Lost One and Cyclops

Hello again, blogosphere. Here are a few things that I've been working on lately.


Here's the progress on this guy. I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to go with the design, and I was simply getting tired of painting on this, so I'm taking a short break from it. I'll return to it soon, though.


Here's another form of the same character. I mentioned the concept of Aura's in this game's gameplay a couple of posts ago. This is the main character with a green aura, which roughly corresponds to the element of earth. In this form he has an earthy/greenish skin tone, a more muscular physique, a greater number of more highly pronounced protuberances, and a somewhat exaggerated bone structure (see the cheekbones and knuckles). I'm unsure what to do with the lower body.


Another character from this same world. His name is Oog, and he's a cyclops, sort of. In my initial thumbnails, he only had one eye, but as I painted him I decided it'd be cool to give him a deformed skull with a sunken and atrophied second eye. There are going to be several related characters/creatures with a similar eye arrangement. They are one of the main factions of antagonists in the story.

Coming up soon, another dump of life drawings, and some self portraits.

Footshuffle!

A silly pixelated animation of myself, doing my signature dance move.

Lost One, elemental form

The Lost One again. In the game I was making, you begin as the rather pathetic being that you saw in the last few posts. Over the course of the game, though, you come across different abilities and upgrades, including objects called Auras, which change your physical form and allow you control over a certain element. The first Aura you acquire is the Red Aura, which changes your form into a winged, more diabolical entity, and allows you control over fire.
Obviously a WIP. The wings are very challenging to paint, especially the "hand" portion. Hands are always hard to paint, anyway.

Lost One 2

As I often do, in my haste to share my work online I posted it before it was quite finished. So, above, you have the same thing as yesterday, but with some more interesting textures and features on the head, shoulders, and elbows, some slightly brightened values on the upper torso, and some corrected proportions that were slightly off before. Below, obviously, is the same character clothed. Looking at the vest/shirt thing the right version is wearing, it seems to make his character a bit too...badass. I'll have to rethink that. Maybe just a ragged shawl of some sort.

Lost One

I don't know if any of you are familiar with the RPG Maker programs. If you don't know about them, they are PC programs that allow you to make very basic RPG video games pretty easily, and more advanced games if you work at it and can work your way around the program's limitations. I played quite a bit with various versions of RPG Maker when I was in high school. I never finished a game that I started making, since even a very basic game requires a hell of a lot of time and work, but I started several. Recently, on a whim, I opened up RPG Maker once again and played with my old games a bit. The passage of time allowed me to see the old worlds that I created in a new light and become interested in them again, so I'm resurrecting some of my old characters.


I spend a few hours today painting the being above. I really like the rendering technique I used for this. I used soft, textured brushes, which is a nice change from the hard edges I've been mostly using lately.
The being above, name uncertain, is the main character of one of the games I started making. The characters of this game were initially inspired by the characters of the SNES game Demon's Crest (screenshot below). I ripped many of the graphics I used from that game as well. However, once I started working on the game, the characters and storyline changed immensely from the material that originally inspired them. The storyline, in particular, bloated out into grotesque and incomprehensible proportions; I had to make it epic, you see. The storyline was a mostly senseless mess, far too big and complicated, and littered with plot holes and unanswered questions. Telling a story like that, obviously, is difficult, and that's partially why I gave up on this project.
Anyway, if anyone cares, let me tell you a bit about this character. The game opens with him awakening from some sort of life-support tank, with a computerized voice giving him instructions that he's too groggy and confused to fully understand. The only message that gets through to him is that he is expected to seek out and retrieve a being known as the Jester. Before he can completely figure out what's going on, though, disaster strikes, and the computer system that had been instructing him shuts down. Terribly confused, he makes his way out of the underground facility in which he awoke, and almost immediately encounters the Jester, who tries to kill him and then flees. The only thing he knows is that he needs to retrieve the Jester, so he gives chase. He finds that the outside world consists of rocky "islands" of land floating above a sea of clouds, and that the land is populated by demon-like entities. As he pursues the Jester, he gradually learns that this strange world is actually Earth, and that its demonic inhabitants were once normal humans. What could have happened to have transformed the planet in such a way? Just who is the Jester, and what is his purpose in pursuing him?
Like I said, the story is a mess, and I didn't quite know the answers to those questions as I was trying to tell it. Maybe one day I'll untangle that mess, and try to tell the story again. Or maybe I'll just draw some of the characters and leave it at that.


