Christmas Card

Class project for creating a christmas card. The limitations were that we had to design the card to incorporate the red and white santa outfit in some way.

I had a huge difficulty getting an idea that I liked for this project.

Steampunk Santa

Robot Santa

Samurai Santa

Here is my mood board. I found dwarves helped me a lot with the beard and face design.

I did try and start with a robot santa which would turn into a paintover, although I found I began to just completely copy one of the images on my mood board and I was not sure if I liked the idea.

Eventually I settled for a simple painting of Santa handing out a painting, he looks slightly grumpy as he was meant to be slightly singed from coming out of a lit fireplace that someone forgot to turn off, but this idea died due to lack of time.

Sketched design

I started by using the lassoo and fill method like I did in my surreal project, but I soon found that this would not work due to the amount of details I wanted, this method proved too messy and untidy,

Here I settled for just painting values

Added some textures to the image to give it some detail very quickly as at this stage I was running very low on time.

Finished off with framing santa and because of the foreshortened hand It made sense to have it coming out of the frame

Keeping in mind that this is a christma card I tried to add some very simply Christmas details.

I found this assignment very difficult due to having such a hard time to get an idea that I liked. I did not like the idea I settled on but I knew it was a safe bet and it meant I could just get started. 

Painting values is still difficult for me, mostly because I do not practice it often enough, but I believe I was able to make convincing values on different materials.

I am unsure of the composition of my image, becase when I sketched the design I thought that A6 was much more box shaped and assumed my design would sit better in it.

Surrealism

This weeks assignment was to create a surreal piece. This could have been done in either 3D or 2D, I have opted for 2D.

I really had no idea what I wanted to do when i first started this project so I simply searched Surreal in google images and came across a few that I liked.

When i finally did come to an idea it was extremely depressive and dark, the idea was to have a figure being pulled by multiple hands coming from their back and them clearly being in pain. I decided I didn't want to do anything so depressive and moved on to something else.

I was completely stuck again, so I simply google searched the word Surreal.

 'having the qualities of surrealism; bizarre.'

"a surreal mix of fact and fantasy"'

This then made me think of a picture I had saved to my computer a while ago and made me search for similar things. (the reindeer man being the first picture I had)

Also Monika's bird man needed to be put here as these two reminded me of her work.

I absolutely loved this idea of the anthropomorphic figures but the style  really appealed to me and I wanted to try to do something like this on my own, and here is the sketch that I came up with.

I didn't work the sketch up as I knew I would be doing a lot of work in photoshop. 

To begin with I created a silhouette over the base sketch.

Then using the opacity tool so i could see my sketch i used the lasso tool to make rough selections and fill in with black for my sketch lines. This is how I was going to do all of my values. 

Same process using four or five different shades to build some form.

Some refinement and face details

Some more, I tried to make as much contrast as I could so I made the shirt as white as possible and the tie as dark as possible to really make it stand out.

I also decided to paint in values with a hard edged brush for the face and hand instead of using the lasso tool to make them appear a different texture than the clothes. 

Placed a background so I could plan where to put the clock and used texture filter to give the background something a little more interesting than just plain and used gradients to simulate where light is coming from. However being surreal this is not meant to make much sense.

Using the paintbrush tool I simply painted the clock in using a hard edged brush and adding a stroke effect to it. I then used the text tool to write the numbers. The middle circle has a satin modifier to it to make it appear reflective.

Something had been bothering me the entire way with this painting and I realized close to the end that because I draw with my right hand my character is leaning to the right, I did not correct this at the start, so I simply added a cane which now makes it appear that lean is going purposely into the cane.

I have been flipping the canvas the entire time just to give myself fresh eyes when I am working. However at the end I decided in keeping it flipped to keep the clock mirrored as that fits with the surreal theme.

To make things a little more interesting I added a glow to the cigar and kept that as the only colour splash. I decided to use a cooling photo filter over the image to make it a little more interesting as I wanted to keep colours to a minimum.

