Day 11

Thanks to some great tips from my friend  architecture day wasn't a complete bust like the first time. In fact making the thumbnails for this was the most fun i had drawing in a while. I felt like i was 10 and playing with legos. The first detail drawing turned out to stiff and sterile , and not to mention that the sketch was intended to be a crypt type of a building not a freaking mansion it turned out. So i had another go at it. Still finding it difficult to successfully translate stuff in 3d space , but i believe i can get there with enough practice. Another problem reared it's ugly head when i wanted to give light to the scene .I'm used to lightning characters not buildings so this felt a bit awkward and i left it alone until i do some research on that topic...

Baah...back to my dragons...

Day 10 - addendum

Ok my eyes are about to fall out. I'm done for today. I feel like this one has a lot of potential. I'll probably be working on this one every day form now on.

Day 10

Just working along as planed. Landscape day. I decided to do a bit more detailed b/w sketches for the imaginary landscape (i was inspired by the lava, obviously :P). Also i made it a point to make them more fantasy-like, as the last batch i did although being fairly ok in regards of composition, they lacked that epic feel that, imo, concept art for games should have...

I'll try and work more on one of these until i pass out tonight...

Also i really, reaaally need to get a better monitor. At one brightness setting everything looks perfect, on another it's crap and i generally have no idea how this looks on other peoples monitors (the most common complaint is that my stuff turns out too burnt out) But the cash for that kind of purchase is non existent atm. So i either take on a job to by a screen and stop doing these, or i keep on going potentially creating crap...hey i wanted to be a digital artist, fuck me right?

Day 6,7,8 and the first half of #9.

OK so this is going to be long post :) As i planed out some sort of a curriculum for my self , the weekend is reserved for polishing out stuff i did during the week. First up was the cyber vampire dude.

latter that day i received a fantastic email from an amazingly talented friend and colleague of mine Ivan Jovanovic (check out his blog here http://pixelizedsoul.blogspot.com/ ) regarding a number of points i needed to correct in this and other designs, so expect a updated version of this (and other stuff).

Next up was Sunday, which to be perfectly honest i spent hungover... something i also need to work on...

Monday- Another character day. This time i wanted to skethces for enemy/creature type characters

Tue (today)  - I was planing on working on some of these creature concepts , developing them further, but as i was browsing cghub i spotted an ongoing creature forge challenge that's due tomorrow.

http://cghub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15122

And i came up with this in about 4h

There is also a character forge challenge due on feb. 9th. It's about the two blue wizards from Tolkein's works.

http://cghub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15290

Day 4&5

Day 4 was a total nightmare. One of the nasty things about trying to teach your self something you know little to nothing about is just that - you don't know. You don't know where to start, what to do, or when to do it. Things a teacher would explain to you in about 30 min seem like gigantic obstacles. Oh i forgot, day four was all about architecture, also known as stuff my nightmares are made of. I lost the whole day yesterday and a better part of today trying to make a ''quick'' study of this intricate Victorian castle. Boy was that the wrong way to approach this subject. My logic behind it was that i needed to add a lot to my visual library and what better way to do it than to do studies. What i failed to take in account was that these were masterpieces of architecture that some genius spent decades building and here i was trying to capture every little detail in what i hoped to be under an hour. Intricacy coupled with multiple perspectives (another one of my night terrors) beat me to a bloody pulp. But i managed to drag my self out of the ensuing panic attack (oh no i can't draw i'll never be able to do this etc...) and tried a different approach. I will make studies of individual elements , decorations , and such to enrich my visual library , and work on creating my own designs. I have no idea if this is something a skilled teacher would recommend but it seems to be doing it for me at this point.

I downloaded the spectacular program by epic game called carapace s that allows you to make multiple perspective grids, taking out all the guess work and allowing you to concentrate on just the design itself.

          http://epicgames.com/community/2012/11/free-art-tool-released-thanks-to-epic-friday/

And i managed to these :)  For a first try im not unsatisfied but i can see how this needs to get a lot better design wise .
                                   

Oh and i managed to do a quick 1h sketch for Anthony Jones'es Heaven's hell contest.

Day 3

Ok day 3 was all about landscapes. I started out with doing thumbnail studies of existing landscapes to get a feel for them and establish a color pallet. Next up was creating new compositions thumbs  from scratch using  the real one as a style guide. And finally taking one of those thumbs and giving it some much needed love to get a ''finished'' landscape concept. I'm not entirely happy how this turned out but hey, learning is a process...

  

Day 1&2 - character art

 Ok, im a bit behind with updating because the idea of a blog came to me a few days after i started this. Any ways , these are the result from day 1&2 . First i started with making a bunch of black silhouettes and did 30 of those. Then i picked out 15 i liked and refined them a bit. The point of this was to get a bunch of very different characters. For the next stage i picked out 3 i liked best and developed them further. I had an idea about mixing like  sci-fi space opera with vampires. More on that craziness later  when i finalize these.

INTRO

This blog will be a day to day record of my attempt at making my self in to a concept artist. Since the fabulous Feng Zhu School of Design in Singapore is something i can't possibly afford i will have to really on tutorials i can find on the internet. Lucky for me there are a lot of great artists out there (including the great Mr. Zhu ) wiling to share some of their wisdom, so with a bit of digging and a lot of hard work i believe i will be able to get a modicum of their skills integrated in to mine. I have given my self two months to put together  a concept art portfolio. To accomplish this i have created a day to day schedule that encompasses all of the major aspects of a concept art portfolio and also includes studies from life (anatomy,arhitecture,landscape,mechanical parts) as a way of sharpening my overall artistic skills. Feel free to comment on everything i do, or even join the fun by doing some of the tasks :)