semicoherent.ramblings.

Zelda Lineup

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:04:00 +0000

This is character lineup of what I remember of Ocarina of Time; in essence: this is what the eight year old me took away from that game. Here are some beats I wanted to hit with each character BASED on my eight year old interpretation (and keep in mind, I honestly barely know the story, I was just an eight year old wanting to hit dudes):

Adult Link

I know Link is supposed to be growing into a cunning warrior however, he's been all about this princess for how long and she still seems hardly grateful for the deeds Link has done. Because of this I always had a sort of pity on adult Link and thought of him as a hopeless dork with a sword.

Kid Link

Always came off as a snot to me
Unkempt weird little orphan elf kid?

Sheik

Who's she fooling?

Adult Zelda

With the introduction of Sheik I started liking Zelda a whole lot more throughout the game, so I made her less boring as she aged, and a little more presentable if you will.

Kid Zelda

Yawn. Spoiled princess, all I remember about her is her guards were assholes and kind of a pain to get past.

Guru Guru

Once again, nothing changed too much, just wanted to make him because he's such a weird recognizable caveat character.

Deku Scrub

I didn't really do all that much here, I just always thought they were a cool enemy type and wanted to paint one.

Goron

They are big cuddly dumb volcano bears that are blessed with retard strength (pardon the french).

Princess Ruto

The fishiest polygonal sexpot my prepubescent mind has ever seen.

King Zora

I felt it necessary to include him with Princess Ruto but all in all he's just a morbidly obese fish with a cape.

Ganondorf

He was creepy and weird and green and just seemed like the type of dude that eats maggots, smells disgusting. I thought he was way too pretty in the games, so I just wanted to make him look more spindly and weird. That being said, being such a horrible villain I totally could and maybe SHOULD make him more badass and cool, less spindly and weak. HOWEVER, this interpretation needs to remain true to 8-year-old-Ethan-universe, so that's Ganondorf.

Zelda Redesigns p.1

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:30:00 +0000

One of the things I've been doing over the last month or so is redesigning some characters from Zelda. Here's where I'm at with some of the cast, there is another set like this I need to make some decisions with yet, and even these are subject to change. It all looks a little too cute at the moment, hopefully I can change that in the next pass.

Leyendecker in 3D

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:26:00 +0000

Here's a study I decided to try out. I always forget about Scupltris for concepts and base sculpts of things but it's a really awesome streamlined tool. Last night I got the itch and decided to sculpt from a J.C. Leyendecker study. A little blobby yet, getting there.

Damsel

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:44:00 +0000

For Delta Quebec, there is a trope character I needed to throw in: the damsel. I named her Damsel, because I'm a hack and it sounds southern enough for me to leave it as that for the time being. The inspiration for design is the WLA (Womens Land Army) that was around in Britain, then later in the US during the first and second world wars to help man the fields while the men were out fighting.

It's all sort of a Rosie the Riveter aethetic I suppose. Pardon the sketchiness, that's me in almost forgot to post this mode.

Spelunky Review

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 01:18:00 +0000

At first glance spelunky is an adorable looking dungeon crawling adventurer. To the average XBLA consumer it reminds them of Terraria or Minecraft and lets you assume that it is all fun and exploration. The art style loses it's charm after about the second time you fall into a spike pit, lose all of your gear and have to start from level 1-1 all over again. Sounds awful right? Until when you realize the 8 stages you just completed took all of 3 minutes.