To add some more surreal elements I selected my silhouette layer, loaded the selection and made a new layer underneath and filled it in black. Then using the distort tool I moved the shadow to make it appear exaggeratedly long and then did the same for the second shadow.

I am extremely proud of this piece of work. I believe this style has helped me to combat my perfectionist when it comes to painting values as it is not meant to look smooth with perfect hard edges. 

By doing this I was able to half the time it usually takes me to paint.

Overall this piece has really developed on its own. I could have come up with lots of variants but I kept focused and was decisive in what I was doing.

Year 2 Halloween

This assignment was an open assignment to create something with the halloween theme.

 

My original idea started out as creating some kind of stitched together girl and evolved to puppets and then a combination of the two.

 

I started by simply googling some images that gave me inspiration. I also scanned a few pages from the Alice The Madness game.

 

 

I did a quick artist study on Abigail Larson. I follow her on deviantart http://abigaillarson.deviantart.com/.

 

Her images

 

 

My quick pencil 'study

 

 

 

Because I wanted to do a humanoid figure I needed a reference for poses, I searched through another deviant artist who provides stock images.

 

 

 

My designs.

 



 

The second design is my chosen.

 

 

 

 

Some work in progress shots.

I was not able to finish this assignment simply because again I was getting bogged down in details. I have many layers which are not adding to the painting at all. I probably repainted the same parts at least twice without really making any difference.

I like how my idea evolved through researching different themes. I really wanted to try and create a background scene of a cardboard stage. A stark contrast in style from the skeleton dancer and giving it a creepy innocence vibe.

Sci Fi Ship Paintover

The assignment was set for two weeks in which we had to design a Sci Fi ship of our own choosing. 

The idea for my ship was that it is going to be a high end commercial vehicle for one or two passengers. The way it would work is that is uses electromagnetic fields to repel and attack on its surroundings. This works because the planet this vehicle is on is one giant city, so there is always a skyscraper for it to cling on and slingshot along.

First step, research.

I began by researching bluprint designs as this is what I wanted to do for my designs.

I knew that I wanted to follow the style of a commercial vehicle so I searched concept cars and bikes.

I then searched for concept designs of sci fi ships, mostly futuristic bikes as that is what I was leaning towards doing.

I decided to do flat silhouette designs. However I spent a lot of time making it look 'pretty' and made my designs not look clear at all. I try to counter this by adding in the shades to show the different levels but overall I believe these designs to have failed.

Trying to make some more sense of my design I picked my chosen design and label it.

I felt confident enough to begin 3D modelling my design.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

I made my model very efficiently so that it can be continued with and used as it is in a game engine. I am very pleased with how the model turned out and felt very confident going into my paintover.

The next few images are of failed paintovers that I first attempted. I was not happy with the composition or lighting on either of them. The side view was meant to give me a general idea of what I was doing. None of them are finished.

In Max I set the scene using Omni lights on the bike to give and a skylight for the background.

I started my paintover by getting so base colours down, I then added some mesh textures to the darker areas and a windscreen.

Continuing with refining the paintover, adding more textures and the extra added writing on the side which I felt played on the commercial vehicle side of things.

I then got to work on the background, I rendered this out from Max with a flat plane and extruding different areas. I then added a panel texture

Finally I created a mood for the painting, using photofilters to give the whole scene an orange glow from the windows. 

The window texture was added in last in an attempt to make it look more like a city scape however it is very simple and I feel I could have done much more to it.

Overall I am very happy with this paintover, I feel that I have learned a lot about my workflow and where I need to improve on.

Next time I do designs I will probably sketch them in pencil first and then try and do a 3 quarter view so that the design is clear to anyone.

A little bit of feedback from my peers and I have changed up some slight things such as adding a reflective light on the top half of the ship and dulling down the orange and making it appear that it is a glow from street level and the blue is from the sky.

I had some spare time and decided that there needed to be something in the top right hand corner. This is not a serious attempt but an idea of how I could have filled this space.