Sunday 20 May 2012

The Visitor


This is meant to show a Visitor arriving to what looks like an abandoned city, or district of a city. It is not clear what has happened here, but the place looks like is been like this for a while. I wanted to have another try at drawing a city. Most of the time taken to produce this image has gone into the central area of the buildings. It took a long time, this is not one of the usual sketches that I have been posting here. In order to make this image I created a set of brushes and shapes for some of the elements you can see here. You can see a Making of or download the brush and shape set from my website.

Fan Art Challenge: The Crow Results





Here is the final image that went into the Concept Art Challenge: The Crow.

I did not make the final three entries after all the votes were collected. The winner (with his particular vision of Ironman) is now at the winners museum. You can find the WIP thread for The Crow at the 3DTotal pages where I published my progress during the Challenge. Looking forward now to another challenge.

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 5


Another black and white portrait. As the other ones I have done, I used only one layer to make the grey scale image. But this one I decided to play with colour once finished. I am still trying to find the best way to apply colour to a grey scale image. I don't find it as easy as one would expect. In this case I don't like the end result, but here it is. I mainly used layers over the grey scale image on Colour or Overlay mode, but the result is not as good in some cases. Anyhow, it was just a quick test. The results are in the right hand image.

Thursday 10 May 2012

Digital Sketch: Home

This is an attempt at a landscape. Once again, I wanted to use shapes as much as possible. I didn't quite managed to get where I wanted with this image, and I am tired of it after two days staring at it. I still find landscapes complicated to get right. There are too many aspects to keep in mind, from perspective, to focal points, points of interest, light, colour mood, ........ I will have to keep trying .......

Saturday 5 May 2012

Digital Sketch: Knight's Battle

Here is another quick painting using shapes. I choose two knights, a fallen one and one standing over him ready to deliver the final blow. Again, my main focus with this is to simply play and use shapes to make the image look more interesting. I have done a few more shapes, so now I have a big collection of them. I am not focusing too much on anything else. Below you can see the image at different stages of the process. In the first one, only rough values are set, and all the elements established. In the second one I started to lay lots of shapes a bit everywhere. In the third one I started with the basic colour, which is later altered with hues layers. And finally the fourth one shows the final image except for the final touch of blurring the knight which is standing over the fallen one with the sword. I think it gives it more depth if he is blurred. 

Friday 4 May 2012

Digital Sketch: Knight

I have been wanting to explore a bit more the use of shapes since I didn't know what they were, but looked useful. So I have been looking into first how to make them, and then how to use them. I have made about 10 of them, and I think I used all in the image you see here :) 

This is how I made them. I selected a black and white dirt image from a library, played with it, like motion blur it, added more texture from other images and so on. I then defined different shapes over this image and cut out the rest. With the shape in its final form, I went to Select Color range and took a few colour samples from the image. With the selection active, I went to the Paths tab, and click Make Work Path from Selection (one of the icons at the bottom of the Paths tab) and saved it (Edit -> Define Custom Shape).


I wanted to make a knight's helmet using these shapes. To make this knight, I have set down simple shadows and highlights as the base, and over it set all these shapes using different blending modes and shades. What you see here is what came out. I plan to do a few more of these using this set of shapes to see what happens.

Wednesday 2 May 2012

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 4


Another black and white sketch. In this one I wanted to mainly concentrate on the cloth covering her. In the previous sketch I tried something with the cloth which I liked, so I wanted to make an even bigger piece of material. I used the polygonal lasso tool to draw the whole thing, one stripe at a time. Once finished with it I concentrated on the figure, and then to finish it up, I made a quick background. Some chains to indicate captivity (maybe ?) and the same pattern used in the cloth on the wall to maintain the theme. I am still using one brush for pretty much everything. I enjoyed making this one.