06 // Levelling Up

It's been quite a while since my last post here, with the baby and Uni situation kicking my butt to the ground. However, I managed to drag my sorry ass out of a particularly nasty art-block and have pushed my skills further toward the level I need them to be in order to get my grasp back on this project.

Since my last post I've been studying and practicing whenever time will allow, in order to master the fundamentals of producing high-quality, dramatic, dynamic, grand-scale environment art. As this will be the basis for my Creative Research project, I need to get my skills to a certain level before I can even think about the narrative that I will produce illustrations for.

The following images show the progress of my studies to this date, including: some awful technique, bad composition, generic terrain, substandard lighting, amateurish rendering etc etc. 

The final image shows where I'm at now with my environment skills. From this point on, now that I've established a relatively consistent and comfortable workflow and process for producing these quite quickly, I will be further honing my skills before choosing the narrative to pursue.

05 // Environment Skills Recap # 2

Following on from my last post, I have been continuing to develop my skills in environment sketching/painting. As well as this, I remembered a technique that I once adopted for a class during my time at Edinburgh College; the Sparth Technique.

Developed and evolved by an artist named Sparth, funnily enough, the technique involves using custom shape tools to lay information down quickly and efficiently in a bid to create environment designs with great speed. The method works brilliantly if done correctly, however can be quite tricky to get the hang of. By adhering to the fundamental rules of perspective and composition, it can be a great way to kick start an idea, before going on to paint over and really define the details of an image.

Besides using the Sparth technique, I have also been further developing my digital painting skills and applying these to environment speed-paints, one of which can be seen below.

04 // Environment Skills Recap

It's been a while since I've really attempted to set some kind of a scene with my environment illustrations, so I decided to re-train myself and develop some perspective skills a little further at the same time. 

Here's a quick setting I rattled together earlier, in an attempt to establish a starting point from which I will be kicking off my advanced perspective learning curve.

While I'm fairly confident of the perspective, forms, volumes etc, it became apparent very quickly that I'm going to have to find an alternate method of figuring out lighting within my scenes. As this image shows, I don't really know where to start with imagined lighting!!

03 // Initiating Research

Having established a starting point, I have already assumed that my end product will require some extensive self-driven learning in a variety of fields that, when combined, should allow me to successfully produce grand-scale, high detail, narrative-led illustrations in a style that I feel most comfortable producing at this moment in time.

As I am not focused on only the videogame industry, I'll be developing a set of skills that will allow me to turn my hand to all manner of projects. Illustrations related to films, novels, TV shows and comics all share common factors in that they require fundamental knowledge of a number of disciplines; anatomy; perspective; colour and light; engineering; architecture; etc. For me personally, this project will be a good reason to further my skills in each of these areas, before going on to choose a piece of narrative or a scene to illustrate.

A brief overview of the areas I intend to learn further include: 

• Advanced perspective
• Architecture
• Engineering
• Environment design
• Graphic storytelling and visual narrative
• Character conceptualisation and design (if necessary)

Note: The following images do NOT belong to me; they were sourced from the internet in order to provide an idea of the resources/inspirations I will be using to further my research and education in a variety of areas.

02 // Where I'm Headed

The purpose of this post is to try and convey some sort of an idea of what I see as being my end goal for this course...

It's my ambition to be an illustrator at some point in my career, therefore I'll be focusing on enhancing and developing my skills in this field until - hopefully - by the end of the year, I'll be skilled enough to produce large-scale, narrative driven illustrations depicting a variety of characters in believable settings.

My work already leans towards high-detail, dynamic, bold compositions, with the characters being portrayed in some kind of action, and it's this style I intend to maintain within my illustrations; portraying motion and energy. In terms of narrative however - I'm no writer - I seem to have bottle-necked myself into one-sided stories. This is one of the main things that I would like to amend.

I'll go into more detail about how I intend to remedy that in the next post, but for now, here's a small bundle of images that inspire me, alongside levels of illustration which I see as benchmarks.

01 // Where I'm At Thus Far...

Alright, so this first post will be all about setting the scene and showing the level that I'm currently working at. 

First of all, I'll present the illustrative art style with which I feel most comfortable at the moment - and the style which I intend to develop for the foreseeable future - including a couple of process animations to give a brief idea of my techniques.

Also, I've included a few digital sketches, which show a variety of levels of finish that I apply to conceptual design (at the moment, all I have is character-based design, as that was my focus of study over the summer months, but I'll be throwing some environments, mechs and vehicles into the fray soon).