In the game, he starts off as the rather weak and pathetic being you see in the top image. As you progress, you unlock more of his powers and abilities. I'll draw alternate versions of him to show that transformation.

Figure Drawings

Here's the final batch of figure drawings from last term. The new term began on Monday, and I'm continuing with figure drawing, so the flow of these will continue.


The cloth folds on the above drawing were fun.


A foreshortened study. I was surprised by how awkward this was. I had thought that I had the drawing experience to trust my measurements, but still my brain kept insisting that it was wrong.


Another foreshortened study, this time of my own self. The assignment was to draw your own legs, foreshortened, so I drew a drawing of myself drawing myself. Meta-drawing, I call it. I think I nearly glimpsed infinity when I did this. : P



The drawing above was the first time I'd ever drawn a model with a boob job. And let me tell you, it was obvious.


A very large drawing from earlier in the term. It was too large for me to take it home and photograph it any sooner.

Dragon WIP 2

I've been spending some time with this every day for the past few days, trying to get it to cooperate. Until this afternoon, it refused to do so. Cooperate, that is. I couldn't quite create a satisfactory backdrop, and the lighting situation was being troublesome. There are two light sources: the somewhat weak, warm light of the setting sun, and the hot purple-white light of the dragon's breath weapon. Now, I have some decent cloud forms blocked it, to be blended and softened later. I stumbled upon the solution to the lighting situation by playing with the blending mode of the breath weapon layer and changing it to color dodge, which made it quite a bit hotter and brighter, which therefore allowed me to put some brighter highlights on the creature's body. This increases the creature's sense of mass, and the hot, bright colors and values reinforce it as the focal point of the picture.
The structure was obviously made in SketchUp. Whether I make its base visible in the picture, or have it extend up from below the bottom of the image, I haven't decided. I haven't decided if there will be more buildings yet. Probably, since this scene is supposed to be taking place over a city. There will also be some more dragons and some fighter planes in the background, though I haven't decided where to place them yet.

I would have waited and posted a slightly more developed WIP than this, but just as I was getting going my tablet and Photoshop decided not to play with each other nicely, and I wanted to post something before I restarted my computer.

Guncraft Character: Feather Man

This is the third member of the main trio of characters that I'm developing for my Guncraft world, the other two being Hawk Girl and Skullface. I really need to figure out the names of these characters soon, because these silly placeholder names are becoming an integral part of their identity in my mind.
Anyway, Feather Man is an aged protagonist, a man of incredible bravery and spiritual strength. He's a member of a mostly-vanished tribe known as the Sky People, a counterpart to the Earth People mentioned in my Manticore portrait, of whom Skullface traces his descent. Birds, and especially eagles, are of great spiritual importance to the Sky People, so Feather Man has golden eagle feathers tied to his hair and his rifle, as well as an eagle skull hanging from his neck. These are talismanic objects, increasing his spiritual strength and enhancing his Vocal abilities. His tattoos (which, more than anything else in this image, are subject to redesign and change) represent the hills and valleys of the earth (the dark lines) and the sky above it (the light lines). His choice of weaponry furthers the eagle symbolism. The eagle chooses its prey carefully, from a distance, and once it dives to catch its prey it is committed, for it is difficult to fly back up and dive again, and by then the prey will have fled. His gun is an old-timey breach-loading rifle which must be painstakingly reloaded after each shot; therefore, each shot must be taken wisely and carefully, just like the eagle diving for its prey.
As stated, this character fills out the main trio of my Guncraft characters. He and Skullface represent opposing forces. Skullface represents youth, idealism, war, vengeance, etc., while Feather Man represents age, compromise, peace, forgiveness, etc. Hawk Girl, as my best friend in the world put it when I was explaining the story to her, represents the human element of the story.
Feather Man's theme song is Ceremony, a guitar instrumental by Joe Satriani. Youtube link to the album version: [link] . I think it shows that there is much more to this character than meets the eye.
On a related note, Skullface also has a theme song, Hill of the Skull, also by Joe Satriani: [link] . I've been keeping my ear out for a theme song for Hawk Girl, but so far haven't found anything fitting.