The basic premise is you have 4 lives, 4 bombs (which destroy map tiles), 4 ropes (makeshift ladders you can deploy), and a fresh clock. The controls are VERY precise and predictable, because if you touch really anything that isn't treasure, gear, a damsel, or the ground, you lose a heart. Your objective is to move through the map as quickly as possible without losing very many hearts. Easy? You don't get hearts back, unless you come across a damsel which you must carry to the end door or run into a kissing gallery where you can pay a hefty price from treasure you've collected so far in your short life for an extra heart or two. Idols count for $5,000 if you can survive the giant boulder that chases after you. Extra gear such as a pickaxe - which expedites your journey by allowing you to knock out bits of the map, and the compass- which gives you an arrow directing you towards the exit gate, will help you immensly. Oh, and for those of you thinking that you can safely crawl through the map at a slow pace, a giant ghost will come out the side of the screen at a certain point (around 2 minutes) and kill you on first touch. The name of the game is learning the systems - finding ways to avoid, defeat, or evade them- and doing so 4 times over before getting a completely NEW set of systems to learn, 4 times over. Caught all that? The name of the game is memorizing the systems and responding accurately.

There are 4 stages per level and 4 levels overall, but I've never made it to the last level (I'm probably 10 hours invested). After completing a level a certain amount of times you may be prompted to build a tunnel as a shortcut to a more advanced stage, however you give up any opportunity of being on the leaderboards, so feh to that.

The multiplayer consists of a few stages with drop boxes and awful things everywhere. It's essentially a super fast Bomberman in which certain maps are started by every bomb from all 4 players being launched at each other from the start of the match and is over in 5 seconds. It is very shallow, very quick, and pretty fun, especially if you play with bots and try to use some teamwork to take out the bots which are surprisingly cunning. There's also a co-op mode, which is the same as singleplayer except once again, no leaderboard possibilities, and no tunnelman appearances to build on your singleplayer game.

Props to Derek Yu for making me feel wholly inadequate.

Oil City Centre

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:11:00 +0000

Apart of my Delta Quebec designs is environments (finally). I'll be posting an overview of this city but the basic structure of the oil city (I haven't made up a name yet) is the residents living in modular stackable homes all around their main town structure of sustainable. Since it was built in a desert, they rely on this tower of 'energy' as a panacea to all energy, nutrition, and other concerns. Though the tower doesn't generate it, but store it from the mines - I'll get to that another day.

Orc Death Knight

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:22:00 +0000

WoW Cards are on a shortlist of thing I'd like to do, I might polish this guy up a bit more, but wanted to share the progress at least.

Tree Tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 18:44:00 +0000

The entire process for this piece was very organic (harhar), decidedy the goal was: thick brushwork, high saturation.

Football for Mutants

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 04:18:00 +0000

I love football. Let me reiterate. Love it. A previous client asked if I could help out with some concepts for a Unity game, it got canned almost instantly, but luckily I was given permission to show off some concepts. These are the three mobs in the game: fan, cheerleader, and football player. The hook: they are zombies. So I went to my big book of stereotypes and came up with these. I had to suit the football player in a neckroll/leather hat, which sent this into some retroish themes (older uni's are better anyway)

Tangentially, I am craving a Mutant League Football(-esque) game, and may do some concepts along the lines of how I would design it. Boney Romo, Slay Matthews, Frank Gorey, J. Cutter and the likes. I did a little chrome study with a sketch I made for the concept, nothing fancy, just a fun way to practice chroming out some robits.

Perspective woes

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 18 May 2012 22:20:00 +0000

So yesterday I got the itch to learn. What is something I'm not quite good at and need help? Perspective. In fact, I wanted to draw a military vehicle of sorts. Problem was simple: wheels.

So I went on my journey of looking up how to draw a perfect ellipse in perspective. Step 1: draw a perfect square..... Wha.... How do you do that? I dredged through the interwebs, art forums, even going so far to a few Art Center students to limited success. Finally I came across a really long-winded series of videos for one point perspective ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfDbXPPzo0c ).

For the sake of myself, and anyone that happens across this, I'd like to reinterpret the video with a quick image/walk through. Let me preface this in saying, using this in a piece or planning is WAY too much work, and very limited. My intention of using this is to check my eyeballing- ie. draw 10 eyeballed squares, check them with this method, correct accordingly.

