Realistic Pokemon

So with our final life drawing project underway we've been asked to find artists work we admire and imitate them. This work is based off of Arvalis' (Advalis' dA) realistic Pokemon work. Whilst he has done some lovely artwork otherwise it's his Pokemon work that caught a lot of people attention.

I chose Blaziken because, let's face it, he's pretty awesome. Also it's a Pokemon I like that hasn't been done by Arvalis before and I haven't drawn him to death like the others. (Golduck)

I always felt like blaziken reminded me of Secretary Birds, or Bearded Vultures. If you have heard of these before I highly suggest looking them up, not only are they beautiful birds, they are fascinating. Secretary birds are known for crushing the skulls of their prey with their feet, and Bearded Vultures actually smash the bones of their prey to bits in order to eat them. Seems like a perfect fit for Blaziken!

Secretary Bird

Bearded Vulture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I started off by doing a quick drawing of how I wanted Blaziken to be posed using Martial arts stances

Once I had this figured out it was time to start fleshing him out. Usually I'd be less careful here, just clean up what I had done previously, but following closer to Arvalis' work I decided to try a cleaner approach to line art.

Now here I started using masks. For those new to digital art I cannot understate how useful masks are, and I feel I should really use them more than I currently do, however for this, with this detail it worked out perfectly, allowing me to plaint without worrying about keeping it clean.

As you can see it really allows you to keep your work clean.

Now here I just started using orange paints on overlay layers to give off the light from the fire wrists, countered with a dark purple/blue for the shadows for colour balance.






Now don't be afraid to play with the levels or the colour balance, these things show flaws in your work and allow you to quickly correct them. Just be sure to pay attention to what's going wrong so you can better learn from it.


As you can see the previous image had far too much warmth, the blue allows more attention to focus on the fire and makes the character stand out more.

And now we have the final product.

Portraits - (Sally, Kyle, Hollie, Jess, Roz and I)

Thought I'd try my hand at doing some portraits of my friends, trying different facial types.

 

Me

(My eyebrows aren't that big.. but they may as well be!)

 

Jess

 

Hollie

 

Roz

 Sally

Animal Modelling - Goat

Well it's time for another post about what I'm studying at university. Building on our working knowledge of modelling we were asked to pick an animal and then model it, animate it and create a turnaround. Here's some shots of the progress:

I wanted to try a creature that was different, but something I personally liked. And I happen to think goats are both amazing and creepy, so we not give it a try bringing one to life.

 

Beginning the modelling

Building detail

 Different perspectives

 Final model

I really need to work on textures a bit more... But this is the modelling mostly done. (I ended up putting eyes on later) And here are the final animations.


Turnaround from Sam Cullum on Vimeo.

Full Walk from Sam Cullum on Vimeo.

Sketches and Value Studies - Feb 2013

 I think considering I tend to update this place with a lot of work that is finished, sketches up until the final results, perhaps it would be nice to see my tests or just general practice that never fully realises into a finished piece. Just daily bits I do to try and keep my own library of knowledge up to date. So here it is:

Life drawing

Bear in mind some of these are done in as little as 1 minute, other may go up to 20, but generally these are all done as fast as possible so that getting bogged down in detail is not a problem.

Males

Older female

Faces (drawn during a lecture, roughly 2-5 minutes each)

 

Female Pencil Tone study (approx 20 mins)

Male Pencil Tonal Study (approx 8 mins)

The following are works done on the computer, I personally find these much easier to blend in terms of value and colour, although hopefully soon I'll be able to get some much needed equipment and I can start working in my sketchbook also.

(I used to LOVE this show as a kid, if you didn't watch Dinosaurs I definitely suggest you look it up, any work by the creature workshop or anything by Jim Henson is definitely something to be admired, even if only just for it's style and proficiency)

Self Portrait (Something I don't like about the eyes...)

I've been coming up with ideas for stories for a long time, if only to give me more fantasy/science fiction based concepts to play with artistically, this is one such creature I've been thinking about for a while.

 

My friend casually suggested I draw a 'Battlecock'...

And so a 50 foot behemoth chicken ensued.

And finally just some quick environment value thumbnails, I've been told if you can't get your concept down in 4 values of grey you haven't got a workable image. here's my attempts at portraying a bio-luminescent swamp either way.

Anyway I hope this showed you what I do in my spare time besides trying to complete full images, it's always good to continuously work and so I've filled up entire sketchbooks with this stuff. Got to keep working to keep improving.

The Storm Dragon

Another week, another contest. This time I decided to enter at Conceptart.org's Creature of the week once again. What made this slightly different however was the fact I was entering this competition with only 3 days left as opposed to the original 7. Because of this I didn't have nearly as much time to get feedback on my designs or my progress, and much of it was done on the fly. Luckily I think this turned out to be one of my better designs, so I'm quite happy with how my workflow seems to be improving.

Anyway, the brief was such:

Dragons come in all shapes, colours and elemental properties. This week your task is to design a storm dragon, one with the ability to harness the raw power produced in storms of all kinds. The idea here is that the dragon would be dormant, or significantly less powerful between storms, but upon the first signs of storm clouds might awaken and wreak havoc (or whatever else a dragon with the power of storms might do) using it's ability to harness wind, rain, thunder and lightning. This can take the form of a breath weapon or whatever other dragon-ly power you decide to give it. As an added challenge, I'd like your dragons to be illustrated in a storm scene, preferably (though it will not be a requirement) using one of it's storm-themed powers. Think about what physical traits the storm dragon might have, especially in terms of pre-existing dragon tropes. Try to think if there might be a physiological reason the dragon only gains its powers during a storm. Think: shape of the wings, composition and length of it's spikes/horns/spines, even colour and really try and make your dragon really fit the theme in terms of it's appearance. Due to the time of year, I will be giving you two weeks on this one. Use it wisely.

