I had the pleasure to collaborate with my brother on his short point and click game “Mr. Mongoose.” I was responsible for painting the backgrounds. I’m happy with what I was able to do within the short (2 week) deadline. While demanding, I found it very beneficial.
Lately I’ve been doing lots of studies, but short term projects like this are necessary to flex what you’ve learned and find areas in your craft that you still need to fix.
I recently re-watched the 2011 DreamWorks film “Puss in Boots.” I was floored with how beautiful the film is, and was inspired to study its use of color and light.
I saved a heap of screenshots and did short 5-10 minute color sketches of the movie’s stills. Not perfect, but fun practice nonetheless. I started using textured brushes but later opted to only use a hard round since the technique and finish level didn’t matter to the exercise as much as determining the colors to use.
Reworking an image can be a tough, painful, and aggravating process. Often when I complete an image, it’s because I have brought it to the furthest finishing level I can currently go. Reworking often involves asking for lots of feedback, looking at the image with fresh eyes, and scrutinizing myself meticulously.
Sometimes I am able to do this effectively, other times not. It’s difficult to see specific areas of needed improvement when you’ve put all you can into an image. That being said, it can be a beneficial and rewarding learning process.
For the above images, I decided to try to improve the narrative and color for the first edit. For the second edit I tried to improve the composition so that it didn’t read like two separate stories. There is still more that could be done to improve this image, however at this point I’d be facing diminishing rewards with each edit.
My advice on reworking images:
The biggest benefit of reworking an old image is that it is a quick way to put you into a problem solving mode, rather than an ideation/creative mode.
More color and value studies from various art pieces that I find very captivating. Working on trying to figure out common color and lighting tricks, especially regarding color harmony
What really surprised me is that snow can be an incredibly saturated blue and still appear white due to it’s reflective properties against the sky!
I found typically strong images arrange their pallet into a large, medium, small format. With the large color creating the overall tone, the medium being used to enhance the tone through contrast or similarity, and the small being a highly saturated color.
That’s just a really rough and quick rule of thumb though, as a lot of images also break this mold!
**Of course there are tons of artists that talk and teach on color (I’d recommend Ryan Lang, Nathan Fawkes, and Sam Nielson simply due to their great lectures and knowledge), but a friend just introduced me to Tyler Carter, who talks about macro and micro color palettes in his lectures. These are two main sets of tone in order to have a nice duality to your scene, either to reinforce or contrast the initial pallet.
This project centered around developing both my design sense with a SciFi language, as well as work on my overall draftsmanship. All things were centered around fitting with either a militarized antagonist, or a wandering hero.
I found that I often fall back on blocky shapes when confronted with doing new things, which is something I’ll work on. Helpful critique I received told me a few things:
This project centered on creating assets and screenshots that followed a mobile/indie game aesthetic. I decided to base my story around semi-technological middle ages, where the villains are cultists who want to regress the world back to a primitive state by summoning ancient monsters.
Practice with architectural design.
I started with 2d shapes to begin understanding some of the forms, and began designing from there. I took a couple of the thumbnails and drew them into a 3/4 view and referenced them and other thumbnails to create some “screenshots” to show how the village could possibly look in-game.
I find that doing rough thumbnails, starting with shapes (even without complete understanding of what it will be), helps create fun and dynamic designs. Typically a fun 2D shape will be simple to translate into a fun 3D shape, but not always. Drawing is still often times the quickest way to throw down ideas, however 3D works well if you want to kitbash forms as well.
Designs for a powerful relic, the undead guardian who protects it, and the location it can be found.
Showing the same character in different poses without being asked will help speed up future production. Adding options for different heads can be used for minions, different enemies, or as a way for the art director to choose to go in a different direction quickly. Provide an answer while leaving room for options.
These are studies that I confined myself to an hour to complete. Good exercise to try to improve both color sense and speed. I have done many more of these, however the one’s posted are the ones I find “good enough” to show! Many many failures, believe me.. but that comes with improvement so I wouldn’t sweat it.
I was really getting tired of my flat compositions and really wanted to push a sense of depth and scale into them. I chose to use Sketchup to establish a very quick block in of my ideas, then proceeded to draw the scenes out. For a majority of buildings in the background, I created a repeating pattern and then skewed it into perspective, adding depth on major windows, doors, etc… as needed.
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