Haven City & Harbor

Haven City & Harbor - matte painting

Matte paint  after adjustments 

after getting those details in, I started painting without the sketch lines and started working on shapes and smaller details

Brainstorming up comps and Haven Tower's details 

More tower details design sketches

Initial sketch before the tower details design sketch.

Initial rough value painting before tower details design sketch

Matte paint part 1 - (Really, more of a matte images paste and transform "spit" than "paint") 

Here the tower is the initial design 

Matte paint part  2 - The tower reflects the new design.

I realized in between the sketch and rough value painting, that the tower was rather lackluster with the city. Especially since the tower would be home to the comic's heroes and main character, it wasn't eye catching with the city. Because of that, I decided to sketch up more details and designs to see if I could think up some unique shapes while introducing some magic like elements.

The city, as well as the world so far, is part tech and part magic, so the initial tower wasn't enough magic. I then thought about floating protective pieces for the tower. After all, heroes usually get attacked by their enemies, right? It's what keeps stories interesting, conflict.
The protective pieces really let me include in magical elements while also keeping it somewhat techlike too. The idea was while these pieces also protect, the inner layer is also a tech based security system.

Going forward, I really need to let myself really design out the environment before I sketch and matte paint. Another note I need to tell myself is my sketch lines need to be a darker color so I can see it over the images I'm going to use to matte paint. I found myself having to toggle the textures and images a few times so I could see where city buildings would start and end on their edges.

Dragon Cave, Dragon creature sheet

Dragon creature design as part of a monthly challenge from Character Design Challenge's Facebook page. 

The challenge itself requires a full body image, rather than the illustration version I have as the first image but I wanted to use this challenge as an experiment with matte painting. As a result, I painted two images, one for an experiment with matte painting, the other for the challenge. 

Designing a dragon, specifically a western dragon, was a new route for me. Typically when I draw dragons, they're of an eastern influence and usually lack the wings of a western dragon. 

It was pretty fun to look at a bunch of animal influences to create a look for the dragon. 

Some animals I looked at were snapping turtles, lizards, komodo dragons, bats, and sharks.

Once I did get the design in place, I sketched up a composition and began adding value and lighting, before placing various textures and images on top.

I definitely wanted the dragon to look scary so a low key palette with sharp contrasts was what I had in mind.

During the painting process, I kept adding more shadows so I could increase the contrast and give the appearance of the dragon emerging from shadow, with the light casted from the fire. 

After completing the illustration, I moved onto the character (creature) design sheet.

I took the sketch from the illustration and built upon it, to save me some time in the sketching.

Unlike the illustration, where I put grayscale values before the images and textures, for this I went with color first before textures. 

I had to remind myself during the color stage to not go full render as I still have textures to add. Once those textures were mostly in, I did paint overs on those textures to help mess with the body and features.

Since my plan was to make this a character (creature) design sheet, I needed details and callouts. So I began sketching out an ortho of the head and then finally the wings. I decided to keep the focus on the dragon, so I took out the flat colors I had for the callouts and kept the sketches somewhat loose. 

All in all, it was a fun challenge and lesson with matte painting and creature (dragon) design. I got to try my hand at two things in one painting (two if you count the sheet and illustration as separates). 

Workshop Bedroom - illustration

Illustrative piece based off of the isometric room I made (and later painted) from SketchUp

Painted room using SketchUp model as base (above)

said room from SketchUp (below)

With a rough sketch, and value paint over for lighting, I got the very basic idea down. 

From there, I applied color and some lighting but with little to no rendering.

As usual in my bigger painting projects, I got rid of the lines and painted up the shapes with some values and details. Eventually I decided the piece was too cool and adjusted the colors for a warmer look. I fidgeted a lot with saturation and value as I was working on this, before deciding I wanted to try again with matte painting, but on a small scale. Several textures went in, but nothing for large pieces, just a few machinery, few boxes and I was hand painting things again. Towards the end, I told myself I needed to bring the piece back to a consistency and put in textures for the floor, wall, cloth (ing), etc. 

It was a lot of back and forth and putting textures in, before painting over them again. This was definitely one of my larger PSD files, with the number of layers (40) I put in. Looking back, and moving forward, I realize I should put in textures and whatever I plan on using as a matte painting setup first, then do paint overs. The work method I used for this really was a lot of back and forth and made me feel like I was overworking this piece, which I might have actually.

Retractable Shield - prop design

Prop design for Retractable Shield

In an older character design, I had thought up of this shield design in the thumbnail stages but never featured it. (I don't know why I didn't since it would have made the character more interesting.)

Hindsight is 20/20, haha!

The original feature of the shield was in its retracted state. I regretted the fact I never painted it in its extended state and been telling myself to make a prop sheet of the shield since then. 

I wanted to test out how keeping the lines would work for painting, since I usually get rid of the lines during the painting process after I get the main shapes in. 

Sadly, I still need to work how I layout prop designs since it's not as appealing as I'd like. I've seen some very nice looking layouts for weapon designs and definitely want to get to that clean layout with a good level of finish. Going forward, it's a goal I aim to reach!

Sparrow and Sparrow's Room

Sparrow's bedroom design

Sparrow's character design

Sketch using the SketchUp model as a base. 

Sketch of Sparrow's character design, before color

For the room design, I created the room shape (floor) first as a square before adding in the small closet space to break the stiffness (squareness) of the room design. 

The plan for this room design was to include the plants, mug and dragon sculpture I designed a while back. They're not as defined in the room painting as they were on their stand-alone prop sheet. 

It definitely was an fun experiment to paint a room in isometric. Fun enough that I decided to deign another room in isometric later.

I really went for loose sketching for the character design since I realized I start too quickly on details at times, loosing the line of action. 

I think I can call it a success in moving in the right direction since I was able to keep the sketch and design loose while only defining parts like the eyes, some of the folds and feet. The hands were kept a bit loose and simple, so going forward, I want to bring back some details into them. 

Lunar New Year 2018

For this year's Lunar New Year, I decided to paint an environment piece instead of a character design piece.

It's a personal annual project of mine to paint a piece in response to the Zodiac of that year. This year is the Year of the Dog. 

First, as my usual work flow, I sketched out a loose sketch before going through and defining what things were. 

After that, playing color, though for this piece, I made sure to use a lot of reds and yellows to keep a traditional Lunar New Year color palette. 

During the painting process, I decided the image should be flipped due to eye flow as well as how people read in the US (left to right). 

For this piece, I really wanted to work on my painting. The ground and textures around the painting, I wanted to define as well since I don't get to that point in paintings. I also wanted to differ the people as well to keep the piece realistic enough in the stylized art style.