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.

The Later Half of Fall 2011

The character design took a 180 degree turn in terms of style in the later half of the semester. We were supposed to design more animate-able characters. The 1st assignment was to design 2 creatures.

I wanted to do something Beatles inspired. Their music referenced several animals, ranging from birds to raccoon. I picked the walrus and octopus to work on. I reverted to a more traditional approach for the thumbnailing process, choosing to do it with pen on paper rather than digitally. For the final illustration, I tried to mimic the style of Serge Birault (a.k.a Papaninja); especially his technique of rendering slimy smooth surfaces.

The 2nd assignment was to create cartoon/caricature characters. I decided to concentrate mainly on creating caricatures of people that I know personally. Again, I did the thumbnails using pen on paper and eventually my drawing of my lecturers as rock stars was chosen. The guitar that the left character (my animation lecturer) is holding proved to be a new challenge for me as I don't usually draw hard surfaced objects. Overall I am very happy with how this piece turned out.

For the final assignment, we were given the choice of either doing a massive illustration which featured the 3 characters from the earlier half of the semester or the 4 stylized characters from the later half. I decided to go back to more familiar grounds with the earlier half. For this illustration, I wanted to really add a lot of drama, through the use of lighting and texture. I also wanted to fully flash out on the details that wasn't present on the earlier versions of the same characters. This one took a good 30+ hours.

Next up, matte painting class. The 2nd assignment was to construct a Chinese city in a fantasy setting. The emphasis was to create something that was out of this world. I went with flying junks and colorful clouds. I'm not really happy with this painting, as compared to my previous Indian city one.

The 3rd assignment was to create a futuristic city. The lecturer made it clear that he wanted futuristic, not sci-fi; the difference being that one was plausible in the near future. While not a huge fan of the sci-fi theme myself, I do follow Feng Zhu's youtube channel and that proved to be very helpful during this assignment. I wanted to do something different, something that was more painterly than my previous 2 efforts. I still used photo plates as reference, but I tried to paint-over them as much as possible.

For the final assignment, we had to create a short video of an environment, similar to this one I did back in my polytechnic days. Following the success of the previous assignment, I decided to stick closely to the painterly style. We were free to choose our own themes for the finals and luckily for me, I stumbled upon the 'Spirited Away' artbook in my school's library that day. I was immediately sold on the idea of creating an environment that would fit right into the movie.

As I already did one similar matte painting video in the past, I wanted to seek new challenges for this assignment. I tried to integrate 3D into the workflow, using 3DSMax for the river and lantern simulation. It turned out to be quite an easy process, with the help of a plugin modifier called Houdini Ocean.

Besides the above 2 classes, I also took a number of other classes during this semester. One of which was Flash. I won't go into the details of how much I hated Flash (I'm just glad its over) but here's the final animation that was created by myself:

Fall 2011 has been quite a relaxed semester (for Digipen's standards) and thus I was able to be engaged in several other projects. One of which was 'Flip's Adventures'. More on that later.

Midterm updates!

A short midterm update of all my work so far...

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 picked the 3rd one to work on, and Sandara was kind enough to do a quick demo on how to paint feathers and scales for me.

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.