Got to go back to some studies and also focus on quick speedy pieces. I think I labor and noodle too much into my work too often.
Inspiration: How to Train Your Dragon! Go see the film! Nooooooowwwwww!!!!

Shapeshifter

Finished for the AIB Jumble. As I said before it was inspired by Gil Elvgren's work. Just brought a book of his and been admiring his work. I really like how his form pops! I tried to apply that in this piece, I think its been a bit successful around her arm (the one thats held up). Its because I zoomed in on that and painted in a lot of hard dark edges to it and tried to fade it off into the form so that it doesnt look too abrupt. The lasso tool is a good friend that I should spend more time with. It was very helpful in painting the straights on the broom stick and made the process easy.
As always Ive been listening to some Chiustream :P It was nice to listen to some encouraging words every now and then. Even though I am now working as a professional concept artist I dont feel much different from when I was in university as a student. I am still trying to improve and do my studies. I still feel the frustrations and doubts I did as an aspiring artist. But doubt is a good thing. It means you are not content and wanting to improve. I think it was Leonardo Da Vinci who said something along the lines of: "That painter who has no doubts will achieve little."
Its a quote I liked and found reassuring. I remember in my second year of university 2 years ago I had a phase of doubting myself and it kept me up at night sometimes :P So during the next day when I am walking to class I would try think of solutions to how I could improve my work and then after class I would try it out... maybe I will fail again and the cycle continued but I didnt get too down about it, in a strange way I relished it because I knew it meant I was on the right tracks and that eventually I would get better. I didnt ever think I would not make art my profession really. I was confident that I would always keep drawing and painting and as long as I kept doing that I will make it in the end. I have seen many examples of beginners growing to great standards and mature beginners doing the same proving that it is never too late to get into it. Art is not like physical sports where you have an age where you peak and then dip from there on. You can start at any time and the whole journey to improve and hone in your skills never end as long as you dont stop. That is why I think you see teenagers painting to the quality of some professionals and its the beauty of it all! There is no differentiating us all, we all have the potential to do it XD
Lets share some inspirations... Im going to link some of the folks I draw with on ConceptArt.Org. I have spoken to lots of aspiring artists before and I am always more impressed and fond of those who do their talking by action. Whenever I see someone working hard and with much dedication I feel these people are the people I like to work with. When I was unemployed I updated my sketchbook every day or two and kept this up for a few months. It attracted the attention of other young and dedicated artists and because of our like minds we formed a group where we encouraged each other and pushed each other on. Check out their work: Krato, Jatherip, Dylanea Go see the last pages to see how theyve progressed!