Day 6 of the rest of my art career.

For the Solitary moments.

There are many kinds of pain in the world, this is one of them.

Today I drew something for my absolute favorite twitch streamer. She's my favorite. If you'd like to contribute to her tip jar: here's a link. She plays a lot of Mass Effect currently.

It's 640x640, I didn't feel the need to make a giant one.

(Banner Version)

I guess this one took about three hours over two days. I really tried to focus on leveraging the use of layers to give it a sense of cleanliness, scale, and depth. Of course the shading is going to get better as time goes on, but that wasn't really the focus here.

Enjoy!

Of course there are details I'd like to add. Scaffolding under the pathway, architectural elements, more detail in the background and foreground. But I want to call this finished for now.

Digital Painting is something I've always wanted to get better at, and the foundational skills for it are also things I'd like to develop.
-Understanding Lights and Values better
-Composition (beyond the rule of thirds, but really that just works so well)

Also, if I'm trying to show someone an idea for a landscape or a scene I don't have to mock things up in blender. I think with a curve of communication vs. work time showing blender vs. digital painting, painting would shoot up faster then plateau in the detail stage, where blender only plateaus much later in the pipeline.

Fully fleshed concept art is a central part of every design pipeline, in film, video games, animation, and it's a wonderful thing to be able to identify as.

As far as I go, I think if someone on deviantart had an idea for a shitty knock-off of Magic The Gathering (TM) that's about my level of art right now. But I'm getting better. Behold the works of my labor to make works.

*These are in chronological order, including the one from the beginning of the post*

One thing I struggle with is figuring out how to manage layers. Images like the last one could have looked so much better if I had used proper layer management the entire time (to work specifically on the stalagtites/mites).

But I'm never going to stop trying to learn, and I'll always keep practicing.

With today's release of Blender version 2.78 (I began around blender 2.47) I thought it would be a good time to publish an update as to what I've been up to. Blender continues to improve, and so do I.

First off: A series of test videos.

I remember being so proud of this. It took a lot of figuring out and planning.

After a month of work, study, drawings, captures, and reference footage, I turned out this piece of art.

As important as the characters are to the story, Another huge character is the landscape that Clara and The Giant live in. I worked and worked to find the best way to present that. And came up with this.

And this.

Finally, for a sequential montage I wanted something a little less constructed and more moody. After playing around in Gimp and Blender for a few evenings, I came up with this.

And what makes me excited is this: In blender's newest version, you can use armatures (essentially puppets) mapped to two dimensional drawings to animate. This is a big deal. Instead of drawing every frame, I can draw just a couple frames worth of drawings and use an armature (like the one in the video above to animate.

Unfortunately this is all I have to show in the newest version, but expect a demo video soon. To sate you until then, here's a test video from the developers:

So until next time,

-Brian "Classy" Whetten