Starting off with some character designs.
First up, I had to come out with a design for a clay sculpture assignment. I decided to go with the Chinese mythical hero 二郎神.
Eventually, the 5th one was chosen and I went on to produce a turntable and an illustration for it.
For the illustration, I was given the liberty to follow whichever style I wanted. I've always wanted to try speed painting. One of the critiques given for my past artworks were that they appeared too clean and too polished, almost to the extent of looking lifeless. I also realized that I was spending way too much on each individual painting. So with this assignment, I wanted to push my painting speed a little bit more.
I chose to follow Marc Brunet's painting style, with the patchy brushwork and vibrant colors. I managed to find a few speed painting videos and his custom square brush, which helped me understand his workflow. The final illustration took me 4 hours, which is by no means a speed paint. However, I was quite pleased with how it turned out.
For the second assignment, I worked on a villain character. As the 3 assignments would tie into a final illustration piece at the end of the semester, I decided to stick with the Chinese mythology for inspiration. I also incorporated Alchemy into my thumbnail generation workflow, as recommended by my lecturer. To be honest, I have mixed opinions on it. On one hand, Alchemy does give me unexpected results, and it is certainly a great tool to create unusual and new ideas. However, I do feel like a cheat when using it. In a way, I always come out with the general idea before designing anything, not the other way round where I add an idea into a random design. This leads back to the age-old argument between functionality and aesthetics. I would definitely try Alchemy again, though, to see what more the software can add to my art.
Selected the Chinese thunder god to develop further. No turntables this time around, just the final illustration. I chose to further embrace the idea of speed painting, this time trying to push for more of the 'textured' look and feel. I tried to go for Ruan Jia's art style.
The 3rd assignment was creature design. This time, I had a fairly clear goal in mind. I wanted to do either feathers, fur or scale, and I wanted to follow Sandara's painting style. This meant a slight departure from the speed paints of the previous 2 to pursue a more 'complete' look. However, I did retain some of the principles that I've learned while working on the previous assignment. And that is - to work the image as a whole and not get bogged down by details until the very late stage of the painting process.
As per usual, I sticked with the Chinese mythology:
I also took a matte painting/environment design class this semester.
Here are some of the environment sketches exercises.
The first assignment is a matte painting of an Indian temple city. Spent quite a fair few amount of hours on this piece.
