Game Jam

Character art by Sinan Demirer

I went to the 2015 Vancouver Global Game Jam, here are some stuff I did mostly in the last two days.

Original plan:

Generic stock image soldier guy poster

The three stages of the game:

Here are some other awesome stuff made by the team:

Sinan Demirer:

Devin Rosychuk:

There are so much more but it'd take ages to put them all up!

Stargazer Knight

I just got back from the amazing Illuxcon event which opened my eyes to the workings of the Illustration industry. I brought with me an entirely new portfolio which contained only 3 pieces I did before the summer break.

The event wasn't one concentrating on concept art, but I got many useful feedbacks nonetheless. The piece that I spent the most time on during the summer was this, the Stargazer Knight:

hi-res Here

I spent about as much time researching and designing as I did on actually painting it.

With the last knight having a "goat" theme, I started this guy with a "star" theme. After about 20-30 different designs and watching several documentaries on medieval armor construction, I set about pencilling the basic armor shapes, leaving the helmet out so I could do it in detail later.

After scanning and cleaning, I wanted a star pattern to go around some of the armor plates, but wanted it to be in perspective, so I created a simple pattern tile:

And the same idea for the chainmail:

Leaving me with the final line art:

I did the helmet separately.

And the rest...

I am going to do the weapons of his faction soon.

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...