Hovel of despair.

Not sure if i'll get any artwork done tonight to post, however here are some photos of my flat (this is pretty much it) that i am going to be using to practice perspective and then possibly model in 3DSMAX.

Also  met some new guys today and had an awesome time bowling, playing pool, arcade games and air hockey.

Outline of the rough shapes of the furniture.

Added more detail.

Outline of the rough shapes of the furniture including the perspective lines.

Through the Drinking Glass

Havn't had much time again tonight, DAMN IT. I must get back in gear, c'mon uni please give me work that is actually challenging. Heres a fairly bad still life of a drinking glass - which is actually very hard.

On a brighter less depressing note - 2nd lesson of Drawing for Games tommorow! Should be good, hopefully get a new assingment as so far this weeks been quite boring and havn't really done much.

Was done very half-assedley, yes thats a word, whilst eating ceral, half asleep and watching the 'Making of Starcraft2' DVD, which is epic by the way. I think that this isn't too bad for a quick blog in, however it would need lots more rendering in order to qualify as a decent study, the colours and shading is very muddy which doesn't really convey the right texture of glass, which is usually quite smooth. Although the 'ribbed' effect of this glass didn't help at all, if anything made it harder. I think i'm going to try to find a few more interesting objcts to use as my next still life - possibly not Glass too, since its such a pain in the arse.

Figure drawing..

Woah i've really gotten out of touch with figure drawing.. finding it much harder now and not so pleased with the results. I very much prefer painting environments but i must do them both in order to become skills enough to get a job.

Also if anyone is wondering 'Why does he only draw females.... perve.!' well i do draw males too but according to a few artists tutorials and videos about figure drawing - females are much harder to draw and much harder to convey their poses and the shape of their bodies, so if you can draw females well you can easily draw males, so thats what i'm attempting to do.

Heres a page of crap from tonight, majorly tired after a long walk around plymouth so wasn't really in the mood - but so guilty about not drawing much lately =/

P.S. Must start a new still life tommorow, or soon!

New Still Life

Not sure if this is going to be finished - as i start University again tommorow and will most likely get a few assignments during the week. So i'll call this finished for now and most likely start a new one after my new assignments are finished.

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A new still life that i'm working on, i really want to try and get into the habit of completing a few of these each week in-between uni assignements in order to keep my core skills in tact and to improve my overall painting skills.

The rough planning where everything is is done, now i'll go over it with some of that good ol' virtual paint and block in the base tones.

Some rough rendering on the tablet, and REALLY rough blocks on the paper - which is fricken hard =/

More work on the paper and added some rough lighting to the desk and walls. Still need to add the desk textures however to make it look more wooden

Some more work on the lightng of the desk / wall and blocking in the monitor, still needs more refelection in the screen part (not the stand) however i'll leave that until last. I've been avoiding the can as theres so much detail printed onto it, i'll get around to thaat tommorow i think.

The Hoe

The weathers been great today so i thought i'd walk to down to The Hoe (the waterfront) which is about a 10 minute walk away. I took my drawing pad however realised i only had one page left - so i sat on the rocks right near the water and drew the what i could see, using a charcoal pencill. It was very peaceful and exteremely relaxing.

I scanned it in and did a rough paint over in photoshop. Heres the result:

Still life

Just a quick update, i think i'm gonna try see if i can focus on still lives for a while, between uni assignments so that it keeps me entertained and to increase my painting skills further.

Heres a quickie of my external harddrive, i got distracted alot so its nowhere near as good as it should be. Damn.

Quickie

Been so very bored today, i need more assignments!

Anyways, heres a quick pose practice from Hogarth, using the new bamboo i bought today to try it out, its not too bad considering the price. Will stick to my Cintiq for home use though. :)

P.S. Just watched the 2nd trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows PT1 and it looks soooo good, i cannot wait!

Will Smith

 

Will Smith is a massive inspiration to me, especially whilst watching this video. His attitude towards life is something that i think, anyone who aspires towards anything, should adopt and use in their lives.

Also here is the finished 'Game Layout Chart' for the flash game 'Legend of Zelda, The Seeds of Darkness' the idea was to do a simple Layout Char and then be creative to make it look interesting. I was going to do more however i am quite happy with how it looks at the moment, without being too cluttered.

'Drawing for Games' Lesson

Had my first 'Drawing for Games' lesson today, first thing we did was play 'Video Game Pictionary' which was very cool! Next we had to draw Jimmy Hendrix, hells yeh. We had 30 minuites to draw him normally and were then told to draw him up-side-down -focusing on the shapes of everything, instead of what we think of 'mouths' and 'ears'. This task was supposed to test our brains - the people who drew him better normally use the left side of their brains more (the mathematical side) and the people that drew him better up-side-down use the right side of their brains more (the creative side) apparently.

Here are my attempts at Mr Hendrix - very badly scanned as they are a3 and my scanner is only a4.
Apparently my upsidedown draqwing was better, the one on the right, proving that i use the creative side of my brain more.

We also had a chat about concept documents and general concept artist roles. And wee given a assignment to creete and design a Game Layout Chart for a flash game, which is fairly simple however i want to make my visually interesting so that should be fun.

