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...

Experimentation

So I took a pretty long summer trip to Kazakhstan. Being in an empty desolate country (even more so than my previous location of Oman), allowed me to contemplate life and draw more. I bought this cool Russian notebook with a cover of vintage cars and started doodling random stuff. Buying some crappy notebook made me feel more comfortable about doing really stupid stuff without caring whether or not it will ruin the book.

WOOF!

STARE INTO THE EYES OF OBLIVION

I played more with watercolors:

Eastern European wildlife

Check out those badly painted dubs

Floating alien

Pencil scenery -- if only I could do this with a pen...

Dramatic hand

'Nam badass

Then I got back to Van-city and started to paint things on actual watercolor paper:

Usain Bolt from newspaper:

My brother's hand:

Some photo of a girl from the internets:

Some guy from the internets:

But then I realized that painting from photo is so much easier compared to still-life or memory...

Salt from Bean Bros Cafe:

I saw a girl on the train the other day, she looked sort of sad and I tried to capture that here (from memory):

Dude with gas mask

So I visited my high school art teacher last week on my last visit to Oman and I sketched this dude out:

Guys with gas masks are probably the easiest things for me to draw. I liked this guy a lot because I didn't use any ref and still got the revolver in perspective (well, barely...)

So I got home and got this thing out, it is so much harder for me to paint from a drawing rather than a photo: (The iPad made him look so short! It's the iPad, I swear!)

I used linseed oil instead of turpentine this time and found it like 300 times easier. 

I'm still not 100% finished with him:

> hands are still waay too small

> some dark bits on the clothing needs to be darker

> detail on belt and filter thingy

Overall I still find pen and ink infinitely easier than this oily crap.

First time trying out oils

So I went to the (only) art store in Oman the other day and bought meself a bucket load of oil paints.

Not knowing what to paint, I ripped off some bits of the newspaper that I was using to cover the table with:

And after like 3-4 hours it turned into this:

Did it on a pretty small canvas, I'm going to try a bigger one next time... It was a pain doing details!