Draw 2 horizantal lines perpendicular to one another. The top one is the horizon line(HL), bottom is the ground line(GL). For the purpose of the exercise, a portion of the GL will be the closest leg of the square in space.
Measure between the HL and GL and multiply the distance by 1.73* (photoshop users can just use rectangle marquee to select the gap, then in the height dimensions type 173%). Measure the new quantity from the horizonline, and mark, this will be your eye point (EP).
Start your square, draw a reasonable length near the vertical line we just drew and create the front leg, and converge the edges toward the VP.
From the EP, measure 45 degrees each way from the center (photoshop users can make a square, rotate it 45 degrees and mark both edges). Draw 2 lines outwards until you meet the HL, mark the convergent points.
Connect the 2 initial points of your square to the opposite Median point (MP). You really only need to do 1, but 2 will help to make sure your work is correct.
VOILA! connect where the last 2 lines converge with your vanishing square legs and you have your last leg.

*Admittedly, I'm not sure the significance of 1.73. If I were to guess it has something to do with treating the square as 2 triangles, being that the square root of 3 is 1.73 blah blah blah. It works.

Materials study

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

A while back I was reading David Gluck's blog on his painting process and something stuck out to me. It was one of those phrases that every artists probably know, and is painfully obvious but I think is woefully overlooked.

"you cannot paint everything the same way and expect it to read as the proper texture."

Reference: Game of Thrones still

I've been trying to apply this to my paintings more and more, to differing results. At the end of the day, it comes down to me needing to understand materials. In a broad sense, knowing the value structure will do what you need it to, details are ansillary, though they can make/break a piece. I think my knowing of how/where to place details at the moment is lacking, but I'm beginning to grasp the difference in values from material to material a bit better I believe.

I did this little breakdown as a study, it's a fun little exercise. 2 years ago I would have went at this very differently, blacking in the silhouette and working my way up, creating lighter values towards the top. While that rule is generally applicable, being aware of glossy vs. matte surfaces I think is a KEY component to realistic rendering.

In all reality I'm just breaching the understanding of this, and need a lot of practice yet, but the only way to learn is to do right?

Ruin vs. Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:14:00 +0000

uh, whut...

Saw a post on facebook about this and wanted to take a screengrab.

Shown left, Ruin, a badass short made by Oddball Animation and released 2 months ago http://vimeo.com/38591304

Shown Right, A not so badass trailer for NBC's new thing 'Revolution,' Released yesterday? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwfCRAtkYEI

WTF IS GOIN ON NBC?!

Before jumping onto a piracy pitchfork bandwagon- there is reason to believe NBC in it's vast knowledge paid for the rights to the clip. However, I think it's a knock on your production esteem to show off your new series via a scrapbook of recycled material.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:55:00 +0000

After finishing up some jobs last week, I decided I wanted to do a sort of environment muscle-test. This is what I came up with.

I got a little blur happy towards the end, because why not? It was just a fun sketch playing around. This isn't necessarily a Delta environment, however it would fit as a nondescript location.

In any case, I've stayed away from environments for a while, and figured I'd get my feet wet a bit with this. I reckon the next step will be to do some 'oh-shit-that-scale-is-ridiculous-concept-art environment' soon, with jagged edges and particle fx to boot.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:16:00 +0000

photostudy

Brapbot

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:17:00 +0000

So, this little guy doesn't have much of a story or function... I just really wanted to make a robot. Sometimes you just gotta make a robot...

Process Sketches

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:30:00 +0000

I have quite a lot of Delta Quebec sketches amassed, but let's parcel them out bit by bit. This scatterbrained nonsense is how I go about character development, the ugly way.

Delta palette

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

The first full-body sketch of Delta Quebec, complete with some color iterations.

Gaudy
Standard space marine palette
Gaudier
A good mixture of gaudy and old school

What I want to accomplish with this is not so much the standard space marine motif, but rather bring in some knightly fashion to a space marine. The specifics of color placement is subject to change, however I think iteration #4 is a pretty close approximation to the final palette I'd like to go with for this character.

Helmet Iterations

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:47:00 +0000

Exhibit Delta Quebec - Whimsical mustachioed space marauder. This is my new pet project for 2012. Don Quixote in space.

