Change of mood!

So I woke up this morning and took another look at the work I've done so far on the illustration. I didn't really think I could do another one without making Roger wait a few more days so I decided to attempt to finish this one. I did some minor tweaking to the poses and settled on a position for the sword. I'm not 100% convinced that the focuses of the illustration works out but I'm feeling better about it. Also, I'm starting to notice that the kind of purple-teal tiles I was working on at the bottom actually made the picture feel reallly flowery. It feels like a flower field in the middle of a dungeon. Anyway, heres the final that I've sent:

To be scrapped

While I was waiting on some crits I kept working into areas that I felt were fairly safe. I took a break from the image and came back and I was totally aghast. The poses are -awful-. I'm scrapping it and starting with thumbnails tomorrow. I really like the colors and the some areas but the poses are just so much of a wreak it might be better just starting over. I don't know, maybe I can just do major adjustments to the image. I worry that I might come across a conflict of interest though if I have to repaint some of the nicer areas.

Test Image

Image Description

Location: A dungeon room.
Action: A large and powerful Troll swings his sword in a broad arc.
Focus: A tiny Gnome is nimbly ducking under the swing.
Mood: Little guy makes good!

This is the assignment I was given by Roger Chamberlain, art director of SOE. I've done about three redos of the assignment so far and this is the latest version I've been working on. I feel like I'm struggling a bit because I'm not used to have multiple figures in an environment like this. Its definitely going to be something I'm going to practice with this summer. Because I've been looking at this picture for so long, I'm worried that theres some things I'm just not seeing. Also, because the action of the picture is supposed to be the gnome ducking under a moving sword, I'm not sure how I want to illustrate that. The sword right now is a placeholder to however I decide to do it, but at the moment, theres a slight motion blur to it. My issue right now is whether it looks like the gnome is ducking or if they are simply posed together.

Last post for today... I think

Phew... I'm exhausted, but pretty proud of my work output. It was nice to be on my game it seems today and yesterday. Here is the final of the environment. Had a lot of fun with playing around with my brushes to simulate the leaves. The floor of the picture is probably the least attractive of the image. But I don't know what to do with it. I was trying to do water, but its rather brushy I think.

Lots of posts today

Moving on to the environment part of the illustration final I decided to redo the painting. The basic location is the same but I wanted to tweak the perspective to try to increase the vertical appearance of the environment. Separating the background from the foreground was a very good accident on my part. I think its must better than the sketch I had previously. I've been using some adjustment layers to augment the painting temperature wise and get a good gradient going on. I'm still figuring out how to do the wood "windows" along the left side of the painting. I'd like them to feel like stained glass but to be sure to keep them looking natural.

New Finished(?) Version

I've put in more detailing into the face and tried to flesh out the roots a bit. It was hard to get a kind of bark texture on the roots because I wanted to keep them so thin, with the ruddy colors I used they actually started looking very fleshy and "war of the worlds blood veins"-esque. I started using a multitude of special effect layers to layer on top of the original and try to pull a more gritty worked into image. Also, I had forgotten that the work was for the CGchallenge which was themed around the circumstances of human-alien relationships. Originally I had then put in a McDonalds bag but it looked so much like an afterthought. My friend, Veronica Franklin was helping to critique the drawing too and she mentioned that it looked like he ought to be interacting with something. This was before the McDonalds addition and she had actually suggested something like a firefly off of the top of her head. But I decided to incorporate the McDonalds theme further and integrated a french fry into the image. This is actually the image I ended up submitting for the CGchallenge. Maybe its because I was overlaying some photography elements though, but the image seems fairly compressed in areas. It seems really bothersome to me but it must be some illusion or other thats making me see compression artifacts.

Heres an editted version with some small tweaks to the highlights and shadows as suggested by Bryan.

From Scratch

So, Bryan was not impressed with my previous work. His e-mail hit me pretty hard. After I recovered I went back to photoshop and redid the alien. I think what I was missing from some of my pictures was that I wasn't looking at something while drawing. I'd look at artwork before and after, but I didn't have some kind of inspirational piece somewhere on the screen where I could pull ideas from. So I pulled up one of the artist's personal site links up that I have and propped up one of his images on my other screen as I worked. I decided it was easiest for me to deal with a drawing that grew out from black, it'd let me focus the painting more and give me a better basis to do the kind of silhouette drawing I like. I definitely was looser when doing this rendition, I think I had a kind of "fuck it" attitude at this point. But we'll see if that works for me or not.

Work in progress

Heres an update on the alien, following Bryan's advice I've re-established the alien's silhouette and I've extended it out to include some of the branches to take advantage of their shapes. I've also thinned out the roots of the alien's legs though I'm not sure I've recaptured the kind of centipede-motion of the first sketch.

Further Developments

I got as far as I could with the character design without dropping asleep on my keyboard. I decided to keep the alien much more tree-like and I started playing with the branches and roots, making them look a bit more like an octopus' tentacles. I also think clothes was the easiest way to make them look intelligent, detract from their "treant" appearance, and elevate them as more mysterious, "How do they put on clothes!?!"

I also started the environment study. I was struck by inspiration when I was talking to Ellen earlier and decided I wanted the environment to be designed as a "cathedral of light." Which makes sense because the aliens are so plant-like that I wanted to flood their environment with light. I think the stark lights would also create very interesting speckling effects on the floor and in combination with the alien's own foliage.

I started looking up bizarre trees and I found I really like banyan trees, particularly their root systems and their odd behavior of growing supporting root structures from their branches. I thought this would be perfect to create columns or pillars in my environment. I also was interested in trying to recreate a cathedral's stained glass windows by creating intertwining branches and vines to create port-holes along the walls. A few wells of light above water fountains completes the environment. Since its 2:00am I think I'd like to sleep a bit before looking at the environment again. I'd like to come up with more ideas for it. I'll probably think about drawing out individual elements to give them more design-attention and to better illustrate their structure. The light well is particularly important I think because right now it gets lost in the stark value-image I have here.

Oh, here are some banyan tree images from google for good measure.