New shit!

Sorry everybody, for the sparseness of the posts, but i have been veeeeery busy getting started with the new job. Ive been working like crazy, but i cant show anything that ive done for work, NDA and all that.

I have had time to squeeze out these guys for myself. I feel like i am progressing in my painting skills, and am looking forward to spending more time on personal things like these on the future.

P.S. thanks Eth for the critique, I know I tend to put a crotch flap and leather pockets on everything I draw, heheh, everybody has their standbys... I'll try to keep an eye out for that kind of thing in the future.

some enviro and vehicle studies

I felt I should put these up since they are something I really need to work on. if you have any help to offer i'd be incredibly thankful!  Here they are -..... and im ashamed to say that the ships look like a mixture of starwars with disney's atlantis .... =_=

but i did get to practice some more with metal and learned a heck of a lot from these pieces, so not an over all flop.

 and then I realized I couldn't paint clouds.

heres a try at dynamic composition.. by the way thats a small boy in the center... not an amorphous blob... or enormous pigeon.

so thats all....but stay tuned for more studies, there's so many things to be accomplished by march!

:D

in celebration of studios!!!!

a work in progress, how can I make this piece look more dynamic and..... less fuzzy? it's like her face looks pixelated from farther away.
:/

mood in concept art

So after being enamored by all the work that you guys are doing and feeling a little sick and frustrated with the illustration stuff I've been doing I decided to do this 2 hour job. It's inspired by a discussion my brother and I were having about video games we'd like to see. I was talking about how much fun it was to have warthog skirmishes in Halo 2 back in the day and how I'd love to play a game that is basically Mad Max/Smuggler's Run/FPS. I'd love to be the player who either gets to drive across desert highways hunting down a bounty or be a sniper on the back of the vehicle picking off anybody who might try to get there first.
I don't think it expresses a whole lot in terms of design, unfortunately but I guess I was hoping I could create something that conveys distinct mood, perhaps? The sort of art you might do at the very very beginning of pre-production. Do you guys have any good examples of these kinds of concept pieces? Or what do you think makes an effective mood-evoking concept?

I tried to give you guys harsh critiques this week! Please do the same for me!
eth.

heres another batch

such great and inspiring posts you guys! everything looks so good! XD
heres some stuff i've been doing the past couple of weeks, its not much but its something :)
heres a piece i've been toying with, i've titled it 'wonderlands bastards' and im hoping the characters are apparent.  but I was going for a small unit of gun men patrolling the urban streets in a sort of space age, grunge, post apocolyptic feel.  Does that come across at all? also, I think I'm going to lop off that caterpillar, she looks like she doesn't belong in there at all, and I need to figure out a jabberwocky and a mad hatter.
But the biggest success with this piece was exploring shapes instead of just the line art.  It really helped me come up with the costumes and took less than half the time to get the characters somewhat rendered out! SCORE! :D
-anyway, let me know if anything stands out to you guys and heres the lineup....
1 caterpillar ,2 white rabbit, 3 dee, 4 alice, 5 dum, 6 chesire cat, 7 queen of hearts
-took around 13 hours

 a speed painting-3 hrs...........thats such a long time... :(
i'll keep practicing with speed painting.

 also, eric I did what you said to try and added a flag to break up the symetry and actually DID add a diagnol line of shadow... but it looks non-exsistant in these :/
i'll go and make it bolder.

              
                     also, what do you guys think? mask or no mask?

Im not dead yet!

So too feel guilty about not posting here, i've been super busy making things for my internship( which i cant show) and finding a place to live, and working at petsmart and not getting killed on the freeways out here. I have been making things, but nothing that ive been too proud of or have spent too much time on.

It occurred to me that i needed to take my own advice, and start posting things precisely because im not happy with them, so here you go! a bunch of old crap, new crap, and in between crap, to prove to myself that im not a lazy shit!

Also, I have found a real job! not the most exciting work, but it should pay pretty well. I should be starting sometime next week, if all goes well.

This one below is the pencil brush I had posted about a few days ago, eth, i dig it a lot...



Should be more to come soon! ive just now started to feel like myself again out here, and not so artistically drained, so the work should be flowing like the spice...

scribblins from this week

I guess this is what I've got from this week. I don't feel like it was very successful in these...maybe just with the dragon. I was just trying to experiment with different techniques I guess. Like giving myself a palette of skin tones to keep color dropping from as a way of stream lining my process when it comes to painting flesh. I think it helped make things go faster just having a some basic tones. Unfortunately it didn't help me finish it. It's only fanart anywho.

I slipped in a couple of questions here in this post that I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on now that we've all been working on our own things for some time.This is me tying to play with more of the color/multiply/overlay layers in painter. I started with grayscale and then just slapped down the color in a few minutes before going back to painting on top. The color/colorize layer seems like the way to go because it doesn't make dark tones get ultra saturated and near black, it softens them so you stay away from pure blacks.
Do you guys have thoughts about your experiences in using different layers? What works best and the like?
Grayscale man. Nothing else to say about him really, I've made a lot of brushes recently that more and more mimic strokes of bristle brushes, just because I like the way they can be sharp and hard and also soften already existing strokes.

Have any of you tried using brushes that mimic real ones? I could share some jpegs I made my brushes from if you'd like so you can try it.
It could be nice to have a little bit of discussion on recent brush making escapades, if you guys have had any.

eth.

Here it is

Sorry everyone, it's been so long since I last posted something. I thought it would be cool to have some sort of trailer for Robo-san and Wan-chan. It might also help sell some dvds, so I made one. It was really fun to make because it kind of rejuvenated me and got me more psyched to do more things again.

So here's the trailer, I think it might be missing something in the transition between the end of the description and Ben's name. I don't know what it is though.

Also I have started working on some other things that I will post later.

-Stephen

bashful

So for a while now I've not been wanting to post because I felt like all my stuff was crap, when I really should have been posting because I felt that way. Whatever the case-- this is what I started on tonight. I'm going to share some more stuff later, I think. Thanks Alison for making me feel completely inferior, I needed that. :D

I wish I could show some of the stuff from the internship but I'm not really allowed to. :\