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.