Morgana - Character Development

Morgana Character Design

 

At long last I got to finish this character.  I did it following the Crimson Daggers Character Development Class.  

This is Morgana as imagined in the Japanese Heian period.  In truth it does not have much of a nod to that period.  It got a little bit sacrificed in favour of the design.  The character is magical but rather than giving her a spell or pet I went for a special costume based on a dragon.  I did some line work first but to be honest I am finding it hard to be disciplined and do all the design in linework.  This concept changed a lot as I rendered.  Not a very efficient workflow but fun.  

This character goes with the earlier Merlin and Arthur .

Fire Speedpaint Study

Fire Speedpaint Study

For the DA speedpaint group.  2 hours speedpaint.  Reference from here.


 

Happy Christmas 2012

The Season of Goodwill

 

sketches 9

For a change of pace started speedpainting screenshots from Avatar.  Not used to working with these kinds of shapes but different is good. These are done in 15 to 60 minutes.   Forgot about all this design work at the start of the movie. In my mind  it got swamped by all the glowy stuff later on. 

Landscape speedpaint study

Landscape speedpaint study

A 2 hour speedpaint study.  From the deviant art speedpaint group. Thanks Wolk for running this.  Stock curtesy of SandsibStock.

Sketches 8

Some more Hurtlocker sketches and posemaniacs. 

Forest speedpaint Study

Forest Speedpaint Study

This was a speedpaint from the DA group.  The stock was courtesy of  ~needanewname
from here.  2 hours to do.  Lost it on the details in the foreground but liked the atmosphere. 

Snowy Pass landscape

Snowy Pass landscape

I did this a while back after doing some studies.  I repainted some of it again.  I was feeling it more this time as the temperatures have dropped.  

Morning light - Speedpaint

Morning light  Speed paint

This was a study from the speed paint group on deviant art.  The Stock from Burtn [link]. 
I am trying to do these with the minimum texture brushes. 

The First Golden Age of Illustration

 I have seen numerous articles referring to the early twentieth century as the Golden Age of Illustration but for me the first true age of illustration lies in the 13th, 14th and 15th century.  Then there seemed to be that necessary combination of skill knowledge and resource to produce great books and the required personal wealth and vanity to support their  production.  

The Luttrell Salter which is in the British museum is an example I have mentioned before. 
Recently another excellent example of this kind of illustration came up for auction in Sothebys.  

It was Louis De Gruuthuse's Copy of the deeds of Sir Gillion De Trazegnies in the Middle East (1464).  The 237 page boasts numerous illustrations but for me the borders of these pages are where the magic is.  Of the pages reproduced were intricately worked foliage.  Among the foliage are depictions of small cannon, peacocks, men with swords and a monkey pretending to be a doctor examining urine in a jar.  It is reasonable to speculate some of these at least were for satire and amusement.  

 The estimate for the auction was 3-5 million dollars.  It would have been a pity for such a book to disappear into a private collection.  Happily the book has been bought by the Getty Museum. It went for 6.2 million dollars.  
The J. Paul Getty Museum has a great resource here looking at renaissance manuscripts. 

Sketches 7

Sketches

Some more sketchyness. 

Space Shuttle Ready for Launch study

Space Shuttle Ready for Launch

Took this subject on to get some practice rendering hard surfaces.  This is something I have not done a lot of and based on this to do it well requires becoming really familiar with the lasso tool and planning the order in which stuff gets layered.

Sketches 6

Some posemaniacs (60 seconds) and making my way through The Hurt Locker (a good movie).  Doing a lot of war stuff mainly because they generally give a lot of interesting poses and shots. I think these are helping even by just getting a little more confident in tackling them.  

Merlin Part 2

Merlin Character Final

This the final of the character started and posted about earlier.  The character was mostly worked out so I wanted to just finish it as well as possible.  I took some time and tried to render as best as possible. Despite the time spent  still not a clean finish but on to the next one. 

Digging For Gold

Digging For Gold

Finally got this piece to some kind of finish.  Seemed to take forever.  I chipped away at it on and off for the past 5-6 weeks.  As you can see below this started off as something quite different.  I did some thumbnails went for the original composition and then got worried about it.  So I changed it all up.  I tried to borrow a lot from Caravaggio's 'The taking of Christ' for the colours and light. The mud started off smaller but then I took some licence with it . Could have kept picking at it but need to move on. 

Merlin Character part 1

Merlin Sketches

I did a series of rough sketches for the Merlin character.  This was to go with the Arthur character already done for the Crimson Daggers mentoring.  I wanted to go for a wanderer.  Probably not of the culture but had absorbed some of its aspects.  I dumped the idea of the staff and wanted to work with the wilder appearing guy. 

Sketches 5

Sketches 5

Yip.  I am making my way through Band of Brothers DVD to get practice with the poses.  Try to look for dramatic poses and then get them down in a few minutes. Some or a little more successful than others. 

Christmas Tree speedpaint

Christmas Tree speedpaint

Following the previous speedpaint study.This was a stock photos from midnightstouchSTOCK
and the group is run on there.  I think it was about 90 minutes.  

It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Sketches 4

Some more practice sketching and work from stills. 

Sketches 3

Some more poses and stills sketches and drawing.  Trying to keep the momentum going and get some nicer lines. 

Character King Arthur

King Arthur Character

King Arthur - Japanese

The Crimson Daggers are currently running some mentoring sessions.  I did not apply for any as I was concerned that I would not be able to give sufficient time to the lessons.  There is no problem taking some of the homework from the sessions.  I am having a go at Character development .  It is something I have done very little of.  The series will be characters from the King Arthur myth but the twist is that the characters must be from a different area/culture.  I chose Japanese Heian period.  Not too excited how this one turned out.  Will try a different approach for the second one - Merlin.

Sketches 2

Keeping the sketches going and did this mud photo study to help with a personal piece. 

halloween - house of horror

House of Horror

Did this as a matt painting exercise at Halloween.  I started out with a google maps image and dropped some textures painted then lit.  

Sketches 1

I am trying to get more practice in so have committed some time to just sketching.  These are screenshots from Game of Thrones but I am also going to work on gestures, hands and feet.  So here are the first of many I hope.