Practicing a previous style

After Tuesdays lesson I've been decided I need more practice in the painting methods I've been using so I have decided I will get back into pencil and paper media and draw some more creatures and faces for scanning in and colouring but instead of drawing round the line work with a tablet I'm just going to go straight in with silhouette shading, 

However until I have produced a good collection again I decided to try more of the white drawing lined lighting in silhouettes and quickly produced the following three silhouettes and picked out lighting areas with a solid white brush

PROGRESSION!

 So today I made a massive amount of progress, practicing painted shading details, defining lighting and shading, creating brushes and blending using opacity and then finally alittle of adding colour and texture :) with help from Broady and Josh they instructed me giving me two minute tasks of adding light etc and below is the results of today's work!

I felt that without linework I was getting alittle lost with defining detail in areas as in my head they where just blank so I used a large selection of my character faces as the basis of the shading as there features where already defined due to the line work, Im very pleased with the outcome and the little amount of time it took to actually do these! I took one of them on to add more detail and blend the linework in and then josh instructed me to add colour and texture and for a quick test as im still learning im looking forward to the future of my workflow :)

On the road again

So I decided instead of waiting for tomorrows lesson I would give on of them a go with shading them using the lowered opacity brush technique and also building a custom brush with shaded spacing and soft edges, In terms of quality its not stunning but for me this is a good step forward to getting there with this type of painting style :)

New tablet practices

Over the last couple of I received my new graphics tablet so I've been testing out it out by doing some more silhouettes I've found the brush strokes alot more detailed and finer which has enabled me to get more defining characters and below is the results

I don't really rate these highly myself however I recalled a technique I used on my third year honours project where I would take sections of character faces and combine the elements I liked from them so I had a play with my favorite silhouettes from the last couple of weeks and created these three although the far right one is unchanged I just really like the posture so now I am going to take these on and try and colour them in Tuesdays lesson

Development Of practices

Since last blog update Ive had some more practices on silhouette paintings but mainly in the shading area now of the ones Ive already produced, using a lot of layers in Photoshop I worked on the silhouette below firstly, but upon showing Josh he mentioned that there was still too much line work involved and I had sort of segmented the images and colored in in sections rather than one whole image.

He also discussed with me the implication of light on a character when coloring in black and white, its importance is vital to correctly color an image, an area Im not too strong one so I took another one of the character silhouettes I made and as it is holding a fire ball its a perfect chance to practice the effects of light on the character, I also starting using lowered opacity brushes instead of just separate tones which helped but I found it had to define the shadow on the form.

While I was doing this I had a word with Broady from the MA course who is just finishing off his work now, He noticed that this wasn't the strongest of pieces and mentioned this artist below, He uses a solid white brush to pick up all the light information of the character, these examples are stunning and have inspired me to give this process a go as well, whatever helps to strengthen my artwork the better.

Below is my first attempt at this sort of style, though Ive noticed It feels like Im just picking up areas of detail from this not so much the lighting of the characters, I feel its the lack of understanding of the characters face, clothes etc that's letting me down so Im going to try on one of the characters of the group sheet on the previous blog post next.

New Character Sheet

After Fridays lesson I decided I had to get a new Wacom tablet and Im currently waiting on an Ebay for one for £30 which is a serious bargin! so hopefully I will win that, so over the weekend I decided I wanted to do some rough character sketches taking into account Items, Narrative and personality through there stances and from what I discussed with Josh you cant just sketch without a purpose so I created 6 characters on paper and then using different brushes I produced there silhouettes ready to take onto coloring in tomorrows lesson :)

Making a Change

On Friday I went into uni and decided to take on my silhouettes on to a coloring process, I watched a tutorial online and tried to follow the same technique they where and produced these three quick coloring from my selection of silhouettes..

Ive noticed then from these that certain areas of my silhouettes don't make sense upon taken into detail for example the arm joints on them don't make much sense especially the one in the middle, this however will be sorted in time and practice.

After this Josh agreed with my same theory on these coloring and watched me draw some more silhouettes and asked me if I would like a bigger tablet, Ive had the same Wacom for the last three years and haven't tried any of the newer models and I discovered Ive been a fool for not doing so..