More face practice

I reeeallly need to get better at drawing faces onto my chaaracters - so i'm going to try my best to study them to get them upto the same level as the rest of my anatomy skills, heres page from tonight. Some Hogarth studies and a photo study in the bottom right. I am very happy with most of them however i need to force myself to be slower and focus as hard as possible to get the proportions exact.

First assignement.

So today i had a lecture on 'Practice in Context' wich was actually really quite interesting. And then we had a seminar when we talked about how it related to games design, which was also really interesting as it makes us look at things  in a different way to how we normally do.

We were given an assignement to create a Timeline of 'The history of Context in Game Design', plotting events in the world and the industry that have effected how game design works and is thought off. For example how the world wars and the recent events of 9/11 have sparked a long line of War themed FPS games. And also to plot places in time where our own context has effect the games we play, for example our age, who w live with, and what music we were into at the time.


2 n a half hours of 'Drawing for Games' tommorow, so that should be very fun!

Quickie

I really need to improve on my face / head anatomy and rendering as my overal anatomy isn't too bad at the moment after my tonnes of studies over the summer, however the faces really let them down.

So here is a quick one i'm working on atm, although i need to go to bed early as i have a Lecture tommorow morning so not sure if this will be finished, good practice though!

..It is here!

Had my first day at university today, was very cool!
We were told about our timetable (seen below) and other information about the course, then we had to tell the class about outselves and then learnt a bit about the teachers. Next we were told to open up Unreal Tournement 3 and have an awesome 27 player team deathmatch which was awesome! Had lunch after that and then just did a bit of an IT Introduction to get our log-ins set up.

So all in all it was good, the timetable is quite good too - as it gives me plenty of time to work at home which what i wanted most.

Its nearly here...

I start University tommorow! Unfortunatly i won't be able to finish that 'lava tower' piece, however i'm hopeing that i'll havfe some tasty projects to work on soon for university, which would be great..

I've also only just got back from Bristol so havn't been able to get much done apart from a quick photo study:

Lava Tower.

Going to start a new environment painting using what i have learnt from the Imagine FX workshop - and hopefully will be able to acheive the same quality.

Here are the references i will be using, all of which were found from google and other stock websites. The idea for this piece is this: "A lone tower surrounded by a lava filled lake with fog covered mountains in distance." which was suggested by Matty O'Connor on Facebook, so thank you to him for the idea.

I am aware that this idea is HEAVILY lord of the rings inspired (Barad-dûr / Mordor?) but i like that, i've always wanted to do a lord of the rings fanart so this could be some sort of in-direct fanart ahah.

• Thumbs / Sketches to come.

• Thumbs, I may choose the far right though i am fond of the middle one too.

• This is about as far as im going to get with this as i start university today and will need to concentrate on that. Maybe i'll try to encorporate it into a project somehow or finish it in my own time, but for now i still had fun with the thumbnail process. 

 
 

Ubisoft " Carte Blanche"

This was my submission to the Ubiworkshop (Ubisoft) 'contest' to design our own interpretation of the assassin in any era or style, the winners would be printed into the new assassins creed artbook under the 'Carte Blanche' section.

I chose to interpret a sci-fi / future samurai-esc assassin, whilst trying to keep some of the signature assassin features such as the beaked hood and hidden blade.

Sadly i was not chosen - however looking back at this piece i can see why, i have improved so much since i created this image, even if it was only 2 months ago. I wish that i could redo it now with a more dynamic pose and ditch the silly sihlouette.

However, Congratulations to everyone who was chosen! -high five-

Anatomy Studies

Here are the anatomy (and some other) studies that i've done so far, in total there are 171 pages and rising :)

I have loads other colour studies n such but i cant be arsed, took too long to just do these xD

IFX Workshop

I am currently trying to use an IFX workshop to the best of my ability heres where i'm at so far:
Its must looser than what i normally do, which is waht i really need to get better at in order to improve. So fingers crossed.

[EDIT] another update:

[EDIT] and another:

[EDIT] ....another:

[EDIT] ... and another:

[EDIT] This is taking forever...:

[EDIT] Slowly getting there....:

[EDIT] hmm whats this? ... oh its an update...:

[EDIT] Soo... close... to... the ... end..:

I have finnaly finished this piece and am very happy with the result!

I would like to say this again: I cannot take any credit for the concept of this piece at all - i painted this by following Alex Chu's workshop in Imagine FX issue 67. I wanted to follow it as close to his process as i could in order to see how close i could get the end result and also to learn as much as i possibly could from it.

I learnt ALOT from this and it was a very valuable exercise, now i just need to take what i've learnt and create my own piece from it, as i won't be able to take much - or any credit for this piece. 

Finished piece:

EoW #149

nished my EoW entry this morning, i'm very happy with it and think it may be my best environment painting yet!  Also a sketch of the door guardians.

EOW more progress...

Some more progress on my EoW, its nearly done just need to add the giant guardians and some finishing touches. And also a sketch, which i used in the Halogram.
 

More Birthday Festivities

Late to upload, but a Birthday sketch for my best mate Jim.

LISTEN TO ARNY!

EOW more progress...

Last update for tonight. Heres the first WIP of the final EOW piece.

Heres the finished 3D mock up, a few different angles. I will choose one and do a final paintover, adding in the elements from the thumb.