This is the place where I'll be posting bits and pieces from here and there (the creative scraps and incomplete works), hopefully documenting my creative journey of self improvement!
Woah! It feels like it's been awhile since I've posted anything, so I thought I'd show some of my progress using colour. So I've entitled this piece Midday and I decided that I wanted to start on playing with colour with a simple illustration, nothing too complex. A big shout out to my mate Robson Vieira for his feedback when I was working on this; thanks man!
I decided that I should start messing around with using colour and getting more confident with it after viewing the work of Pascal Campion. I just love this guys use of colour and his compositions. They're what I call "feel good" images - rather emotive.
Anyhow, here's what I've done with some notes..
The final image. Midday.
So this image shows the original sketch which has been partially painted over already (I forgot to keep a save of the sketch on its own, but it still gives you an idea of what I originally started off with).
This image really shows what everything looked like after I had layed down the main brush strokes. It was quite bold and saturated at this stage, which was what I was originally going for, however after some feedback and doing some additional research, I realized that it was a bit flat and needed further work done to it.
If you compare this image to the final, you'll notice I toned down some of that intense satuation of the character, softened some areas and added blooming and some additional lighting effects as well as some more texture to the sky to make it more interesting to look at.
Over a week or so ago I took a trip back to my ol' home town in the south (Mount Barker, WA) to visit my parents and unwind a bit. I used this opportunity to visit a sort of mural thing near town that incorporated some paintings from various individuals in the community (students mainly) onto a painted steam train (these individual paintings represented windows on the carriages).
I was responsible for one of those paintings. I think it must have been back in 2006 as a project for my year 12 art class. It needed to represent something to do with the town in some respect, if I recall. I decided that since the painting was going to end up on a train mural later on, I'd try and include a train theme in the design as well. What I ended up with was of a girl riding inside a train carriage that was passing through the country side with the Mount Barker tower in the background with a sunset glowing over the horizon. I remember it was an interesting and fairly fun experience doing this. For one, I had to paint onto a sheet of metal which I had never done before, but really it was a fairly straight forward process.
The funny thing is, this was the first time that I actually had decided to go up and closely inspect the mural in person, some six years after it was put up on display. So if you ever find yourself driving through Mount Barker one of these days and you keep your eyes peeled for a train mural just off the Albany Hwy, you might be able to notice my little contibution towards the end of the first train carriage.
The painting which I contributed to the mural.
Here's a shot of the first carriage (1 of 3 carriages) with the steam train in the distance.
A better shot showing off some of the other paintings. What I also came to notice was just how well the other students did with their contributions. Good job!
So after a short break from drawing (and a serious clean of my computer), I've gotten back into it again. I had re-installed Photoshop and was having issues finding my brush at first (it's nothing special really, but I like working with it), but once I had gotten that all sorted, I was cooking!
I chose to paint one of my all time favourite musicians this time 'round, the wonderful Enya. I grew up listening to her Watermark album (I specifically remember playing with lego in the living room with it playing on the ol' sound system) and it's one of those great nostalgic moments of my childhood! (dare I say, "subtly defining")
This time 'round I also had the challange of painting a hand which I wasn't too sure about, but I think it came out fairly ok. I think I might have rushed it in some areas, mainly some parts of the hair, and there are still some off proportions, but I feel that I was able to capture some likeness of her still. I feel like the quality of my blending is getting better though, I feel like it's come out more smoother, so I'm getting there. Again, it was an enjoyable process, and I'm eager to start the next one, but it may have to be put on hold for a few days since I'm quite busy through out this week with other commitments.
Ooookay, so I have three different incomplete animated projects to show in this post.
The first one is Jimmy & Doiky 2: A Day at the Beach, a follow up to the first Jimmy & Doiky animation I did back in 2006. I wrote the script for this one back in mid 2007 and started animating a version of it that same year. However the style and everything was a little bit lack-luster, so I shelved it for a while and started work on a new version of it sometime in 2008. The original J&D was really just an animated skit, but with J&D2, I wanted to expand the two characters and have a bit more of a narrative to play with this time. I was on and off this project throughout 2008 and tried to get back into it around early 2009, but didn't make a heck of a lot of head way in it.
I still like this project and I reckon it still has some potential, so I very well might get around to finishing this actually. I liked the style in which I was going for, it may need some additional tidying up with what's been done so far as well as some script tweaks, but it could definitely be salvaged.
Jimmy and Doiky making their way through a crowded beach to find a good spot to setup shop.
Jimmy attempting to chat-up a surfer chick.
The second project is an untitled animation that I worked on back in early 2007, and was developed after a "discussion" started up in an animators forum that I used to frequent back in the day. A sort of animation battle where myself and another animator would each animate characters we'd design to face off against each other. So my character against his character.
I made a start and had my character designed and scripted out my animation, but things eventually fizzled out when the other guy never got around to designing his character. So the project ran out of steam in the end. There's only a handful of shots animated, but it was hard to continue on with the fight choreography without knowing the design of the other animator's character. I spose if I really wanted to finish this, I could just design another character, but it's not really something I'm interested in working on anymore.
The opening shot.
A shot of my character Zan approaching the other character in a secluded mountain area.