As far as the technical aspects of making this image go, I was sort of experimenting with a new rendering technique in this image. I used only hard-edged shapes, not blending the values at all. I think this had a nice effect in the face, making it nice and craggy and blocky, but I think it was somewhat less successful on the rest of the body. But it's hard to see underneath the layer effects and textures that I put over the original rendering anyway, so whatever.

This man's face formed the basis for Feather Man's features.


Feather Man's feather-laden hair is based on this man, Last Horse, below.


I have no idea who these photos belong to. Sorry.

Manticore Portrait

In my time alone I visited the ruins of Pueh. I walked through the abandoned roads and took shelter in the houses that had not held anyone since before the Grandfathertime. I hunted and foraged and spent time with my own thoughts. One day, as the winds were turning and growing colder, I met a Manticore.
Because they are both beast and man, the Manticores are revered by the Earth People, for beasts are truer to the Way of the Earth than men, and their Ghroi more powerful. This Manticore walked on things that were both hands and feet and paws. It panted and growled like a beast yet moved its lips as if muttering to itself. Though it walked on four legs, it was tall enough to look me in the eye. I looked back, and because I did not make obeisance as a man should when he faces a Manticore, it struck me in the face, opening my cheek. I was furious, but also terrified, and I bent and pressed my face to the Earth. The Manticore stood for a long time before it was satisfied with my abasement and left. It was then that I knew that I was wrong to hate my people for giving my sister to the Manticores. I should hate the Manticores for taking her.

***

This was fun fun fun to paint, and even better, it broke me out of the art funk I've been in for the past few weeks.
This is a manticore, and it lives in the same world as my Guncraft characters (though a few centuries earlier). Michael Jaecks [link] put the idea in my head to paint a manticore, and several weeks ago a unique concept and idea for the manticore came to me. I plan to do a larger painting of this creature, showing its entire body as well as its native landscape.
The italic text above is a snippet of a short story I'm writing. I'll post it in its entirety once I do a more complete and involved painting of a manticore.

Beatific Dragon Sketches

On ConceptArt.org there is an activity called Creature of the Week. As the name suggests, each week a new topic is given, and anyone registered to that site may post their own interpretation of the topic. This week's topic was Beatific Dragon. While jumping from article to article in Wikipedia, as I sometimes do, I came across the Mute Swan, and thought it would make a pretty sweet basis for a holy dragon design.
Here is what I've sketched for it so far.


In addition to swans, I also looked at some dinosaur and iguanid lizard reference. The iguanid reference doesn't really show in the design at all, but it is definitely quite dinosaurian. Someone has already commented that there's quite a bit of Oviraptor to its design.


After choosing which design I liked (which didn't take very long) and roughing in a color scheme, I drew it in the more interesting pose above. And that's as far as I've gotten. I tried a few backgrounds, but they weren't working, so for now there's just a blank white background. Because of schoolwork pressures (next week being finals week), I highly doubt I'll get this done in time for the Monday deadline, but I do intend to finish it. I've found digital painting to be somewhat awkward recently, though, so what I think I'll do is finish a large paper drawing, photograph it, and then colorize it digitally. Or something like that. We'll see.

Figure Drawing 2009, episode whatever

Here's another batch of my figure drawings.




A few weeks ago, we had to demonstrate our knowledge of skeletal and muscular anatomy by changing parts of the figure into mechanical forms that are analogous to the muscles and bones of those parts of the body. This was very fun. It's not a serious piece of mechanical design at all, though.


Another assignment a few weeks ago was to do a study of some draped cloth. This was as far as I got on mine. I'm going to do it over with a smaller and simpler setup.


I did this drawing earlier this week. This is the only part of the drawing worth showing. The head doesn't really look like the model, but I think I did a good job modeling the form there.


In the previous drawing, we were urged to go dark, to use a lot of compressed charcoal to put a lot of black on the drawing. In the drawing above, we had the opposite goal: go as light as possible. So, this drawing is rendered only using a white charcoal pencil and the tone of the paper. There's some regular graphite pencil in there, remnants of the initial sketch. I think it may be my best, or at least one of my best, figures so far.

The face behind the skull

Recently I began thinking about what Skullface looked like without his skull headdress on. Once I had the basic idea, I sketched out several variations and modifications of it, just as I did for Hawk Girl. He's a very strong-featured Native American guy, deep eye sockets, heavy eyelids, long nose, etc. The ones with the stars next to them are the ones I like the best, while the one with two stars next to it is a combination of the other two.
Once I had a good idea in my mind of what this guy looked like, I went on a search for Indian men with facial features that I could twist for the purposes of evil. The following images proved especially useful.

