REEF- Character project themed around the Reef.

Mood Boards and Research.
This project is a fairly open one and its based on characters which is where I see myself specializing. So far I'm really enjoying it, and aim to have a interesting character concept by the end of it.
Right now I want my character to be human, so I'm looking into the creatures you find on the reef and what natural resources for clothing, armour and weapons he or she may have available to them and how that could influence their appearance in my designs.

After some initial research I created a few silhouette concepts building upon that reasearch, aiming my focus at the outfit of the individual.

Development of fourth design & colour tests.

Cool idea's that didnt work!

 This painting was an experiment of mine a few months ago. I wanted to practice lighting effects that i had never tried before, especially in digital paint as I am relatively new to it still.
I started and left this painting in one night, having decided that the pose threw off the over all image too much to be continued with. It was completely unintentional for the sword to appear phallic, having worked fairly speedily I didn't sit back and examine the position of the arms earlier enough to want to consider removing them and starting again. So i went with it and focused more and the use of colour and lighting in the image, rather than the actual composition.






It was painted it Gimp 2.6 freeware as i didn't have Adobe Photoshop at the time and have only just recently acquired a copy.


My main focus with the painting ended up being the sword, and his face. I originally wanted to convey a very menacing and agressive feeling from this character, and no face shows that more in my opinion than a snarling wolf or dogs face. So he ended up being a kind of werewolf, which was fun to do because i had never drawn one before so made it interesting blending the human anatomy with the wolf's animal fur and face.

The sword was more difficult than I had thought it might be, and gave me quite a bit of grief!
I was a complete novice when it comes to painting fire and intense flames. I game myself more difficulties with this painting by working without any reference material intially. In the end I wasn't happy with the cartoonish Red and orange flaming sword i was becoming, so i decided to opt for a more realistic look and found an image of a coal fire. This is what game me the basis for the colour pallet on the sword. Which i am quite pleased with. Although I would reduce the blue flame percentage and add more cooler flames to justify the orange highlights on the character.

I mean to do something like this all over again, and use what I learned in the making of this painting to improve upon it in the new one. ;)

Concepts- The Behemoth.

Behemoth

This is a colour development from a series of concept sketches I worked on a while back. They were never used so I thought i'd spruce them up. I always wondered what my Behemoth would look like fleshed out...
This was a 10 minute quickie, but I hope to develop the concept further in future. I have always been interested in Insects and animals, and my inspiration for this was a collection of pictures of moths and Other  insects, which i dissected and rearranged to form one cohesive creature. Then i worked from that collage and rendered a pencil sketch of my concept.
My intention was to give the creature colossal scale to enhance the threatening anatomy it was sporting, and give it a otherworldly sense of belonging.
It may scare some and look cuddly to others, but that's where the phobias come it I guess. My girlfriends mom thinks Moths are devil spawn, but i know not all do ;)
It was not intended to be an aggressor, but more of a docile giant, when scaled next to the puny human. Flipped the scales you might say...

Dhurik the Dwarf.

This was a random painting I decided to do when I got back on Sunday because I felt I was being very unproductive and it was about time I did some art after a lazy Christmas...
I loosely knew I wanted to draw a fantasy Dwarf Character, D&D sorta style.. but with my own twist.
just over two hours later this had emerged. I don't normally like to use any kind of reference, instead I try to challenge my memory of shape, form and anatomy at first. so I just set about scribbling in Gimp 2.6 Painter.

 

  It started off as a pile up of about five layer, starting with the loose line art to guide adding tone.  This is a rough lay out of the stages I went through thanks to me saving quite frequently, I wouldn't normally be able to do this as i don't tend to think that far ahead lol...

As you can see on the end there. I added a few more layer in overlay mode and layered on some colour which worked nicely and took only 20 minutes-ish. This was the first time i'd gone about painting this way, starting totally in grey-scale then adding colour later.

 

I am quite pleased at how it turned out, for a quick painting. I mean to do this again but perhaps with less fantasy themed material.

Personal Gaming History: Part Two! 2003-2011

 A.K.A. The dark days of my “Academic” schooling ;)

I’ll just talk about the clear winners for me in each category and when I first played them. My first and all time favourite PC game or (CRPG) was “Baldur’s Gate.” Got given it for the family Windows 95 pc in 2002. This game profoundly influenced my choice of games in the future. Although it took a couple of failed attempts to get into it, once I got the hang of it there was no greater CRPG personally. It was developed by Bioware and released by Interplay Entertainment in 1998.

The game takes place in the Forgotten Realms, a high fantasy campaign setting, using modified Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) 2nd edition rules. That’s part of the reason it was a challenging game for me to enter the PC games genre with. After Baldur’s gate, years later I bought and played its sequel and subsequent spin offs “Icewind dale I & II”, using the same Infinity Engine. Since then I’ve been comparing every RPG back to it and hoping for another sequel from Bioware. 

