Painting a dog.

I recently painted a portrait of a dog named Buster as a present. This painting took around 3 hours, and I'm reasonably happy with the result. It's the first time I've digitally painted an animal before, and found creating a realistic hair flow difficult, however once finding the right combination of opacity and brush strokes I'm happy with how the texture turned out! 

Since painting this, I've had a lot of requests asking for me to paint portraits of their own dogs in this

same manner, so I've been thinking of either setting up a separate website for this type of work, or maybe add an extra section into my existing website to advertise these style illustrations. 

Pathfinder Door Progression Shots

 

I thought it'd be interesting to see my work throughout its progress, so each time I rendered a change I saved the image, and here they are in sequence!

'Pathfinder' modelling begins

Recently I've been working on 'Pathfinder', a sci-fi based project in which me and +Kim McCarthy  are collaborating as environment artists to concept, model and texture the interior of the main ship. This ship is being chased though space ny an enemy ship, and the interior is seen in shots where actors are composited in by VFX artists with lighting and special effects edited after, alongside a sound technician added sound effects and voicing on top.

Pathfinder is one of the bigger projects I'm working on at the moment right now, so I first started by making very basic models of each asset, to then show to the director and make sure the basic form is correct before adding more detail. This was a vital stage in the process, as the dimensions of some assets such as the navigation tables needed to be exact as these same measurements were being used in the green screening room with the actors, in order to produce the most natural feeling environment. 

 

 

 

platform

 

navigation tables

 

door

 

wall pipes

I'm reasonably happy with the base mesh so far, as I've tried to limit my loop flow to only what's needed for form in my models, and the shapes are pretty clean. Once the diffuse maps are on and rendered I'll go back and check the loops once more to see if all loops are still required to keep the same structure, as some form may be shown enough in the diffuse map alone. 

 

Subversive Girl

Huge inspiration right here. 

Instantly fell in love with this artists work. The artists real name is Rebecca Puebla, a 3D character artist from Madrid. I first saw this artist in a CG magazine but recently found her work again as I was looking for inspiration on Pinterest ! 

This artist inspires me as she creates her characters, and then poses and sets them in a shot as if it were a painting, rather than just a CG model turnaround. Creating macabre style images in this process by keeping her models either expressionless or slightly seductive, Subversive girl creates a finished piece I would really like to try it out in my own works.

 

It made me think of my alternative model project, and how I could encorporate her into a piece like this. Maybe I could only model the top half and pose? 

This has made me think about what sort of composition I want in my final piece, and what feel I want to create in my final image!

 

                                    Want to check out her work? Click here!

Have I gotten better?

So I was having a look through my old hard drive, and found some digital paintings I did last year,

It's interesting to see how much I've progressed in one year, especially how much faster I'm able to
produce a piece.

 

 

'Rosalie', painted in 2013 took 10 hours in total whereas my recent alternative model design only took 3. 

Becoming more comfortable with Photoshop and my Wacom has allowed me to be far more expressive and creative with my work, and at a much faster speed. I'm pleased with how I'm progressing, but I'd like to try a more detailed painting approach on my next character, like the painting of a woman's face I'm currently working on (link to image here) 

With each piece I'm becoming more experimental, helping my art and my designs progress into the future! 

 

Justi Romero

Justi Romero is a CG Artist I recently came across, whilst looking for creature inspiration as that is the next project I will begin after the Pathfinder interior is completed.

Born in Spain and now working as a CG Artist in London, you can see his skills are impressive by the sculpts he produces shown on his website, that need no diffuse or spec maps to enhance the detail. Each model has high detail of texture sculpted in and it takes a talented artist to be able to show models to this standard, ones that need no other maps.

However this is not the main interest I have in this artist, it is his website. As a CG Artist most of my self promotion will be through putting myself and my work online for possible employers to view, so I need a professional website of my own to allow my work to be seen in the best way possible. As I already have this progressing blog I have a starting point to promote myself, but I do still need to create myself  a website,for my final works to be shown.

So the first thing I really need to start doing is looking up other websites to see how other companies/ freelancers promote their work, and how successful they are, which brings me back to Justi Romero's website. 

With a very simplistic layout, and limited links I really like the format of this site. He has let his work speak for itself, being the main and only images one screen, slowly transitioning through each image available to see. The slow image changing shows this artist wants the viewer to take a good long look sat his work and isn't trying to hide anything in his models, clearly confident of his high skill levels. 

The limited links allow easy navigation of the page, only putting up what employers would want to see; who he is, still images, turns and past experience. 

Simplistic fonts and colouring looks very professional, almost as if the page were saying 'I don't need to show off, my work does it all' , a technique a lot of the most successful and well known companies also use. 

This had made me think, I need a website that is effective. If I can produce work that along with a simplistic website will interest people, I'll have created a successful website!

for Justi Romero's website click here

Terryl Whitlach

So recently I created a post about a book I've read recently, 'The wildlife of STARWARS a field guide', and mentioned that I wanted to check out the artist involved. I now present Terryl Whitlach!

 

 

This artist is amazing. It is clear from just scanning briefly across her work that she is highly knowledgeable in anatomy of a vast amount of species and easily manages to create believable breeds of her own by mixing aspects of each creature, carefully keeping in mind how the skeletal and muscle structure would sit underneath.

 

 

Once researching into this artist, it is then understandable how Whitlach got into this frame of mind whilst designing. With a father who taught high school biology and chemistry and a talented illustrator as a mother, Whitlach already had a creative streak in her blood mad with her father constantly bringing home creatures in jars for her to examine she has a constant flow of animal anatomy reference, increasing her interest in creature anatomy and the want to draw them. To add to the inspiration, her grandfather also has a large range where she frequently visited his horses, eventually being her favourite animal and you can see this in her work as a variety of different horse variations are seen in her designs. 

 

 

 

Studying vertebrate zoology and having an I depth knowledge of animal anatomy alongside artistic skill, Terryl Whitlach combined her skills to create incredible illustrations and is now considered one of the top creature designers in the world. 

As shown in the earlier post, this vast knowledge has led to her being largely desired in the art industry and Is best known for her works for Lucasfilm ltd drawing the creatures, but has also worked with large companies such as Warner Bros. Entertainment and Disney. 

 

I find Terryl Whitlach a huge inspiration, and hope to some day illustrate and design creatures as perfect as hers!

          .... for Terryl Whitlach click here