 I played with a Bamboo Wacom tablet which is considerately bigger than mine and the results where great, I loved how the tablet felt and the sensitivity of the pen so using that I created some more Silhouettes, Also I told Josh how sketching without purpose was hard when it can to this sort of artwork so he told me to do silhouettes for a zombie like creatures and then told me to cut away at them with a square brush,

Silhouette Practice

I cant progress with my project Idea and with the research model of this project coming up my work will be based off any creative work however in the next couple of days I am going to get practice in a different painting technique as I feel its vital not only in this module but as an artist! My previous work to the MA has always been linework pieces that didn't fit the gaming concept world style so Im looking forward to practicing this technique.

That in mind i produced these two pages of character silhouettes that over the weekend I will be taking them on to monotone paintings before color.

Practice makes.. rubbish

I've decided to spend a couple of hours today practicing some artwork, first life drawing I found a helpful website that sets up stock images of nude people so people can study and draw then, it also has a timer on so I tried 1 minute firstly then 2 minutes, I also made it my goal to use my graphics tablet, Pencil and pen is my strong point and I've done alot of Life drawing over the years but never straight from a tablet, below is my results.

Left - 1 minute Practices

Right - 2 minute Practices

Face Practice

I almost forgot to upload this to here, I did this the other day as well as some life drawing exercises just get some more practice before beginning the hard graft ahead!

Ideas above my station?

After doing this research i quickly jotted down a rough idea of characters i will want to be designing and there characteristics, I listed the following 

Warrior        - Sword                      - Human Male
Mage     - Hands or staff                  - Humanoid Female
Tank     - Unarmed or Huge weapon         - Creature
Speed     - Daggers                  - Creature
Healer     - Staff or item              - Human
Defender      - Shield                            - Creature

I will also want these characters to have a purpose, a common goal and also an enemy!

huge / powerful / dark / mage / 

Possible Outcomes

4 - 8 character profile sheets completed in 3D environment

5 animated stills with music and sound fx

1 possible final battle scene between all characters also animated!

Reason

I want to do this as it incorporates every area of software and art process I need practice in,

This MA will give me a chance to define my art style, learn new painting techniques, use a software I haven't used in used which I greatly enjoyed and also its a chance to create something I feel is unique to the gaming world and will be used as an advertisement for whatever purpose the characters have for example I may decided to give it a title, something to place on all the images to fit together and build this universe they will live

I guess my next step is to confirm this with Josh and make sure this is a suitable route to go down for me as I don't know how difficult this project will be!

Types of Characters

Above is a row of varied characters from different media and I think every gamer will know certain types of character types that alot of games share, from the images above we have the following from left to right:

Mage - Vivi - Final Fantasy 9 - Obviously a magic cast given hes unarmed and sporting a wizards hat, A design that goes back to the earlier Final Fantasy games this character design is effective as its clearly a friendly character with its warm colour pallet 

Alot of games have Mage characters with the same sort of characteristics in there design, examples being items like staffs or wands, orbs and often auras around hands etc

Tank - Venom - Spiderman - Vemon is as the title suggests a tank, strong, huge and very powerful. Jet black giving off an instant appearance of evil and in terms of his design hasn't changed alot since spidermans creation

These types of characters are always built for all brawn and know brain and often are very slow as a consiquence to there power, Tanks also make great enemies in media as the hero can always out smart or out wit then even with there extreme power

The Rebel - Vegeta - Dragonball Z - This is a character that's almost forced to join the good guys to save the world, a grumpy rough character that shares little emotion to the current affairs but even so he is one bad ass dude! his attire is battle armor custom to his race 

Rebels in games are eaten up by the player! alot of gamers enjoy playing as an over powered character who doesn't give a damn about anyone, The Saints Row series has demonstrated these types of characters perfectly over the years letting the player blow up and destroy all wit ha smirk on the rebels face!

The Techy - Sam Gideon - Vanquish - This character is more of a rebel character like Vegeta however Sam is kitted out with a gorgeous mech suite, allowing him to dash round on jets through a futuristic setting, with that in mind his design works well for the clean metal futuristic look and in terms of the suit its very believable as a character upon studying it

Tech characters are almost always kitted out with high end gear or imaginative weapons and clothing, In the game Dark Chronicle the main character wields a giant wrench, a little bit of an obvious demonstration however none the less effective, Every crew of characters has a techy, after all someone has to kit the a team with equipment and weapons

The Explorer -  Lara Croft - Tomb Raider - There isn't a gamer alive today that doesn't know Lara Croft the dangerousy sexy female icon character is a explorer type, confident and strong willed and one of the most famous explorers going, Her design has been altered over the years to stay up to date with the console etc but shes famously known for her tiny shorts, light green top and of course her two pistols

Explorers are eaten up by gamers, there sense of adventure and curiosity powers them through and task or challenge that will come there way, explorers are often depicted to be carrying helpful equipment back packs, binoculars etc and are often found in ripped or dirty clothes as they have most likely been exploring some cave

Team of Heroes!

