Bravestar!

Had something else planned for the next sculpt but I couldn't start it for the excitement at doing Bravestar in 3D! Here he is! Also wanted to get some better rendering done with him and model his gun but I've got to get started with this next thing. Might come back to this, who knows!

Also got more life drawings in this week. All pencil, all suffering from tiny arm syndrome, despite that I was quite pleased with the way they come out.

I liked the way they were all layering up in photoshop so didn't bother cleaning the overlaying parts. Instead I tried to find tangents to link them all together.

Spider-Man

Pencilled, inked and painted a Spider-Man during my lunch breaks at work this week. 

It's been another couple of sparse weeks on the personal work front hehe. I finish up the placement at DC Thomson tomorrow. Hoping to get into some texturing work again next week.

I have been doing a lot of superhero comic work in the last month. It's really helped my drawing improve a lot in a short space of time. 

A couple of things I noticed during the work is that I sometimes draw lifeless bland poses in favour of technically drawing well and secondly I often draw wonky anatomy but am rarely able to spot it until I scan the art into the computer. 

Been working on both a lot. Hopefully I'll see more improvement as the comic work continues.

NDA

I've been wanting to post something for weeks now. Literally everything I've been working on in the last month is under one NDA or another. 

I cracked tonight and messed around with this Riku and Taro image again. I started it to force myself to learn a bit more about Illustrator. It's served its purpose so I took it into painter and photoshop and played around with different effects. 

I'm nearly done with some texture stuff. Hopefully I can finish that around NDA contract work.

WIP Riku and Taro

Trying to get used to using Illustrator some more.

Some work in progress images of a Riku and Taro illustration.

Also been slaving away on a freelance job in illustrator. It still seems backwards to me compared to Photoshop. I feel like anything I do in illustrator comes out looking awful and there's an easier way to do it that I just don't know of.

Last post before end of semester.

Almost there! Spent last night putting together half of our production bible for The Divided with Scott. It's looking tasty! Really pleased with it so far. Should get the rest done tonight and be ready to print it as soon as we get the last of our updated storyboards in.

Was a pretty tough job wading through all the concept work we have on the blog. I think we managed to get most of it in.

I kind of got Nuria's Matte painting done and I am pleased with it but I really struggled getting it to the level of finish I wanted. I got to a certain point and started feeling like it wasn't getting better in anymore and I was just adding more and more paint.

Anyway, here it is. I need to see it comped with the 3D animation to see if any other areas need changed. Saw a rough comp with an earlier version yesterday and it looked fine perspective wise, which was a bit of a concern before. The colours might need a little tweaking but are fairly close. What I am concerned about is that the large stormy area in the sky will be the only bit visible when the camera hits street level. Know idea how that will affect the scene. Should find out tonight.

Gary and I had another couple of freelance jobs on as well. One for game art and one character design. It's nice to get these wee jobs for the $$$ but they always appear at the least beneficial times :D

1 week left before hand in. I've still got to fix the storyboards for Papa. They will need some quite extensive changes. I also want to finish blocking out my animation of Riku and Taro for the Maya class and finish painting Book of Nemus page 1. It's getting there slowly but surely. Panel 1 and Panel 3 are more refined from last time. 

I managed to get the paint effects trees concept done for Papa last week. Fairly pleased with how it looks. I reckon with some proper lighting and some good compositing work this method will work nicely for populating the backgrounds of the forest in the film. They are ridiculously fast to render too.

 This one has a bit of photoshop work for the background.

So yeah, hopefully I can get through the tasks I have left before hand in next week. Some long days ahead hehe.

Ninjas

Gary and I have had an idea for a story about some ninjas for a few years now and have never had time to get anywhere with it beyond making up an epic story over beers and doing a few character designs. 

We decided to model the guys up in maya for our character rigging animation classes this semester. 

Here's a look at Riku so far. 

I tried realistic textures first and it looked absolutely hideous, so after some looking around I found some tutorials on Toon shaders for maya and have been messing around with them.

***UPDATE***

Just kept going with this tonight and got it to a pretty finished state. I want to still have a look at paint effects brushes for the lines and see if I can clean it up a little more but I'm pretty happy with him for a first go with toon shaders and looking forward to doing some rigging!

Monster

A silly monster I made this morning. Its a tiny detail on the Bravestar background but I kind of like it :)

Me Sprite

I made myself into a fighting game sprite instead of going to bed or working on coursework.

Octus

I painted Octus from Sym Bionic Titan :]

A Zombie

A zombie.

The Living Field

I have a class on Fridays that I don't like much. I say much, I mean at all.