Trickety-Boo

Swift artwork post:
This piece gave me nothing but problems from start to finish, but we got there in the end. Yay.

Midnight Sketch

This evening I decided to take a little time out of college projects in order to try and develop my digital painting skills a bit further.

Following the sound advice of Xia Taptara, this is the result...

Bring on the Trumpets!!

Caught in the icy embrace of another 1st semester at college, I've been hard at work producing sketch upon sketch of ideas and conceptual bliss. Having worked my way through many Great British Pounds' worth of drawing materials, I've decided that now would be as good a time as any to share a drawing or five with the cyber-people out there.

I've got a few ditties for you this evening: 3 developmentals that show my WIP design process of a main character; and 2 coloured pieces that have nothing to do with anything really, but were lying around within the vaults of my PC and deserved to at least see the light of a screen.

Alrighty then, back to the grind. I'll see you on the other side of a month or so.

Project Development

So yet again, I find myself knee-deep in a whole bunch of projects and assignments for college... loving it!!

Here be a few sketches from my workbooks for you to peruse:

Sketch Day

With a new year of college projects fast approaching, I figured now might be a good time to develop my sketching style a little further. And what better topic to practice with than creatures!!

So, working digitally, I mimic the techniques used in midtone paper sketching: brown pencils for line, texture and details, followed by white pencil to pick out highlights.

Sci Fi Plasma Rifle... Final Image.

So here's the final version of the digital painting I've been working on.

10 hours of work maybe went into this; all painted within Photoshop CS3, no 3D renders were used.

Sci-Fi Plasma Rifle... Work in Progress - 02

Update on my original post this week, simply to show development of the weaponry design.

Here, I'm focusing on enhancing forms and adding further detailing to the previous stage.

Sci-Fi Plasma Rifle... Work In Progress

Of late, I've been inspired by Science Fiction weaponry designs and figured I should try my hand at learning some of the techniques used by professionals in order to create my own designs in a production-ready style.

YouTube has a plethora of video tutorials on the subject, of which I found ConceptCookie's to be the most useful.

While this work in progress follows closely alongside his design in terms of colour and style, my future designs will adapt the techniques learnt to create my own original creations.

Anyhoos, enough chat. Here's what I have so far...

Brief Digital Painting Study: Sci-Fi Panelling

A quick look into what makes interesting panelling designs.

Considering mechs and weaponry, I began looking for similarities in a variety of designs. This brief study shows a few of the more popular design solutions.

This is just the first stage in my study. More will follow soon.

Sci-Fi Lass Painted

OK, so I failed to remedy the hair situation. Next time.

Sci-Fi Lass

Rough sketch ready to be painted up...

Note to self: Remember to fix her hair!!

The Creative Project

Not a lot going on right now as far as digital painting goes - other than a few sketches which I'll probably show here soon - so I thought I'd take this opportunity to show off a couple of my abstract pieces which have been featured in the Creative Project via Behance.

Enjoy!

Norse Warrior God

Here's a look at the step-by-step process of the creation of a character I produced for one of my college classes: a mythical Norse warrior emerging from the mists of time.

Digital Painting - Face Rendering

A swift post this month; this piece is an interpretation of a Bluefley00 tutorial from YouTube.

I highly recommend you check out his channel if you, like me, are learning digital painting techniques as it is a goldmine of knowledge and tricks.

End of the Year, Ahhhhhh

I've had to take a slight break from posting anything here lately due to the influx of work that the end of the college year demands. However, to prove that I still exist, here are a couple of leftovers from my assignments.

My personal learning experience posts will resume in a week or two once I've gotten through the mountain of work before me :S

Further Deep

A few photos from a damn-fine weekend for weather in London; the sun was out and everything was looking all kinds of good.

London - 3 Days Deep

So London's a pretty cool place - everything here's fresh to me so there's a whole load of exciting things I need to get up to while I'm here.

I did some sight-seeing yesterday but the weather was a bit crap which put a dampener on things. Here's a few photos I managed to get.

P.S. I suck ass at photography and post-editing, as you will probably notice from the shots.

Sketch Dump

It's another chilly day in Edinburgh - wintery conditions in April are just strange! So I figured it would be a good time to share a few bits and pieces with anyone reading this.

I decided to start this blog as a means of sharing my progress in hopefully forging a career of some sort in Digital Art; I'm a student at Stevenson College in Edinburgh, currently in my first year of the HND course Computer Arts and Design. Technically, this is my second year there, as I had to get through an entry-level year just to get onto it, but it's been good, clean fun so I'm a happy bunny.

As well as showing what I've been getting up to and learning, I hope to use this blog as a means of networking with other creatives. So don't be shy, I like getting messages and it'd be good to hear your feedback on what I'm doing.

For obvious reasons, I can't really go posting all the work I produce during this time, but every now and then I'll try and get a few loose sketches or finished personal pieces up here.

My original interests in Digital Art had me playing around with abstracts, which still interest me but has had to take a bit of a backseat to allow for studies. Lately I've been incorporating concept artists' techniques into my work, mainly to discover ways of speeding up workflow. The Sparth technique has been my inspiration over the past week or two - it's ace! If you'd like to know more of it, here's the link to his original thread so you can have a look at the process involved: Sparth's thread at ConceptArt.org

So yeah, learning this process in conjunction with getting the hang of all the fundamentals has been a huge help to my own artwork and is causing me to give some consideration to game/movie concept art as a possible career choice. But you know, these are early days yet, so who knows?

Tomorrow I'm off to London for a week or so to do a bit of a sightseeing. If anyone has any recommendations of things I could get up to while I'm down there, let me know. I've never been before, so it's all-new territory for me - happy days!

Here are a few pieces I've been working on lately:

Simples

A couple of hours spent messing around with the custom shapes again this afternoon, happy days :D
Here are the results:

Sparth Technique

Having come across some examples of what can be done with the custom shapes tool in Photoshop, I had to give it a try.

The time-saving benefits of using this method are clear from the word go. Not only that, but it adds a real nice style to a piece of work, in my opinion.

Here are the first few environments I've managed to produce in between college assignments. Expect more to follow in the near future.