Round requirements:

- The creature must be recognizable as being a dragon

- The creature must have the ability to harness the power of storms while they are in progress, but be dormant and/or powerless at other times

- The creature should be illustrated in the middle of a storm

I'm actually a very big fan of dragons, sure every fantasy artist has a thing for dragons, but I thought this design could be something different. Nowadays with things like World of Warcraft there's far too much emphasis on the Western Wyrms, and so my design was to be based on the more serpentine wyrms of the east.

I started off basing my designs on newts, salamanders, snakes, even horses for a few, but these were the sketches I came up with, as well as a final design I really liked the look of:

After cleaning up the final design I ended up with this:

The body I liked, however, the head looked too reptilian. I wanted this to look like an amphibious creature but this just look juxtaposed and really didn't fit.

A few clean ups and colours later:

Much better! By this point I had also decided on the kind of colour scheme I wanted, it needed to vary between, red, purple and orange, I wanted it to really look like this creature was made of the electricity it fed on

Something still didn't look right though, it was too messy, the values needed work and the focal facial point really needed more definition.

After a few more hours playing with the design and painting we finally end up with this:

This certainly was one of my better designs, and I really feel like I'm making leaps and bounds in colour. It's just a shame it lost the competition by one vote.

The Triclops

As the holidays loomed upon me and university work had taken a shift to less important topics I felt it was time to get back into the swing of the creature contests I used to enter some months ago. My choice was to enter CGHubs 'Triclops' competition with the following brief:

'The triclops' primary sense is the 3 eyes it has. It is a nocturnal little creature that gets frightened easily, so it spends much of its time looking around for predators before making any type of move. It is a quadruped with 2 smaller limbs used to handle food. (6 limbs total) All other physical traits are up to you.'

And so I went about creating sketches.

For these I simply tried to get a full range of designs. The largest problem however is the complete lack of any animals within the entire earths ecosystem with a need to have 3 eyes, all necessities such as a wider field of vision can be attained with developments like a rectangular iris, similar to a goats. Not to mention the 6 limbs, 6 limbs is something only insects have and that is purely because of how light they are for them. If an animal developed 6 limbs in the natural world it would be so weighed down I wouldn't expect it to last 2 months sadly. Still, with that in mind I decided to stick with my initial design, a more insect like creature.

For the creature I looked art a mixture of animals, the idea was to make it more of a prey animal, and so creatures like rabbits, triceratops and horses heavily influeced it's design. However after much discussion with other artists on forums it was decided that a more front on view was needed to really portray it's 3 eyes.

 

 

However at this stage more emphasis was on the ears than the actual creature. Naturally this wasn't the reaction I intended or wanted, and so the following design was made.
 

Now was time to refine the design and colour it in, however this turned out to be a much harder task than I had anticipated. I tried both a Value>Colour route:

And a straight to final painting route:

Luckily after some tests It turned out a nice combination of the two worked out pretty nice, colours on first, and then value to correct the subtle mistakes. Resulting in:

The Triclops

The Triclops lives in a vast desert; almost entirely barren, the only signs of life either being the Triclops herds themselves, the beasts that hunt them, and the sparse patches of vegetation.

It has evolved an interesting way to interpret wavelengths using it's unusual number of eyes. The one at the front of it's skull views in ultraviolet, making vegetation stand out amongst the arid desert, whilst the two at the side keep a constant vigil for predators. Should one be spotted their antennae glow in a spectrum invisible to the majority of their predators, warning the rest of the herd.

First Character Brief - Ghost Girl

So in keeping with trying to update this blog with my university work, here is the latest of the project we've been given. Out task? To design a series of ideas for characters and then develop them through various steps to a fully realised concept. Here are the first ideas I generated and their corresponding sketches:

B-movie Ghost Girl
A child lich who haunts a now abandoned cinema, but is unaware of her own undeath. Dressed in a make shift B-movie costume she watches the film she last saw in life, lingering in this world unable to finish the film.

Space Traffic Officer
Speed test cars? No this woman speed tests space ships. Patroling the edge of Earth space on her hoverbike, she keeps and eye out for the safety of space faring ships from reckless pilots.

Robot Merchant
A small robot merchant, he travels around the bustling marketplace trying to make Sales but is constantly overshadowed by the larger models and their fake customer LCD faces. He in completely unaware of personal space.

Parkour Rhino
An anthropomorphic Rhino who was teased as a calf for his girth. He wants to learn to do Parkour so that he can prove himself to the less largely inclined creatures.

Devil Bear/Grim Reaper
Death for the animal kingdom, where the skeletal human reaps the souls of humanity this horned bear will harvest the souls of the animal kingdom. He is completely apathetic to the plight of others but sees his job as something important that must be carried out.

 After speaking with the tutors we decided that the Ghost Girl was likely the strongest idea. Personally, although I hadn't done many pictures for the design I was partial to the idea of the Grim Reaper for animals; but I could see their point, and so carried on with the Ghost Girl.

The next are the following drawings done to the brief that allow a more in-depth look at the character.

Expression Sheet

Construction Sheet

Turnaround Sheet

Colour Experiment Sheet

Finally after all this work, a promo image was needed to 'pitch' the idea. Whilst I wasn't entirely happy with how fast I had to churn this out I think I'm still pretty glad with what I came up with.