Redesign & paint of Queen Crystallos & Diana Lang

In telling myself I needed to draw more orthos, I revisited some old character designs and selected out some props. The props I knew I wanted to draw were from the Visual Development for Live Action course I took while at AAU. During the course, there wasn't really a prop design requirement; just 4 characters (hero, sidekick, villain, creature) , vehicle and environment. 

The first prop I tackled was Queen Crystallos' scepter. 

I knew there was gonna be quite a few details I had to figure out while I was drawing the orthos, but it was a worthwhile challenge. 

From there, I decided to revisit the old character design of the Queen and redraw and redesign the character. The old painting, while for live action, was pretty blotchy in the paint, and it bugged me for years. 

For the redesign/draw/paint, I went and tried a line based approach and added a lot more detail to her dress, and completely redesigned her crown. The old one looked rusted, which wasn't what I wanted,  and bone-like, which while does work for villains, was also not what I wanted. 

After I completed the Queen, I told myself I might as well redesign/draw/paint all of the remaining characters and create orthos for their props as well. 

Thus, the heroine, Warrior Diana Lang. 

Her style ended up being something very different from the style I went with for the Queen. (I intend to go back and repaint the Queen in the same style as the Warrior.) 

The retractable shield gauntlet changed quite a bit from the original design. I actually couldn't recall what the original one looked like and this version was a happy accident while I was painting the new character painting. 

So far, I really like the style I went with for Diana Lang, and her shield gauntlet. Onto her sword! 

Bugology - a large milestone

Back in August, a developer reached out to me to join his game making group, as an artist. After many bumps, the group has finally released its tester (demo) version today!

Backyard Insects - paintings

Backyard background painting 

Backyard background painting, with objects placed in. The wood pile ended up being repainted by our second artist due to initial roles of me, as the background painter, and the second artist as the character (insects) and objects painter. Due to balancing issues, the objects painter role got sent back to me, haha. 

Bugology game logo, version 3. 

Logo sketches. Client ended up liking two images, one as the logo and the other, the client selected as the game's icon. 

There ended up being quite a few designs I went through when designing the logo. 

From the selected logos, I went through many iterations. 

But of course, there were ideas, paintings and assets that were unused, such as the original game user interface design I had designed, sketched, created parts for and mocked up. 

Sketches of the GUI for client

Mockup of GUI for client / developer to build. Our group's third developer voiced out that this setup would cause a lot of lost space, and tiny assets,  to which I agreed. 

The main menu (settings) UI design, the client wanted me to design for, also got unused. Or at least the main game menu that is released with the testers (demo) version, is using a simple version. 

Other unused assets and ideas included buttons and Login/ Create Account screens. 

  
 

Unused Create Account/ Login mockups. 

Bug Book UI mockup, version 1.1

The Bug Book mockup stayed unchanged mostly from the version 1.0; just color changes, and removal of clients' side arrows to be replaced with folded pages. 

Playing with a different style for environment drawings

I wanted to try changing my painting style to something more solid, less loose. A lot of my early paintings could be considered pretty muddy with the paint so I purposefully painted in flats and worked up from there. 

The kitchen illustration was actually the first set of the three, where I focused on values and story telling. Going from there, I had a personal success with the Greenhouse, in the style. And the Study Room was a second test to repeat that same style. 

Personally, I like the Greenhouse's results best; I feel like with the Study Room, the color palette was the best result out of it but I didn't get the same clean look I got from the Greenhouse piece. 

Moving forward, I definitely plan on working on this style!

Greenhouse 

Greenhouse - initial sketch 

super messy thumbnails for Greenhouse composition

Kitchen - initial sketch

Kitchen - rough values

Study room  - comp thumbs

Study room - initial sketch (rough)

Study room - sketch version 2 (cleaner)

Study room - rough paint in, pre version 2 sketch.

Study room 

Vehicle and character design pairing

As a challenge prompt from a Facebook artists' group, I designed a character and vehicle. It was definitely something new where I had to consciously make something look damaged, as the prompt involved an escapee and their get away vehicle. 

For the character design, I wanted to challenge myself with making an armored character, and began sketching helmet designs. Once I found a couple I liked, I began working on the full character silhouette. 

The initial character sheet's layout started pretty much as above, with the character's illustration on the side. 

Eventually, I decided the back light beam was too much and took it off, and began working on the character's lighting. 

After taking away the line drawing underneath, and cleaning up some areas, I changed the layout after receiving some construct critiques on the model portion of the sheet, and hard edge indications. 

During these edits and changes, I was also working on the vehicle design along side the character, progressing at the same time. 

 There were tons of thumbs I went through as I was figuring out what to use as a design.

My idea was to have a small ship, one that wouldn't take a large crew to fly, especially since the character was escaping, and most likely had little to no time to get a crew.  Design wise, I also wanted the ship to hold some similarities to the character. The two tails on the back were part of that design. 

The damages I envisioned were from ramming into objects during the escape, with bullet holes from people trying to stop the character from escaping.  The main section that had the bullet holes was the cockpit area, as the guns were aimed at the character. Another area I thought about was the crew area, where the smaller windows were, but the windows were too small and might have made the holes unreadable. 

I then decided that the piece where the smaller windows were was too messy so I brought the paint back and thought about indents above that section of the ship. However, in the end, it didn't make sense with the shape of the ship, and I couldn't think of a logical way for the damage to end up there. 

Similarly, I scaled down some of the other damages on the ship, and cleaned up the orthographic drawing. 

Towards the end of this challenge, I caught myself more on the lack of hard edges when I was painting, which was good, now that I could catch myself on it. Going forward, I definitely need to use hard edges more, or at least, while I'm painting, jump back and forth from hard edges and soft. 

Market Street

Market Street

presentation sheet

There was an art challenge contest (THU 2018 Golden Ticket Challenge) going on, on ArtStation during most of the month of June, where artists had to create a painting of a parallel magical world of Malta.
I wanted to test myself, to see how much I could grow while participating in this challenge, and to see how I would paint a fantasy piece.

During the research and thumbnail phase, I had several ideas of what I wanted for the composition. Ideas ranged from knight statues guarding gates, rivers leading into the city, multiple bridges and towers. The latter idea eventually spawned into the current piece as I really liked how I could add a lot of range in the environment.

research notes and thumbs

sketch on top of phone rough sketch

From there, I knew I wanted a warm color palette, something to add to the fun of the piece. 

flat colors

shadow and some lighting

building and building

I kept building and building the mini world I had created.
Eventually, after having hit a wall on what else I needed to work on, oh the down side of working on a piece for a while!, I asked in various social media artist groups for their opinions and received good critiques from a number of people.

(Before)  ---  Oh perspective fixes.--- (After) 

Hard edges and wonky perspective were the two main things I definitely found myself working on and correcting throughout the piece.

Punched up the values, added in the lighter values I was missing

Pushed back background to bring out foreground

I also got little bits of feedback that really helped me push the piece, such as missing the last 15-30% of lighter values in focal area, and pushing back the background to bring the foreground more into focus.

There were a ton more progress shots but for the sake of the people scrolling , I kept the images down to a minimum. Or at least I hope so!

All in all, I really improved in my painting skills and got to add another genre experience onto my belt.Now I just need to bring the knowledge in earlier into a piece, and try to cut down my finish time.
I had to take break the whole process into a lot of 3 hours sessions to keep my hand muscles from overwork/overuse, and to keep my laptop from heating up due to high temperatures while I was in Taiwan during the process.