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D3 Art Contest - The Ear Collector

Hey guys, recently I've finished an illustration for the Diablo 3 Art Contest. I played the original Diablo, but was only really hooked into the universe with Diablo 2. I remembered spending countless hours doing Mephisto and Baal runs. Naturally, I am very excited with the long-awaited Diablo 3. And since there was an art contest tying onto the release date, it was the perfect opportunity for me to show my eagerness for game.

IDEA


To be honest, I did not try the Diablo 3 beta. I wanted to start the game afresh - in its most polished state, so I refrained myself. My busy schedule during the semester definitely helped me accomplish this. Therefore, I did not know a lot about Diablo 3. The official site and the numerous concept art definitely helped me in visualizing what the game was about.

For the idea of the piece, I turned back to Diablo 2 for inspiration. There were already a lot of technically superior submissions for this contest, and I knew I had to compete on another area. With the 'success' of the LoL fanart contest, I've once again decided to focus on storytelling from my own experience with the previous game.

One of the unique items in D2 was the ear. It was something left behind by the victim after he or she has been PK-ed. It did not serve any purpose, other than for bragging rights; a trophy item. I pitched the idea to my friend, Jacky and he added that I could make the main character a ear collector. Sometimes you get the best ideas from bouncing it off other people who shares the same interest.

I initially wanted to go for a Demon Hunter and Witch Doctor combo, since they were the 2 character classes that I was interested in trying out when I lay my hands on the game. But I swapped out the Doc for a standard Barbarian as the victim for the final illustration.

LINEART

I wanted the pose and proportions to be accurate, so I took a few photo references with the help of my friend Zishen. Together with other photos of the female anatomy (from my other.. references), I was good to go.

I sketched out the original composition in my notebook. However, I do not have access to a scanner at the moment, so I can't post that up. I usually begin my process on paper, as it allows me to think about the bigger picture, rather than be bogged down by the details at such an early stage. Once I'm happy with the rough drawing, I do another rough drawing on Photoshop. The good thing about the digital process is that I can make use of the transformation and liquidfy tools to get my proportions right before starting to paint.

I am still not very comfortable with doing very precise lineart in Photoshop. Therefore, I usually take 1 or 2 additional passes to lockdown the tiny details. Many people ask me why I bother to refine my lineart, since the final piece does not actually show any of it. My answer to that is simply because it is easier to correct any mistakes at the lineart level. In general, its easier to shift and manipulate things around when they are in their basic forms.

PAINTING

I steal color palettes off other illustrations. I do that all the time. But I only start with their colors in the base layers, and go through several revisions of curves, color balance and hue tinting. The end result is usually something that doesn't really look like the source material, so in a way, I think its still considered ethical...? Anyway, this step of the process is extremely quick, with the aid of a big brush. The key thing is to set the lighting and the color temperature of the piece. I always create a top layer filled with black and set on saturation blending mode to constantly check on the values of the piece. If this step is done right, it is very hard to screw things up.

Next, I go ahead and detailed the environment. The focus of this piece is the 2 characters, so I avoided making the background too elaborate. I prefer to work in 1 layer, as it allows me to quickly adjust the hue and values just by switching the blending mode of the brush to multiply, color dodge or overlay. Here, I made the lower third of the image more purplish so that the painting doesn't look too monochromatic. After the environment is done, I moved on to quickly rough out the characters. Instead of concentrating on just one area, it is best to quickly identify the highlight, midtone and shadow areas of the entire figure. As I mentioned earlier, it is easier to make any adjustments early on during the painting.

And now.. the slow process of detailing. Every now and then I switch to a soft brush and adjust the contrast of the image using the brush blending modes. I added some motion blur effects to emphasize the force of her movement. I also used liquidy to adjust her arm and thigh thickness.

And it's done! The finishing touches include adding a few photo textures and setting them to low-opacity overlay modes, doing a few rounds of curves and color balance and sharpening the image.

Had a lot of fun doing this piece. Don't forget to 'like' the picture if you.. well, if you like it:
http://reveal.diablo3.com/en_EU/art_contest/#!/gallery/most_recent/4832
15th May couldn't come sooner!

And so...

...I failed in my resolution to post at least once per month on this blog.

