SOTD 01/29/10

YOGAAAA!

SOTD 01/28/10

FINISH HIM...ooops, wrong game.






In the next few posts I will be posting this little sketches studies for a larger piece I am working on, stay tuned for more goodies.

SOTD 01/27/10

BAAAANE!

And a couple of studies. Still have a few issues with these studies, but practice makes perfect.

SOTD 01/25/10

For Zaphir, this one and your prints are on their way to you.

SOTD 01/22/10

Mario Pisano the explorer.







Redesign of Korben Dallas from the 5th element.

SOTD 01/21/10

Again, one of my all time favs.

SOTD IS BACK AND ALIVE

Hey guys, sorry for the hiatus but I am back into the swing of things for these sketches. I think I just needed a short break to recharge and start the new year right. Anyways, here are the sketches.

First off, I still think this is one of the best animation films ever!




Next, this was done as a Christmas gift for some family.



Enjoy and I will be back tomorrow with more!

THE DUKE

Sorry for the lack of posts, been grinding away at some projects. Anyways, this is some more Daxter and Jak stuff I did last year. Here we have one of the main bosses, Duke Skyheed. The brief basically described the normal Duke turning into a "Hulk" of a creature. With that in mind I did my usual preliminary sketches to give the art director a wide variety to choose from.

A lot of these I was playing around with posing, proportions and attitude just trying to find the life and personality of the creature. I was alos tinkering around with how the clothing would rip and really wanted that to be designed well and not just haphazard tears in the clothing here and there.







All of these sketches are pretty tiny so I can move through iterations faster. Once I build a design vocabulary in my head, then I get into details which I did in the head studies below.





After the art director picks the one he/she wants, I proceed to provide them with a final clean design before moving on to color. This differs from studio to studio but most of my clients like this stage because they can see the design clearly without a lot of over rendered goop atop.







Not always, but sometimes I do quick color comps just to work out a color scheme for the character. This is super loose and I only spent about 20 minutes on this.







Lastly, final color and any minor tweaks here and there.



I do not think they used my version in the game but that's the nature of the business, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Remember, your job as the concept artist is to provide design solutions for the art director to help them create the visual world they are looking for about the game. Best piece of advice I got from one of my design teachers was...."Do not fall in love with your work, its always gonna change once you pass it down the pipeline."

Easy to say but hard to do.

FINAL ILLUSTRATION

So, I was trying to save more steps to this, but as I got into my work flow I collapsed a lot of layers and lost some of the preliminary work. But the process is similar to the the illustration process I documented here:

http://patrickballesteros.blogspot.com/2008/08/anatomy-of-commission-pt2.html

However, here are some finishing shots of the piece.

After I worked out the values in black and white I use a color layer on top of the gray scale layer I created, this is all still under my line art layer in Photoshop.

Next, I create a normal layer atop my line art and begin to render. I started with tackling the kid in the panda suit first because it was the toughest area and I knew by nailing that it would help to set the tone for the rest of the illustration.




Next I worked on the kid sitting on the panda mech's arm, then worked on the camera kid and lastly moved on to the kids on the scaffolding. On the camera kid I start to figure out his holographic screen for his camera.



Added some glow to the hologram and started to finalize the kids and the window behind the kids.





Added a nice glow to the window given a hint of light coming through the broken window panes. Also, did a final pass on the shack and tree. I made sure to lower the contrast on the tree in the bg to create atmospheric perspective and give the image more depth. Lastly, added my signature to the bottom and made sure everything fit on the template correctly.





And...TA-DAAA! Final Illustration with header and text. From concept to finish I'd say this took me about 4-5 working days. Wish me luck guys, and on to the next illustration or concept art, I have some characters I want to flesh out and change the pace up a little for those who check my blog. Thanks!

ILLUSTRATION PROCESS 2

After choosing a composition that I liked, I start to figure out the individual components, what the kids are gonna look like and how that big panda mech is going to work.

Below are some of the first sketches of the little girl on the terrace, I work in ball point pen so that I can see my iterations all on one page. For one it makes me feel like I draw a lot but more importantly, it allows me to see my options and combine shapes from different faces to come up with future possibilities. The ones with the stars are the ones I start to lean towards.

These sketches were primarily for the kid sitting on the panda arm. I was trying to go with someone feeling tough without making him look like a little person. This was a hard one but again doing all these iterations helped me find the right fit for my illustration.

After doing all those studies I work it out in graphite, since I have a vocabulary of shapes in my head from the previous studies I was able to knock these out pretty fast. This phase I use graphite to really start to nail some of the shapes a little more.

Once I have the major components I Photoshop them into my thumbnail as a final comp and layout below.

I print this out on my home printer which prints at a standard 8.5 x 11 inches. I take the print out to Kinkos and blow it up to about 145% of the original. I still use a light box because I still love to draw and figure things out. As I was drawing though I hit a roadblock with the panda mech so had to stop and figure it out with a few more sketches.

Below are the panda mech sketches were I was exploring the face and joints.




After doing those sketches I felt better about that design aspect so I pushed forward with the line art and was able to finish it faster. Here's the thing about drawing fast, its not about physically moving your pencil or pen faster, it is about making better design decisions. Those sketches helped me make decisive decisions about the mech which in turn allowed me to visualize the final product below.

Next up the start of the color process.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Hey all. Hope everyone had a great holiday season. I am looking forward to a great year with great friends, family and artwork. So let's get started.

This week I will be working on an illustration for a cover competition due this coming Sunday.......YIKES, talk about procrastination. Well I haven't done this in a while so I thought I'd breakdown my process for this piece.

1) Lets start off with the brief: there was none, the only thing I had to consider was that this image is for a fantasy/sci-fi magazine. With that in mind, before I even start drawing I try to think of a story or theme for my image. I wanted to juxtapose a hi-tech situation in a low tech environment similar to a look and feel from the film District 9. I also wanted to carry elements from past illustrations like kids, bears and maybe an ice cream cone.

Here are my first comps for the illustration.
So having a good idea I just start breaking down the composition and structure of the piece into big shapes, nothing super specific just yet. I know I wanted an abandoned shack and some type of bear mech. My first story was that the kid are playing at lunch with this big bear mech. You can see after the comps how I start to work out some preliminary sketches for the kids.


Here is another page of comps and trying to figure out positioning of the kids.
In the comp you can see I have decided to zoom in on the image a little more. Instead of a flat picture I also decided to can the structure a little more so there is a little more movement in the image. Again, you can see me working out the shapes in my characters, these were feeling a bit too serious and grown up so again, I needed to work out more studies.



Below is one of the comps I chose to push further.
I felt that the previous comps were lacking energy, everything was straight up and down and I wanted to push more gesture and S-curves into the whole image. Its similar to life drawing, even in design everything has a gesture so I wanted to make sure that there was an overall dynamic gesture in the composition. Having decided on that I next started to move on to more character studies. Some of the shapes and faces on these page are starting to lean towards the feel I wanted to hit. Especially the last study of the guy eating noodles, I pretty much used that sketch as a basis for the stylization I wanted these characters to be in.

Next post I will give more character studies and will hopefully have the lineart for the illustration completed by then as well.

Stay tuned!