Wednesday 10 October 2012

Fun with concept-arting

I've always enjoyed designing random stuff for imaginary games that would never get made. Here's a concept for a knightly leading hero:

For starters I wanted an easily recognizable helmet:



Then I started on some body silhouettes:



Some finalization to the design... Plus thumbnail for painting:


Final sketch:


Then some good old watercolor!


Some detail on the sword that my crappy camera didn't manage to get:


I recently had an insanely useful (arguably career/life-changing) "painted comics" course with Brian Stelfreeze, who gave me some extremely useful advises on playing with the color wheel and having a "damn subject" in our pieces where the most pure color would be put. Not sure if the camera captured it or not, but that's why the sword is the bluest thing here. By painting this guy I realized that while white rim-lighting work great for machines/metal (like my last painting), it is terrible for leather or non uber-shiny surfaces. I need to use some more shades of gouaches for highlights.

A little reference on the gloves might have helped too -- no idea while I didn't use any!

I realized watercolor paintings aren't the way to go for modern concept-arting... but it's so damn fun! The fact that my first digital painting I did last night was so terrible (that I'm not even going to put it here), did not help my move towards digital either...