10.18.2010

Wild Career Change

Not that wild.

Following an enlightening conversation with someone at a DigiPen alum meet, I suddenly realized that all that level design stuff I was doing for fun is something I could do for a job. Crazy!!

I'm working on fixing up my site, but in the meantime I really wanted to get something up here!

These are some areas I made for Arkaz, the NWN1 server I work on, in the Aurora toolset. It's a little old but we still have a lot of dedicated players.



These ones are from Neverwinter Nights 2 and were made for ID Tech as my demo project.




These are some screencaps of the project I'm working on right now. This is the Dragon Age toolset, which is probably both the BEST and most difficult tileset I've used so far. It has 3Ds Max-style rotation and that makes me soooo nerdily happy.




The tower is constructed from a lot of pieces of things that I'm pretty sure aren't supposed to be tower-parts. There's loads of bugs with the level but I'm working on it. I have a story planned based on tarot, should be interesting.

I've been doing this for ages and felt it was "cheating" to use a toolset so I never posted anything about it.

9.16.2010

New Header

I did this instead of sleeping! :D Have a close up.


Would you believe I've been wanting to draw that picture since about seventh grade? Yeah.

9.15.2010

Andy Costume Update



I think this is the version I'm going to start working from. I'm not sure if I'll keep the blue. The character is meant to have rather drab robes. However, I'm happy with the overall design.

Hopefully the next post will be a WIP low-poly model. :)

8.27.2010

Andy Thumbs


Did a couple more this morning based on critique I received. We're heading off to the ribbon-cutting ceremony at DigiPen now, I'll keep working on it when i get back.

8.26.2010

New Project

Hello, sketchblog!

I am beginning a new project today, with the intention of reaching a few different goals.

It'll likely be much more realistic than a lot of my work has been in the past. It's been interesting so far, but I feel bad using this much photo reference.

I'm using Andy for this, half because I know the character like the back of my hand, and half because there's a new Neverwinter coming out and I thought it would be fun to translate a character from NWN1 into current gen graphics.

Here's the first four of my thumbnails for her costume.

So far I like the "pirate" one best but I'm not sure about the boots. I want something that looks roughly like what she wears in NWN1, but past that I'm unsure.

She has the skeletal arm, a set of distinctive bracers called "Evershade" (I only drew one in the thumbs though), and supposedly, really great legs. If I can get something that showcases those things while still keeping the resemblance, I will be really happy.

EDIT: After some initial critique, I've altered her proportions slightly:

Legs a bit longer, head a bit larger.

5.31.2010

Chain of Roses

That hair is what I get for inking something at 2 AM. I'm pretty happy with those roses, though, and overall I think that experiment was a success.

There's my sketch for this. I was thinking dragons instead of roses at first but changed my mind.

Painting at Midnight

Why am I painting at midnight and/or 2 AM, you ask? I have no idea, but I've spent the last couple of hours looking at Mucha paintings and that may have something to do with it.



There's loads of errors here, but mainly I intended to use it as a test painting to try out my watercolor pencils and water pens, which I haven't actually used yet.

Scanned again so I had a line art version of those roses. I really like drawing roses.

5.18.2010

Fairytale


Finished! Just for fun, check out the sketch that got me to paint this:

Haha!

5.12.2010

Zach, Andy, and other mythological creatures

Forgot to update!!

I completed my contract work for BrandX Games and they have given me permission to post the final two images! This is "3D Concept art" for an unreleased and unannounced game.



The project was a little rushed, but I think it came out very well for the amount of time I had. I also taught myself ZBrush for this project, and while I'm still fairly new to the program, it's SUPER FUN to model with it and I look forward to doing more ZBrush work!

However, right now I'm trying to get this painting finished!

I think I'm getting close to "finished" but there's a lot of untouched areas here still-- check out Andy's white blob of a spellbook! I also checked my sketch and realized I read some of my lines wrong and gave Zach a huge butt, so I might try to fix that too.

4.07.2010

Progress

I can't believe I forgot to put this here!



I applied some critique from some other artists, particularly on minor tweaks to the anatomy, and I'm working on detailing and better defining the forms now.

My current project for BrandX is due to be finished on Monday, though, so I'm a little busy with that and can't work on this right now. I'll hopefully get some time to finish this up next week. :)

4.02.2010

Fairytale Colors - From Scratch

So, remember this?