Notes:

Doesn't fit exactly what I was going for but I love how the blockiness squeezes onto his head.
Too gladatorial.
Has potential to be interesting with spacing adjustments
The best Quixote-resemblance, although I don't know if I want to be that literal in translation.
Cool MX helmet bro.
Marvin the martian.
Samurai.
No.
I'm going for space marine, not cyborg

I'm proud of these iterations, but there's a few more in me.

viking process

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:47:00 +0000

A little side illustration I've been working on: finished version coming soon.

Mulletsaurus #3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:08:00 +0000

This time around I tried taking out some unnecessary sharp edges to make him seem less threatening. I also cut down on lineweights and painted over some of the lines in a very messy way to make them blend in with the character a little more. The part I like the most is probable the legs/shorts/shoes in terms of line color. I'm not quite sure where to go here, I'm going to have to stare for a while to figure this one out.

Mulletsaurus #2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:39:00 +0000

Some pretty basic changes and I think a hell of a lot of good ones. Where to go from here?

The hands and feet are rather neglected, possible shoes? tattered chucks to fit the mullet-redeneck motif.
Along the same lines cutoff jeans and a scrappy mustache might need to go into the next draft.
There's a lot more flow in the pose, though there could be a lot more if I put it into motion, might experiment with some basic action pose to give it more life.
The mullet definitely needs some work, needing more roundedness at the top of the head

If you have any critiques feel free to leave a comment, I'd love to hear what anyone else has to say.

Mulletsaurus #1

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:21:00 +0000

Yesterday I recieved the newest Creaturebox sketchbook and I decided to break out my old copy of Sketchbook Pro which was rotting away after watching their process DVD. Although I dislike a few things about the software I decided to give it another go, and gave myself an assignment starting with this little guy.

The goal is to do an iteration of this guy every day as a warm-up, and post it to this blog, critiquing it after every post and improving and iterating on the design each time. Here we go:

The pose is very static, lacking energy. One thing that inspires me the most about the Creaturebox guys is that even in a static pose there is a lot of energy in their designs through squashing of shapes. The tail and the arm I did a little bit of that but the body and head are lacking, I suppose the best place to play around with this is the neck area.
Inking, patterns, etc - aside from the little ridges on the tail and the hair there is no repetition anywhere, possibly making the teeth smaller or adding some sort of pattern on the gullet or belly would assist with this, in addition to adding some inferred form.
Rendering - I blame this on SBP, I started trying to paint in that program but the eraser tool is god awful, so after lines on the next iteration I'll be going to straight Photoshop. Also a secondary rim light is needed for this pose, but I got lazy. However, my focus here is lines and shapes, so I really don't want to get too crazy with the colors and rendering, 2 light sources max and very minimal approach.
Eyes- Very boring, assuming this is some sort of reptilian creature (with nipples?) I think some sort of angular ridge above the eyes would help a lot.

Tiny Bang Story stolen art fiasco

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:49:00 +0000

From Sam Nielson and Kevin Keele to Tiny Bang Story. SMH. Click the image to see the transformation.

from the original post: http://artsammich.blogspot.com/2011/05/good-artists-borrow-great-artists-steal.html

Composition Study

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:41:00 +0000

A quick morning study from the Curious Case of Benjamin Button (the best worst movie ever). Done as a compositional study more than anything but it's good to see that all of the structural accuracy studies I've done in the past few months are starting to pay off (though there is still a lot of room to improve).

Vermeer Study

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:55:00 +0000

Detail Study of The Milkmaid - Vermeer

Thanks to http://www.googleartproject.com/ I was able to take a closer look at some pretty awesome paintings in a way that I've never been able to before. This is an hour long study from The Milkmaid of Vermeer, who I had always thought of in a similar realm as Van Eyck - Beautiful but not much beyond the obvious rendering-wise. When I zoomed in to certain areas of the painting I was delighted to see some very impressionistic techniques at use. Who'd've thunk.