Troll

Just a speed troll fun for the evening today

Plein air tryout

I always wanted to try plein air painting using a tablet and a laptop! During the weekend I finally had a good chance, but only for a speed painting:

I also started another photo-study of a girl's face (sic!) but I couldn't resist turning it into a bearded dwarf portrait :P

Portraits

In the meantime I tried making a selfportrait painted on my Wacom Bamboo tablet, Photoshop from a square mirror. Obviously it's still unfinished, I'm planning on continuing it some evening. It will definitely not end up on this one

I was awed by a photo of my friend who is a stylist and a model, and decided to make a small study of the photo, and here's the outcome:

( no color-picking or overpainting was used, I used PureRef for placing the photo on-screen )

Ref: <LINK>

And here is her Facebook Page

Zbrush learning + shaman concept

I finally started learning Zbrush by making tutorials (The tree is the one made after Zbrush 4 Scuplting for Games book, the rest is just experimenting). I must say that after switching to Zbrush from years of playing with Blender, I was overwhelmed at first. Getting used to the controls and way of orienting the model, and the 2,5D and subtools stuff was a harsh time for me at first. But now, when I finally got to sit and work with it for some time, after learning the basics it became more and more simple and fast to use. I won't say it's user-friendly, especially the noob-user friendly, but after spending some hours in it, preferably with someone more experienced or with a tutorial of sort, it now turns into super-powerful tool :)

From the 2D stuff I also made that (WIP) character, again for the tabletop game mentioned before. It's a concept for a shaman character, one of five the players will be able to choose from, each connected to different pawn color (blue here)

Event, cards, links

I recently was in Warsaw where I met great people including ones I mentioned in the post below - Michał Kuś (http://www.kus-art.com), Darek Zabrocki (http://daroz.deviantart.com/gallery), and also other young but already developed CG artists, such as Mathias Zamęcki (http://mathiaszamecki.com)   Wojtek Fus (http://wojtekfus.tumblr.com) and many, many others. It was during a nightly event organised by Polish Digital Art, which included live speedpainting and also an auction of computer graphics printed on canvas and Zbrush sculpts printed in 3d! (Auction will take place on 30.05.2014)

There is little news about our board game, since I finished color test-cards a while ago, yet we need to prepare the board and few other things before we can give the prototype of the game to our friends for testing.

The event I mentioned gave me big boost in terms of painting motivation, so prepare to be flooded with some sketches soon!

Also, when posting other people's page links, I just have to link two people whose CG work is at the moment my favorite:

Theo Prins: http://www.theoprins.com/

Eytan Zana http://ezdraws.blogspot.com/

Test cards for the board game

I am continuing the work with the board game cards for the first official tests. I still have load of work to do. Here is a glimpse of newest event card design (secret passage in the forest), traditionally with a step-by-step process. Traditionally, not finished :)

Silhouettes before sleep

Today I managed to finally sit and draw for some time, starting from speed dwarf portrait, then turning to silhouettes - conceptual thinking training, inspired by one of the Feng Zhou's incredible videos:

In the meantime, I am totally overwhelmed by amount of great art being produced by talented people, especially seeing many works at Daily Spitpainting Facebook group

< FACEBOOK LINK>

People like Arnaud Pheu, Darek Zabrocki, Marek Madej, Michal Kus, Goro Fujita, Jakub Różalski, Dimitar Marinski and others are throwing in such massive amounts of decent art there. Some people even started picking up better works for an online art network
<LINK>

So, again, I'm really glad I started doing some sketches, at least

Long time no post

I haven't had posted anything in a while. The reason for that is laziness and resulting lack of anything to show, apparently. I was kind of busy with work, a small part of which is shown to the left and below - an animated process of making one of the book covers' illustration (it's about an early-medieval fort, or gród/gord/burgwall), and a vectorization of Linda Schele's drawing depicting a stucco facade-mask from Group H in Uaxactun.

I was also trying to develop one particular style for the illustrations of the board game cards I mentioned in the previous post. I will probably try to achieve the simplicity and mysticism one can see in Ivan Bilibin's paintings (I strongly recommend searching google images for them!). One quick try for a forest nymph or rusalka:

Board game cards, book covers

Recently I had to finish the rough sketches for all the cards for our board game (more than 30 different graphics at the moment)

At the same time I was asked to do two archaeological book covers (anthologies consisting of articles in fact). Unfortunately I can't share the work yet. Instead I throw in some old crap.

Reworking old sketches

I'm planning on remaking some of my old, unfinished works. Some of them are in really low resolution, and all of them need complete reworking. Here are them waiting for some love:






















In the meantime I've done lots of vectorization of some drawings and photos of ancient mayan graffitis. Sample below:

15 sec gestures and more

A while ago I eagerly joined a "200 pages of madness" challenge by Tessa Aalbregt (https://www.facebook.com/groups/185288861632624/), and in fact all I've done was the first pages - the 15 seconds gestures using random pose generator ( http://www.posemaniacs.com/randompose ) - I strongly recommend giving it a shot! Great way to upgrade your human drawing, maybe not with 15 seconds super-short sketches, but a bit longer studies! Another good site with photos this time is http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/

I also wanted to share a recent portrait for a board game. The game idea changed rather drastically now, and it doesn't have much to do with witches. Again, not really finished work, more of a WIP.

I decided to participate in latest Creature of the Week contest on Conceptart.org forums
(http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=272062)
- C.O.W. #305 - Flabby, Spotted, Carrion-Hoarder

And here is the creature:

It lacks some polishing, but had to finish it up before the deadline!

















The evolution comparison:

First post, the journey begins

This page was basically made to encourage me to practice and paint more, and, more importantly, to make publishable stuff done, since I had have troubles with polishing out my pieces, and finishing them. Actually, I tend to stop at the point of sketching. So, at least I plan to produce more sketches that (hopefully) I won't be ashamed to publish :)

I'll start with an excerpt from an image submitted for CGSociety XVII challange: Ten.

The full image is pretty much a failure, but I'm glad I managed to pull it off and finish the details, which, as I wrote before, is not usual in my case :)