I took another look at it today and all I could think was, "wow, this looks awful." So, I ditched everything but my linework and started over completely on the colors. I entirely threw out what I was trying to do and worked differently, and I think it's a better painting for it. Here's what I have so far:

I think it has more life this way. Obviously it'll require a lot of work still, that's very roughed in, I just wanted to get the colors and lighting right off the bat. I also threw it into greyscale to see how it looked, and I'm much, much, much more happy with how my eyes flow along it now.

I'm excited about this, because I had gotten stuck and stopped working on it entirely. I'm really happy to get it going again. :)

3.19.2010

Mirandy & Batstain

I've been working on character designs rather than colored doodles at work lately, so this is all I have that I'm ready to show yet. Sebastian is Bryanna's character, by the way... her prissy half-orc butler and my cute happy necromancer, because we apparently really like strange archetypes. :)

3.02.2010

Robots from middle school


More work doodles. I was curious if I could interpret her armor design to something that might work a little more realistically. I'm not sure if I like it, but it was fun to draw.

2.23.2010

Blood Magic

More stuff I drew on my lunch break!



One day I will draw Andy doing something she, you know, actually does sometimes.

2.20.2010

progress and lost lighting

This might have been slightly ambitious given the amount of available time I have right now. Anyway, I've finally got Zach's face to a level where I don't cringe to look at him, I've put in the base of a sword and some placeholder lightning. I had some blue light on them from the placeholder lightning, but accidentally closed the file without saving it, so that will have to be redone. I've also adjusted the seams on Andy's robe in the sketch so that it actually makes sense... might seem like a small tweak, but it was driving me insane.

I think their hair will stay as-is until I get the clothes to a more complete level, since I'll probably end up with some flyaway strands on the clothing and I think it will be more efficient just to do that once.


Here's what it looked like with the blue lighting I lost. The previous picture is more recent and has some tweaks to Zach's face to make him look a little better.

2.12.2010

Finished

Finished this at work today. :D

The paper got all waffley from being colored, so my scanner destroyed it pretty well. I did my best to fix it up in Photoshop. Pretty happy with how this turned out, but I really badly want to go get more col-erase pencils now, considering what's shown here is basically every color I have left.

2.11.2010

Work Doodles

Obviously Mucha-inspired WIP Andy. Complicated by the loss of most of my col-erase pencils, resulting in a VERY limited palette that does not, unfortunately, include her hair color.

1.31.2010

Andy & Zachary WIP

I've posted some art of Andy/Miranda before, but it's all been little sketches. Well, recently I liked one of them enough to clean up.

The anatomy is entirely horrible here, but I liked the pose, so I scanned it in.


Here's the reference I'm working off of, by the way. Neverwinter Nights, quite old game, but still very good.


After a lot of sketching and redoing and moving things around, here's what I've got so far! The image got flipped since Zach's right handed and Andy's left hand is important, I'm not sure what I was thinking doing it the other way to begin with. The lines are more of a guide, I plan to remove them in the end. Oh, and I had no reference of Zach's sword, so I put off drawing it. I have some reference now, so that will probably be in the next version.


This is a better idea of what it'll look like in the end. :D She looks like a Disney character to me, but I'm cool with that.

1.12.2010

Grab Bag

So, I now have a job working at BrandX Games, but since I can't post anything I'm working on, I am going to post a whole lot of unrelated doodles instead.

This is the loading animation on my website. I need to throw her on a nonwhite background.


Here's Zeb, who is a Megaman X fancharacter from middle school. Mind you, in middle school she looked like:

But no matter. :D

These three are of Miranda Rose, another D&D character who I haven't quite had time to do a painting of yet. I did unearth some really fun sketches, but the anatomy is so bad in them that I won't post it here until I've got a better version.

Here is something I haven't posted much of... a landscape!

This is something I'd like to paint as well. It's an elven temple, even though it looks like a tree. And on that topic, two pictures of a character from this area... drawn on the back of a D&D character sheet, because I am classy and also cannot be presented with paper without drawing all over it.


I think the second one is stronger. This character is always sticking a hip out, I'm not sure what's up with that.

Also from the back of the character sheet, but from a different game, Rhysaar. She's an aquatic elf of some kind.

Finally, here is a super pro drawing from the back of another D&D character sheet. It's our entire 4ed D&D party, inspired by the 4ed artwork. Princess in the middle is a (male, even) elven bard, the two on the end are lovely gnoll and dwarf fangirls of his, who apparently have similar taste in enormous, swirly bras. Emo tiefling and generic male paladin lead the party!!

This is on our fridge as though I am a four year old who made a picture for his mommy.

Aaaand hopefully one day, I will have something to post here that makes me look less crazy. :D