Anyways, here are some selected artworks from the semester that just ended:

For the 3rd assignment for the Concept Art class, we were required to create a character that would fit into an environment chosen by our lecturer. I picked something that looked kinda steampunk as it was an area where I have not really explored. Came up with a few sketches, and she preferred this one. For the final illustration, I tried to imitate Dave Rapoza's method of rendering, with heavy emphasis on chiaroscuro.

Witch Gone Wild Detailed Sketches

Witch Gone Wild

The final assignment was to create a boss fight scene. There was no restriction for this assignment, and we could go for whatever style we fancied. And since I already did a 'realistic' boss battle scene, I decided to go for something more cartoony. I tried to keep the characters fairly simple in terms of design, choosing instead to focus on the composition and epic-ness (adding more than the stipulated requirement of at least 2 characters). In terms of style, I did not actively try to imitate anyone for this particular painting, choosing instead to fall back on what I've learned thus far. I wanted to illustrate the fun of playing an MMO with friends, and I hope I've achieved that.

Boss Fight Detailed Sketches

Battle at Sundown (Boss Fight)

The bulk of my time from the past semester was spent on 2 main modules. The 3D animation project and the sequential art class. And today, I am glad to present you the completed 16-page comic from the sequential art module. I took this project as a challenge to improve my painting speed and I'm glad that I could finish it on time.

Shadow Wind Cover Page

 You can download the entire book here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?r6u48950qhdz4pt

This semester has not been exactly smooth sailing for me, but I'm happy to have made it through in one piece. Here's hoping things do improve next time around.

The Rough Road Ahead.

Things aren't happening as smoothly as initially thought. Certain complications during the game project has resulted in me leaving the team. For reasons unknown, my friendship with a good friend of mine is going through a tough time. And my grades took quite a dive this mid-semester. However, this being the mid-semester, there's still plenty time to remedy it!

First, an update of my artworks so far:

Creature Design for Concept Class

To be honest, not the most unique of designs, and the stiff pose definitely did not help. However I did feel that the storytelling was quite effective, and I did manage to experiment with new color combinations.

PRJ300 Character Design

PRJ300 Character Turntable

PRJ300 Robot Design

PRJ300 Environment Design 01

PRJ300 Environment Design 02

The project is in the 3D phase right now, and I hope to update the blog with more shots of 3D models from the production in the future.

Seems like I will be in for a tough time animating this and finishing every other assignment... But I will not give up!

Happy 2012!

OK, so I'm like... 7 days late to the party. Anyways it's been a good holiday and I've managed to accomplished quite a fair bit of the things that I've planned to do. I worked on 2 art pieces during this time period:

The first was a 3D model of Akane, the villain character which I designed for a Projects class a few semester back. The main objective of this exercise was to brush up my 3D skills in preparation for the next Projects class (3D Animation Production). I ended up rushing a little to finish this model due to time constraints (I didn't want it to 'spill-over' to the next semester) and thus the results were slightly unsatisfactory.

The second was for a League of Legends fanart competition. The artwork was inspired by a joke from my friend, stating that teaming up with one of my weaker (in terms of LoL skill level) friend was like playing in a 4v6 match. The goal of this painting is not to insult noobs, but rather to display the fun we had as a class when we played the game together. Irregardless of skill level and whether we were 'feeding' or 'owning', we managed to enjoy the experience.

I've recently switched to dual display and it has caused quite a bit of confusion in terms of color and values for me. This is due to the different calibration settings on both monitors. Thus, I am unsure which one is more 'accurate'. I had to ensure that the painting looked good on both displays, and that definitely took up a fair bit of my time.

With a new year, there are also some changes and some new things to look forward to. Firstly, I want to  update this blog on a more regular basis, with a target of at least a post per month. OK, maybe a post-per-month isn't all that 'regular', but at least it won't be a once-per-semester kinda thing.

As mentioned above, there's the big 3D animation project that's coming up. But perhaps what's more exciting for me personally is the game project that I would be involved in. It's still in the idealization phase (and frankly, I haven't gave it much thought yet, due to my involvement in the 2 artwork above) but the prospect of working with all the talented people in the team is a good reason to be excited about.

All that plus the start of ICT and plans to have a year-end trip with my cousins, 2012 is beginning to shape up to be a busy year.