Random Recent Paintings

Amongst the Living

Some Speedpaints based on the idea of robots living among humans and all that comes with that.

The Oracle

This was both fun and frustrating to do. It's an attempt to combine two things I'm really interested in; the techniques of the impressionist painters like Sargent and the possibilities of 3D for illustration. I used a combination of Zbrush, 3DsMax, Bitmap2Material, Mental Ray, Akvis, and Photoshop to achieve this. Apart from modeling stuff myself in Zbrush (the cloth) and building the environment in 3DsMax, I also used some assets from Daz3D, TurboSquid, and CGtextures. However I did not use and photographs and tried to paint a lot of the stuff in that the original render missed. I wanted to see how far I could push Mental Ray and was very disappointing with the render times (a whole day) and I think that in the future I will switch to either Keyshot, Redshift, or Octane. There are a few things that I hope to improve on in the future but It's been a great learning experience that I hope I can share, if anyone is interested, with everyone at some point. Here's the render I painted on top on.

Animated Concept Gifs

I always love it when someone takes the time to turn their still images into a little gif animation but I've never really given a good try. So here are my first attempts. I kinda wanted to make it look like they a gifs captured from a longer film. Getting the timing right is really more trickier than I thought and something I need to work on quite a bit more. Shout out to Sayantan Biswas for help with looping the red masked dude.

Planetary Lunch break

Some Helios Sketches

I've been going back and forth between the dystopian/post-apocalyptic world of Helios. Earth has been scorched by a massive solar flare and civilisation collapsed. The daytimes are lethal thanks to large amounts of solar radiation and the nights are owned by packs of roaming wildlife, mutated, and bandits. Mankind has managed to survive thanks to the creation of "Houses"; large fortified settlements that are specialised in providing a certain resource. The trade between the settlements has created a class of warriors that protect the caravans against raiders. Apart from a few trade disputes and the off raids, things are going well, until a southern army shows up that look to claim it all for their god. A god they believe destroyed the earth once because of the lack of sacrifices.

A Visit to the Southern Ruins

 A little experiment with Sketchup, Keyshot, and Photoshop. I wanted to import the simple model I made into 3Dcoat but because I'm a noob I forgot to close the mesh which meant 3Dcoat couldn't deal with it... so it was straight into Keyshot, then adding textures and painting in Photoshop. Below you can see the render I got out of Keyshot that I used as a base. I think this might be a pipeline I will explore more. 

 I'd like to do something that I stole from Thom Scholes and leave a few suggestions what to watch, read or listen to.


Have you read: The Girl with all the Gifts by M.R. Carey?
Have you listened to: Plaid - The Digging Remedy?
Have you watched: Preacher?

Some More May Sketch a Day Stuff

 

These are all studies, the top one to show the technique I used to do the bottom ones. The video shows the whole process that took just over 2 hours in five minutes. The bottom ones are studies of the excellent BBC series War & Peace. I did them on my Cintiq Companion while freezing a frame on my TV. It was hard to get the colours right and I think that was probably, next to the composition, the biggest challenge. I really enjoy doing them but I prefer using reference but then overlay my own designs and ideas on top of it. 

May Sketch A Day #1

It's that time a year again that means me and many other artists attempt to do a sketch a day for the whole month of May. This is the first batch heavily inspired by or based on Ashen Falls.

Random MGS4 Inspired Old Sketch

Was playing around with some military stuff and then this happened...

ArtStation Challenge - "The Journey" first entry.

Hibernation Error

I've been meaning to join this challenge for a while and in between work I've been tinkering away at it. I finally feel I have enough to show to post a proper entry. I had this idea in mind of a long space journey where the hibernation system fails and kills all on board except one. An almost classic Sci-Fi trope but fun to explore nonetheless.
During the IW Demo Day last month I had a chance to show a little bit of my process of this painting in front of an audience. It was fun if not a little daunting.

I started with a quick thumbnail to figure out my shot and/or composition. I planned to kit-bash the whole thing in 3D but it's always good to have a rough idea of where you want to go.



I did the kit-bashing with the help of my own 3D models, Daz3D and free kits I found online. Although my PC is pretty swanky it didn't like this scene when I was done adding all the models. I was going to render it in 3DsMax but the high polycount meant I would have MentalRay render for days just for one image. So I took it to Keyshot which did a fantastic job in just a fraction of the time. I assigned materials and emissive objects in Keyshot and did a few render passes like the line work you see here. It give me a good idea of where everything is, especially as this is quite a dark scene.



This was the first light setup that I played with and I really liked the sense of danger but it didn't really feel like an hibernation room... I'm still tempted to go back to the red colour...



After a full render with lights and materials in Keyshot I took it to Photoshop to add atmosphere, texture, colour, and more light. The next step is to paint in more details, make it feel less like a render and more like a painting. I might also need to make it a little more clear the other people are deceased and that the system failed.



Thank you for taking a look, please stay tuned for more. In the meanwhile I appreciate all feedback, comments and critiques.

Cheers!

PS. This was copied from my ArtStation Challenge page, please have a look at updates and feedback here: https://www.artstation.com/contests/the-journey/challenges/5/submissions/3720

Random Paintings and Sketches of the recent months.

 

Count Cockatoo

Afternoon brush and painting practise from scratch. I was trying to get as much texture from brushes without resorting to photo-textures and then this popped into my head :)

Count Cockatoo - Oh the poor fools that mock such a valiant knight, many a graveyard is filled with them. "The Chicken Knight" was what they would shout from their horses, castle walls, and towers only to be met with a most violent death. The screams still haunt the skies for the birds of Count Cockatoo will not let a soul rest.

River Wild

These are crops of a larger painting but I need to fix a lot to it before I'm ready to share it. The concept behind the paining is a group of Native Americans teaming up with runaway slaves to fight a guerilla war against the big land and slave owners. Their rebellion becomes quite successful and they see a long and often successful campaign, causing their cultures to mix to become a blend of Native and African styles, faiths, customs and languages. I know this might sound a bit far fetched but the idea was something powerful people in the US were afraid that it could happen at the time and actually made sure to antagonise the groups against each other. (I noticed the rifles are a bit too modern, will need to change that or just think they managed to fight their cause well into the 20th century).