My next transition weirdly some might say was from PS1, to Xbox original. I had seen a friend playing Halo Combat Evolved and when he let me have a go on it, I was totally sold. That was all I wanted for Christmas that year, and with the gods luck I bagged one under the tree. “Turok Evolution” was one of the first games I owned on it that I really liked. Mainly because you could use poison arrow bows and kill all manner of Dino’s. It also had great couch multiplayer with friends and the simple fact you could kill each other as Raptors meant it was WIN. 

After “Turok” I managed to bag a copy of eventually “Halo: Combat Evolved”, developed by “Bungie © 2001.” Now that was really the first Sci-fi shooter I obsessed over. To this day it is probably one of the best shooters I’ve ever played and that rank will stay for sure. It was so good for a few simple reasons. It was fresh, it had a great story to it, great graphics for the time and it was oh so fun. “Halo 2” took over when it arrived because of the new expansive multiplayer and incredible graphics but even with that, I still revisit Halo one and not two.

Just after Halo 2 came out, and once I’d played it to death with my friends. I wanted to get back into RPG’s remembering the days playing Baldur’s Gate. Mum had just got a new family Pc and I had the Xbox, so I started to search around and began to collect the gems that I’d missed over the years.
That was when I discovered “The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind Game of The Year Edition.” Developed by “Bethesda Game Studios”, and published by “Bethesda Softworks and Ubisoft © 2003.” I decided to get it on Xbox because that was what I was most familiar with but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The game was a beast. Mammoth in size and so detailed that it mind boggled me at first. Overwhelmed, I abandoned it for a while, initially put off by the seemingly dated visuals.

But not wanting to feel like I’d wasted my money, I returned to it and really sunk my teeth in. 450 hours or more later I think I pulled them out. I had discovered the mesmerising depth and beauty of the “Elder scrolls” world and from that time onwards, I had a new favourite game above all others. The sheer quantity and variety of Items had me trekking for hours and hours across the entire map scouring every inch of fogged map, and the difficulty lead to countless reloads which only hooked me more. That was the game that really highlighted my personality in RPG’s as an obsessive explorer and compulsive hoarder. Lol

Another RPG that I was massively into at the time was “Champions of Norrath: Relms of Everquest” on PS2 produced by “snowblind  Studios ©2004”. It is a hack and slash action RPG designed to be played single player or up to 4 player with friends as I mostly did. It was great because we could all meet up at a house and bring our memory cards to import our single player characters then go questing together. Simple but addictive fun, and was made more addictive by the limitless variety of randomly generated items and unique rare items to collect. It had a sequel in 2005 which was essentially the same but bigger game and more characters. It was so much fun and probably the best PS2 game I ever played.

Along came the Xbox 360 in 2005, though I didn’t get mine till 2006. There are many titles that I like on the 360 platform, and I have quite a collection, but there are a few that stand out. “Gears of war” being one big sore thumb. I got gears of war a month after its release on November 17^th 2006 along with my Xbox 360 for Christmas. And that had to be the best Christmas I had had in a long time.

It was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, or at least no-one I knew in terms of the fast tactical squad based combat, dark macabre colour pallet and level designs and the insane gore. I loved every ounce of that game and must have racked up hundreds of hours online play with friends. This was around the end of my GCSE’s… I think it may have made an impact, I know it did on my Art! My sculpture went from facial studies to, to Full blown demon skulls!  To this day it is the 5^th most selling Xbox 360 title.

“The Elder scrolls4: Oblivion” was the next most memorable game I played on the Xbox 360. I didn’t get it when it was released in March 2006, but got the Game of the year edition in 2007 which included both major DLC expansions, the same as Morrowind’s game of the year edition did. Like its predecessor I fell in love with it, not at first but soon after adjusting to the changes from Morrowind. And it commenced the easy task of devouring hundreds of hours of my life until I had played it to absolute completion. I have to say; I think as a game, Morrowind was more in depth, believable and creative than Oblivion. So I prefer it, but Oblivion sure was perdy!

well sometimes... o.0

That about brings me to Present day. Over the last couple of years ive focused more on my art and thats only increasing. So I have amassed many more games than I have time to play sadly, and become more of a collector. But names like "The Witcher" and "The Witcher 2: Assassin of kings" stand out, along with another favorite older CRPG I forgot to mention "Neverwinter Nights". And now, most recently Skyrim...  I wont talk about that one now, save it for another blog! SO where would I like to see games heading in the future? e.g. what would I like to be working on I guess? Well, I'd love love to see more thought put into the simple aspects of a game that made the old classics like Crash and spiro so fun. It would be an interesting blend with next generation graphics I'm sure, but perhaps now that technology is heading towards the immersion experience of free control and ditching the control pad, we could see those fun aspects being re applied with a whole new feel. 

But really I just want to see Morrowind remade even bigger with next generation graphics and online capability! XD that's the game I wanna work on. Thanks for reading, I hope it was interesting in some way at least.