R3

Here's some work I did for an iOS game back in january.

Check it out here. 

More stuff after the jump.

Gonna cut ya

Another sword wielding gentleman in a bad mood.

Werewolf

Value sketch.

The Pole Position

Here's something a little different. This is a hat submssion for Team Fortress 2 that I designed along with my friend Filipe Pichel, who handled the 3D modeling side of things. It's based on 1950's early 60's race helmets. Take a look at its final form here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=4441

With a little luck it might be accepted into the actual game.

Human Slayer 2

Here's a variant, thought it looked nicer with a darker background.

The Human Slayer

Almost finished, background is still a little bland.

Shuttle details

Some more detailed drawings of the space ship I posted earlier.

The Red Keep

Environment practice.

Stabby stabby

A silly little thing I'm working on. I wonder what he's stabbing?

Eyeball

Some sort of... I dunno, one eyed alien squirrel or something. All I know is I spent way too much time on it.

The Hermit

Done for a tarot card illustration challenge on cghub. This one was a bit of a struggle, I couldn't quite get the flowing robes to work well with his pose.

Shuttle

Noodle

A random doodle that turned into something.

War Puppet WIP

Here's work in progress of a design for a robot puppet thing I'm trying to figure out, I might use it in an illustration or something.

Sketches

A couple of random sketches, hope to have some new finished stuff up soon.

Portrait practice

Could probably use some darker values.

Painting Process

I've been receiving quite a few requests to demonstrate my painting technique lately, so here goes. I wouldn't really call this a tutorial, but hopefully some of you will get something out of it. Blogger isn't the most practical way to display this, just click the images to enlarge them.

As far as technique goes, there's really not much too it. Most of my painting is done with the default round photoshop brush, set to around 60%-70% opacity and 100%flow. While I'm painting I use the "Alt" key to bring up the eyedrop tool, sample colors and just build up a smooth transition between them.

I tend to shift the hue of lighter values towards warmer colors, but it really depends on what specific material I'm painting.

01.

I'll use the power ranger as an example.

This one was originally painted at around 2000x3000 pixels, which is small for this kind of illustration, but its large enough to get a little detail in there.

I don't use that many layers, there's the background layer, another layer for the line drawing, which is painted over on a third layer, and that's about it. Since this is a full render, I'm not really trying to preserve the line drawing, its just a scaffold to build on and most of it will be completely painted over, there's not much point in cleaning it up too much.

I find it easier to start out with a dark midtone, and define the form with shadow and increasingly lighter values.

02.

Although I'm going to paint directly in color, values are still the first problem I try to solve.

The detail in this design is concentrated in the helm and upper body, and thats where I want the eye to rest, so its where I'm going to paint my lightest values. I pick a light direction that will help me do this and roughly block in the major shadows and start placing the brighter values.

There's nothing very interesting about the legs so I'm just going to let them sort of fade into shadow.

03.

I'm giving the values a bit more contrast and fleshing out the shapes a little more, but at this stage there's still no detailing going on, I'm just painting in blobs of color.

04.

Starting to look a bit more solid, this is where I begin to smooth out the colors, and add in stuff like secondary light sources (very minimal in this case). I saturated the terminator (border between light from shadow) on the torso, its a very subtle effect but it makes the color feel a lot richer, its exaggerated in the image to make it more noticeable.

This is a bit of an artistic liberty, it wouldn't really happen on this type of fabric, especially in this type of light. Its the sort of effect you'd use on flesh being hit by direct sunlight for example.

05.

At this point the painting is pretty much done, all the major forms are defined, all thats missing are small details like the engraving on the chestplate and a few final touches, after that its time to cleanup some of the messier lines as well as the outer edges and add in some background.

And thats about it, on more complex designs or if I'm not too sure about what colors I'm going to be using, I might start in black and white, sort out the values and add color later, but the painting process is pretty much the same.

Along with the default brush I sometimes use this one.

If you're just starting to learn digital painting, this video explains the fundamentals much better than I ever could.

Also this tutorial by Arne Niklas Jansson (Prometheus) really helped me when I started trying to figure this stuff out:

Hope this helps.

Gun sketches

Kikiot

This is a retouched version of the creature posted here. Which originally looked like it was made out of carrot or something...

Also I meant to link this ages ago, but here's a shout out to will winkler, who modeled some of my characters in 3D.

Eye Gouger

Big orc guy done for CHoW, on conceptart.org.

Practice

Yarr

Something Old

These are part of a series of paintings done for a narrative sequence in the game Undersiege.

Gun pirate

A buddy for my fat pirate. I rather like how these guys turned out, I'll probably render 'em at some point.

Steampunk Coppelia

Steampunk is in the air I guess. Done for the character of the week challenge (CHOW) over on ConceptArt.org

Pirate sketch

Here's a chubby pirate guy I drew for fun.

Azure Ranger

For the steampunk power rangers challenge on cghub.

Point

Swamp steps

A couple of steps from the swamp thing image.

Swamp Thing

Here's a swamp thing I painted for character forge over at CGhub.

Fire Arm

Sketchy, sketchy.

Swordsmen

A couple of guys I painted for practice.

Lunchtime

Some sort of beach ogre brings home a little snack.

Islands sketch

Quick sketch, messing around with brushes.

Undersiege process

Here's a small look at the painting process of the undersiege piece, from initial thumbnail ideas to the finished illustration.

Squint

This guy started out as a small random thumbnail sketch, I enlarged it and rendered it out.

Guard Duty

Someone has to guard the entrance to the secret hideout...

Shark Critter

Undersiege promo

Promotional illustration done for the game Undersiege. It was supposed to have quite a lot of text slapped on it, hence the rather sparse background.

Red Ogre

Practice.