Aswell as researching into singular famous characters Ive also researched into groups of heroes as I will creating a team of atleast 5 later on in this project so I wanted to research into characters that fit together in there universe, I looked at the team in Final Fantasy 7, All the characters fit together due to how they are designed and drawn with manga like eyes and definitive hair styles 

The sonic team fits together for different reasons its obvious to the viewer that these characters belong together with there bright colours and simplistic design, big eyes etc

 I also looked at the Team Fortress team, a group of 9 guys each with different skills and abilities yet all fit together to create this team, there colour pallet is light grays and bright reds, another way to fit characters together is to give them a shared colour or or item etc to show they are together in that game universe

Character Analysis

It feels too early to start creating my own characters for this project as Josh's method of questioning why? will leave me confused with what to answer with.. however I decided to begin researching to famous characters known throughout games and various other media and concluded some facts that I will take into consideration for my own concepts later..

1: - The characters silhouette must always be recognizable

2: - The character must display purpose - Good / Evil etc

3: - Any clothing, weapons, Items etc must fit the character

4: -The colour palate should be warm colours - Examples are all yellows and blues showing warmth

5: - The character must make sense.. over complicated clothing and armors can be confusing

6: - Where or not the character is male or female must be made obvious to the viewer

Initial Idea

So over the past couple of days I have been thinking more into what I would like to achieve from this MA course and have tried to narrow a list of possibilities of what I could do to progress as an artist!

Ive decided Im going to create 2D character Concepts possibly 4 - 8 characters then build 3D environments from them to be placed in on 3DSMAX then take stills and move over to Adobe After effects and animating them slightly to create dynamic shots.

Ive noticed some similar elements of this idea in various places on TV as advertising and online limited flash animations so I used this weeks lesson to research into these specific examples and here's what I found..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enkqrYKE1P8

(Clip of images animation)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLqS7Is7H-4

(More animated example)

 League of Legends has some stunning artwork for there characters and alot of them are animated in the way I would like to learn, As I could only upload Jpegs onto Blogger the links to the animations are above.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfC_dLLA-Jo

(Link to video clip)

Not being a massive football fan this is the most Ive ever been with the sport, Sky Sports have released a series of advertisement videos advertising there new(ish) HD channel the technique used gives off this stunning action shot effect which is a good example of what im aiming for

Other examples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpqhODAI6lQ - This is an over exadurated example of an animated still

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkgUtiogvuE - Very good example with detailed animation

http://vimeo.com/10754666 - This one seems to be trying to tell a story and items from each appear often

Early Observations

From watching these and research into other areas with this animation technique Ive decided more will be involved in this process than I previously thought however this is also exciting as it will give me a chance to have a dabble into other media creative softwares for example every animation is accompanied with either music or sound effects which later on in the course I will have to be considering myself!

Software

DreamSceneSeven - Software created by windows so that the user can have animated desktop wallpapers, Not usual for the actual creation of the animations however once mine are complete at least then I can have them on display always 

Adobe After Effects - Ive used After Effects in the past and although its complicated software Im looking forward to using it next year when the animating process will begin! From what Ive gathered it is After Effects which is used to create these animations using layers and plug in effects etc

Second Mindmap

Kumquat Cordial!

I didn't want to just take all of Joshes Ideas so I went back and created my own mood board expanding more on certain areas I feel are important to include in my work..

First Mindmap

In the Beginning..

So during last weeks session I talked through with Josh roughly what I had planned for the year, I told him I wanted to create 2D character turnarounds but also include alot of 3D modelling as I really enjoy 3DSMax aswell as sketching and digitally painting, So he suggested that I create 2D characters and place them into 3D environments, which could give a unique display for the characters! I'm also considering animating the stills lightly to achieve depth and also hopefully look pretty badass.. 

When me and Josh discussed this idea he quickly jotted down this mind map

The main concept idea at the top with branched off ideas for research mainly

Early Character Concepts

The week was not a total loss however as the sketches I had been doing since the MA I decided to go over the line work of these character as I had no internet to research methods of what I have planned!

Internet no go..

A Series of distracting events..

After last weeks session I have not had a chance to upload anything to dropbox as my internet at home has been off and also due to my job I couldn't attend the Fridays lecture :/ so today I will be completing my mind maps and uploading them to here and also planning my next steps for the MA!