City Reflection - Part 2

Colour Contrast

To contrast the blue and greens I chose to add their complementary colours orange and red to the skyline, which produce a polluted look in the paintings world that is most likely caused by this huge futuristic city. 

Aesthetics vs. Realism

The water reflection now does not seem believable and makes little sense regarding the sky and city colours. However this lack of sense does not minder that artworks quality in my opinion is aesthetically more appealing to me personally.

City Reflection - Part 1

For variation I decided to make an exclusively 2D concept piece. This allowed me to jump right into the painting experience which I miss a bit when integrating 3D methods as they often take longer to start off for me.

Random Shapes and Forms

So for this one I took a different approach to even my previous 2D projects. This project started off completely with random shapes and forms. I had a city scene in mind but the design was still very loose. 

To start off the colour palate was defined and the mood and atmosphere of the piece started to build up quickly. The lighting in this scene with the reflection in the water played an important role I would keep adding layers and sometimes merging them and mirroring them to the water with different layer options.

Once establishing the core concept of the city's skyline I started to alter the colour settings and adjustments as well as add an foreground to create some more depth in image.

Science Fiction Brief - Part 2

After finishing the design for the day version I started working on the night version. I therefore started to imagine what would stick out most and the red energy areas would obviously be the most visible aspects of his suit. 

So firstly I lowered the values and changed the colour theme to blues suiting the night theme.

Adding Glow

Now I traced over the red areas and added some saturation and lighting. I therefore tried out different layer options such as soft light, hard light, vivid light and lighter colour.

Science Fiction Brief - Part 1

This Brief was set by one of my course mates. He had a very clear view of how the science fiction character should turn out. He described the character to be an enemy footsoldier of the future with slightly superior technology over others. Furthermore the character should be flexible and skinny with a normal figure and the armour basic and light. 

After several sketches in my sketchbook I got the green light to take the project in a chosen direction. The 6 character concepts beneath were the initial 6 digital designs to be reviewed.

After meeting and discussing the outcome the character concept was narrowed down and more similar concept with little variations followed.

These were then further narrowed down and I would soon begin to work on the main design sheet.

I therefore received the base model mesh from which I made some renders to paint the final character design over.

Design Sheet
For the final design sheet I planned out a front, side and back view. The painting process took quite long in comparison to the other projects as it went into exact details of the design and a good amount of iterations. Capturing the right look of the materials and textures of the armour and fabrics was also a challenge.

Life Drawing No.6

1 min warm up sketches 

 2 min warm up sketches

30 min pencil drawing

Bad Place Project

For the "Bad Place" project I followed the same steps as for the Blizzard 2 project in a previous post. To start off I created a simple model in Maya and added some basic lighting to create some nice shadows via mental ray, physical sun and sky. 

3D Thumbnails

I then altered the camera attributes to adjust the perspective points and add some distortion. By saving the images for the thumbnails out as PNGs I am able to get rid of the blue background sky and stay in black and white allowing me to solely focus on values if desirable.

Once the thumbnails are put together it is time to choose an interesting thumbnail to continue working on. For this project I chose the birds eye concept as I found it had an interesting perspective and lighting.

I started adding an overall friendly colour theme to the image without high colour contrast despite the serious topic.

For the final image I added dynamic elements to the scene such as wind and papers flying around. The blur also further guides the eye towards the centre of the artwork where the action is taking place.