Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Eye Glasses - Updated

Hello again out there!
This week's word of choice was actually 2 words- eye glasses. My first thought to tackle this concept was a post-apocalyptic gas mask. I'm not really sure why, but I've always loved the look of classic gas masks.

My Inspiration, I must say, would probably be taken from an hilarious and really beautiful web comic I follow called Romantically Apocalyptic. I love the dull and almost sickly look of the world, contrasted here and there with really great pops of colour. The story is also incredibly entertaining!

GasMask2

This subject to me seemed to make the most sense if sketched with regular graphite pencil on a page of my sketchbook. I have no real process work to show because it was pretty much done in one shot on my way home today. Waiting for busses to whisk me away, I sat at benches and drew away.

After a couple weeks away from it I decided to finish it off with ink, markers, and coloured pencils. My next step I traced over the entire image onto marker paper with my markers and ink

GasMask2

After that I decided to try to blend some of the areas and and slightly more contrast with coloured pencils.

GasMask3

Finally I took a picture of the finished image and edited in Photoshop to improve the brightness, sharpness, and contrast.

EyeGlassesFinal

And there you have it! My impression of the word(s) eyeglasses. A fairly sickly looking gas mask. I was given a great compliment by my sister when she saw it. Her response was "That's cool, it looks like something from one of those video games". And my day was made! Something I designed as video game concept art really did look like something from a video game! “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” ― T.S. Eliot

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Harpy Lady- Concept design Updated

Hello again out there! Thanks for coming to check up on me, it's well appreciated :D I have some more work to show on my latest concept.

The word of choice this time around was wings. Right away many different concepts came to mind, angels, flying crafts, but mostly monsters. I love designing monsters, it's much more liberating to create something ugly than to strive for serene and beautiful. There is a lot of beauty to be found in that which is deemed unattractive though, so it's a lot of fun to work towards that goal of making it visible to people.

Finally deciding on the concept of a harpy I drew up some sketches and scrapped most of them, but eventually came to this line work.

Harpy lines

After I worked around with colours for the wings and the skin tone, because harpies have been designed in many different palettes and styles, I tried comparing the image with and without the black lines.

Harpy-2

Clearly the image would look much better without the black lines surrounding it. So I continued along with that in mind, trying to create more contrast in my colours.
Adding in more to the facial features, including dark, high contrast eyebrows, I then moved towards the hair.

Harpy 3

I knew I wanted it to look like a cross between feathers and human hair, because obviously the harpy is a cross between humans and birds.

Harpy 3- close up

The orange seemed like a good choice because it's in the same area as the brown which I used for the wings.

That being said, I wasn't too sure about the skin tone. I liked the general look, but she almost seemed to human, not quite weird enough for my purposes.

Harpy 4

Playing around with hue and saturation on the skin layer, I came to this blue/grey colour which seemed to be pretty interesting, and had higher contrast, which I love. After showing it to another design friend of mine, I'm now debating whether or not I will keep it this colour or not.

-Edit-

After playing around with everything I decided it would be best to just add more shading to the darker areas using a purple hue, so I scrapped the blue hue.

darker skin

My next step was to add in the feathered arms and legs

arms/legs

After adding in the layers of colours and blending them as I did with the skin, I used a feather brush to create that wispy look of feathers, especially around the hips, ankles, wrists and upper arms.

bandages

Next I added in the bandages on her ankles and wrists. I put down a pale off white colour, followed by a darker shade of the same colour to give the look of shading. After that I blended the colours to smooth them out, followed by yet a darker shade of that same colour on the edges and lines separating the bandage pieces.

hair

I then continued on to the hair. I had some comments from friends and family that the style I had originally put on her looked like a pine cone, and was too uptight and put together, so I re-did the hair in a flowing, wilder style. To create the look of her hair I first put down the medium orange colour in the overall shape of the hair. After that I added a darker shade of orange for the low-lights and I blended the two together. I followed this with a much lighter shade for highlighted strands made with a 2 point brush to be evident as separate pieces of hair. Finally I placed almost white strands as shines and super-highlighted pieces of hair, isolating them to the points where I thought the light would be strongest.

Talons

Finally I went to the toes and added in the talons. I painted on the dark brown colour, followed by the golden colour and the highlights. I blended all of them together and finished with what you see above. Then a green background with a gradient, just so there is enough contrast to see everything but not so much of a background to detract from the focus.

And here is my final product of a Harpy lady. She took me a couple months to finish, but I believe she is well worth it. I am very proud of this image :)

Harpy-Finished

“Humans had a saying. Mess with the bull and get the horns. Well, Harpies had a saying, too. Mess with a Harpy and die.” ― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Surrender