Eddie Plenty Holes, a Lakota man with an awesome name, photographed around 1899. His features were very close to what I was looking for. I just had to make them more hostile and add a touch of dark amusement.



The strong features, heavy eyelids, and somewhat defiant expression of this young man, photographed by Edward S. Curtis, also proved useful.



This Masai man also had elements of the facial features I was going for, as well as an amused (and even ambiguously malevolent) facial expression. Unfortunately, this image has been sitting in my reference folder since forever ago, so I don't know where it came from, or who to credit it to.



Lastly, unrelated to the rest of this blog post, there will be no Creature Feature this week. It's Saturday, the day when I usually do Creature Features, and this is my first post since the last Creature Feature. I was very unproductive as far as personal art goes this week. If I have a week where I produce little or no art to post here, I don't really see the point in logging on just to make a post about somebody else's art. This blog is about my own artistic progress, with the Creature Feature being just an occasional supplement to that. My own art first, Creature Feature second. No art, no Creature Feature.

Creature Feature #5: Nemo Ramjet

This week's Creature Feature, as the title suggests, is about Nemo Ramjet, one of the most interesting and creative illustrators and creature designers today.
Like Alex Ries last week, Nemo Ramjet does a lot of speculative creature designing, designing creatures and animals with evolutionary processes in mind. Let's take a look at a few of his projects.



The above images show imagined future forms of humanity. The second two images are from his "All Tomorrows" project, a future history of mankind following the next several hundred million years of our progress and evolution, failures and triumphs. It's a powerful work, and I'll provide a link to it as soon as Nemo's website goes back up. The first "All Tomorrows" image shows a few variations of an insect-eating form of humanity, while the second image shows a form of humanity that has evolved to become modular and cell-based; the being pictured is composed of several different humans. The first of these images shows another speculative future human, but is unrelated to his "All Tomorrows" project. As you can see, the human form is rich with creature design possibilities.
Also, Nemo Ramjet is one of the few creature designers that I know of to incorporate the reproductive organs as design elements.



The above two images, and the first image of this post, are from Nemo Ramjet's most well-known project: Snaiad. One of the most fascinating and creative creature design projects out there, Snaiad documents the lifeforms of another world. It is richly detailed and incredibly well thought out. Like many of Alex Ries' aliens in the last Creature Feature, these animals are all derived from a common ancestor, and their variation is due to modifications of a basic set of features. The most notable feature of Snaiadi animals is that they have two heads. The first head carries the jaws, sense organs, and genitalia (yes, the genitalia), while the second head holds the creature's actual mouth. The biology and evolutionary history of these creatures is very detailed and well worked out, so I urge you to visit that website and have a look.



The creatures above are from another project of the busy and versatile Nemo Ramjet. According to Richard Dawkin's "meme" theory, ideas spread, flourish, and die according to the same evolutionary principles as organic lifeforms. These beautiful creatures are animalistic representations of memes. The third one weaves a powerful argument around itself in self-defense, the argument represented by a series of gossamer glyphs. The fourth one is the embodiment of a catchy tune. Some of these creature have fearsome jaws, with which to destroy the arguments and logic of other memetic fauna. These are beautiful, fascinating creatures, and a testament to the possibilities of more abstract creature design.

The images below show some additional creature designs by Nemo Ramjet. The second image in particular is one of my favorite creature design images ever; you can see it in larger resolution on his DeviantArt gallery. The third image shows two aliens from another of his projects, this one about the life that develops on the inside of a Dyson Sphere (an artificial sphere built around a star). The fourth image is a drawing of a Pteranodon based on the work of David Peters, a paleontologist with some truly absurd ideas about the morphology of pterosaurs. The final image shows a speculative land-dwelling descendant of an antiarch placoderm, an ancient form of armored fish.





Relevant links:
Nemo Ramjet's website: It's currently down, but as soon as it's up I'll post a link!
Snaiad Homepage: http://www.snaiad.com/
Nemo Ramjet's DeviantArt: http://nemo-ramjet.deviantart.com/

All images in this post are (c) Nemo Ramjet.

Figure Drawing 2009, Episode 4

In no particular order.