Alright, the third animation was actually a music video type animation that I started working on back in 2006. I decided to make a music video of the 90s song You Are Not My Friend by Frenzal Rhomb. I always found this song ammusing and catchy. I actually got about 80% of the animation for this done, but there were a few sections in the song that I didn't know how I could fill at the time, so it came to an end.
A shot of the main character sitting on the beach with a drink in his hand.
Here's a little something that I did some years ago, back when I was doing my animation studies (2008). We had to create a matte-painting (well, "painting" isn't what I'd call it, more like "photo-manipulation"). This was actually the first assignment I had to do for the course, to show that I can infact use applications like Photoshop.
Basically what a lot of us did, was take a picture of some kind of landscape then alter it until it looked much different than what it originally was - usually transforming it into a ruin, which pretty much is exactly what I did!
This was my matte entry. The City Ruin.
Ok, so this image (above) was the original picture that I used in creating my matte-painting. The original image is called City Street by DMSpotts10.
This was the initial stage of the experience. I took the original image and placed it into a landscape oriented workspace.
Ok, so the first major thing I needed to do was go through the image and remove things that I didn't want in the image. Cleaning the shot. Removed things like parked cars, pedestrians, banners and lights.
Now I had the idea for a concept of a post earth-quake type catastrophic scene, so at this stage I tore the image apart and did some resizing to show more of the buildings. I also added some things like graffiti, smashed building windows, changed the colour of the tree and desaturated the overall colours in the scene.
In this step, I added the look of earth below the street level as well as some cracks in the road and a car wreck.
Started working on the distant background element of the scene. I brought in some additional buildings and arranged them in a "ruiny" kind of way.
In this stage of the matte, I added some thick cloud for the background and some mist around the foreground area.
The final step was colour-grading the scene, and voila!
Here we go again! So, yet another attempt at digital painting. I am really happy how this one turned out, mainly due to the fact that I feel like I did a better job at attaining the likeness of the person I was painting; and yes, the person in question is the awesome Gregory Peck, who will always be the lovable Atticus Finch to me. I felt like I was a lot quicker painting this one too, although there's clearly aspects that I need to keep working on, but hey, that's all part of the process, and all part of the fun!
I've been getting a real rush from painting, it's fantastic - seriously, I didn't realize just how much I enjoy drawing/painting until of late when I started doing it again... it's such a zen thing to do. I guess with all the busyness in my life and creative time usually devoted to computer graphics or cartoony vector drawings, I never gave much thought and attention to just sitting down and drawing or painting like I use to when I was a kid and just working away at something until it looked nice. Good times... good times.
Can't wait to start working on the next one. I'm tossing up between doing another man, or a woman again. I have an idea of who I'll do, either way, so just have to wait and see!
My Attempt at Gregory Peck.
The Gregory Peck Reference Image (from To Kill a Mockingbird).
So 2008 was the year that I started my 3D animation course at the SAE Institute in East Perth, and as a way to prepare myself for the experience I decided to have a real go at creating a 3D character (or atleast a character bust in this case). This was one of those real great learning experiences which not only fueled my motivation and passion for computer graphics but also really (fine) tuned my skills at the time.
I had always wanted to develop lifelike characters and achieving photo-realism [be it computer graphics or drawing/painting] is always something that facinates me. I'm a huge fan of the work of 3D artist Francisco Cortina, ever since Final Fantasy: Spirits Within and the Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris and also 3D Artist Olivier Ponsonnet who is just amazing. Their work was the inspiration and motivation behind me really having a go and aiming for something I've never achieved before with 3D.
I remember getting to this stage of the modelling process and giggling like a little school girl. I was really excited with how the face was turning out, it was better than any previous face I had modelled and was eager to see just how well it would turn out on completion.
I was really psyched at this stage. I had decided that I'd just model to the chest region so I could focus all my effort and attention on the face.
A view of the character's topology.
Here, I was focusing on nailing the look of the eyes and brows. The skin shader was looking very worse for wear at this stage though.
A shot of the profile with skin texture and an updated skin shader.
A front view of the bust with textures. At this stage I believe I was still playing around with lighting and getting a more believable skin look with the shader (using Sub-surface scattering).
After some messing around (mostly with the hair dynamics in 3ds Max), I ended up with this final image. Honestly I quickly started disliking this image, since the pose was basically static, emotionless and the hair turned out terrible, not to mention it all just felt flat and boring.
Now, about mid-way through the year, during my animation studies, I had learnt a lot of really cool things that I could do in Maya (the 3D software that we were learning on), and so I decided to re-visit this character I had done at the beginning of the year. After spending some time transfering everything relevent from 3ds Max over to Maya, I began to make enhancements.
One of the new test renders of the character with a revised skin shader and lighting setup.
I created a rig for the character so that I could pose it, which also gave me the opportunity to animate it if I wanted. This was the same excitment I had before when I initially started modelling her at the beginning!
Another test render, this time with a bit of a pose.
After some further work (hair, designer specs and a baseball cap), this was a portrait I made using the character. I felt a lot more satisfied with the way this one turned out, it had more life to it.
And because I could, I decided to have a bit of a play with her and animate her saying a few things that I could use later for my show reel. And with the help of the wonderful Natalie Van Sistine [who gave the puppet it's voice], she came truely alive!
In all, this was a really interesting journey of learning new things and applying all that stuff to be able to create something [in my opinion] quite cool!
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