Carvanha

A personal project of mine, working on some stuff Rare said at the career fair, making a character from a piece of concept art. Here is the concept art, a Pokemon called Carvanha. I chose this because I liked the simple shape and the fact that it had a really angry looking face! I wanted to go with more detail than the normal Pokemon style, which tends to be flat colours and cartoonish, so I added detail ideas from real fish. Might make it a fish tank/ bowl to display nicely in.

Texture is 1024 x 1024, tri count just under 1,700 (I was thinking Wii spec).

Concept:
Renders:

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Life Drawing

Last year I went to a life drawing session on Monday nights. I feel it was really good for me and I produced a lot of work. It was also really interesting getting to see the work of a wide variety of artists with their own personal styles and preferences, and I hope I can find some classes out in Canada.

So anyway, here's some of the stuff I did. A lot of the parcel paper ones didn't photograph very well, the colours came out very weirdly, but you get the idea.

This model was great, she was really angular and could hold some really great poses:

This is probably my favourite piece, I achieved what I try to go for, where you fill in a lot of the information yourself:

This one came out bright yellow when I tried to photograph it, so I've had to turn it dark to have it make any sense. It was going to be black and white, but after I did the white I found it made enough sense anyway and left it:

The guy actually fell asleep during this pose, but barely moved!

Roll

Speedpaint, 45 minutes.

The snow roll actually exists!

Case

Speedpaint. 45 minutes, although a lot of that was spent pursuing a different idea

Speedpaint Lock/ loch

About an hour, the word was supplied by Tim and was either loch or lock, so I decided to combine the two

Great Tits

Finally finished Woooo! *prepares herself for barrage of terrible jokes and comments*

Life drawing

I've found a life drawing class near me and I went last night. It was a bit weird and frustrating at first, but then it was almost like I hadn't been away from it. Here's my piece from the 50 minute pose at the end.

I've even drawn the face! I've always had a weird mental block about drawing faces - I've always been paranoid I'll get it wrong or offend people or something, so I just haven't done it. And that in turn makes me think I can't do it and feel horribly self conscious and it becomes a vicious cycle. But weirdly I'm starting to get over that, without really having done anything about it.

When I progress in art, it seems to feel like the knowledge or ability of how to do that thing has always been there and that the walls are just falling away rather than learning a new block of information. Almost like there's more space in my head for stuff rather than less. Does anybody else get that?

XSS Poster

I thought I'd put this up on here, it was a pretty fun project and got lots of good responses. It's a poster for XSS (Extreme Street Sports), a Southampton university club which Tim co-founded. The poster was for their fresher's fair, and Tim went around wearing the featured top hat recruiting people.

Dragon!

Crossposting this from facebook. This is a dragon I painted for my Mum to go up in the local library. I normally end up painting something at least once a year to do with the summer reading scheme. A year or two ago it was nature and I made loads of googley eyed bugs and painted lots of animals. Recently I ended up painting up a wooden Pterodactyl, I wonder where that's gone...

But anyway! This is bigger than A0 and painted entirely with poster/ powder paint! Who needs photoshop when you have the primary colours, black, white and green?

New Website

My new site is now live! 

Queen of Arts

Penguin

From photo reference. About 10 - 15 hours

Export to reality!

Run through export to reality program:

I suppose technically it is some kind of exporting to reality... even if it is just papercraft.
Well, here's my tester, and it definitely worked! Only unforseen problem was that because the model had an open base, the papercraft wasn't particularly stable and the edges were wibbling everywhere, so I made a rough base for it.
Here's the net, it's 3 A4 pages:

So the plan is now to do a few more things, I was thinking of doing this lot as a group, lots of nice boxy shapes:If anyone wants, I can run their models through pepakura and try to make the unfold as user friendly as possible, but I will NOT test build anyone's models for them. Also if anyone does want to do this, the lower poly the model, the easier everyone's life will be.

Deer Full painting

There we go. I've decided I do quite like it now, painting it has just been a very frustrating process at times.

Deer

I'm doing a proper version with a full background, but it's not coming out the way I want it, so I've done a 'illustration in the corner of a book or something' version. I will post up the full background one once I've finished it, but I just don't think I'm ever going to be happy with it, whereas this I quite like.

Other sideline activities

I've been busy with the final project lately, but I did find time to make this monstrosity for Tom O' Brien's birthday (it was only a little bit late)

And here he is in the lab, waiting for his new owner to arrive

Finally painted something

Took about 5 or 6 hours

I did a paint

Speedpaint: Can. Took an hour and a half as I was just doing it on my own. Yay Stoppit and Tidyup!

Gameartisans

Well, I've entered my first Gameartisans minicomp, the sackboy mini! The brief was to create a new costume for sackboy, either based on an existing character or an original idea. The limit was 2000 tris and one 512x 512 diffuse map, with any other maps being optional. I thought it'd be nice to have sackboy in some kind vehicle, thinking about the way vehicles are often represented in children's plays. I settled on a plane, seeing as cars pop up now and then in LittleBig Planet anyway, and then decided to kit out the sackboy appropriately as Biggles, the fictional World War 1 and 2 pilot. The background is taken from one of the Biggles books.

I think I did OK for my first entry, and I certainly had fun with it.
Blogger seems to be misbehaving and not linking to the full sized image of my submission, so I will do it manually:

Woo! Van Finished!

Hooray! It's all done! Although I do have a couple of shader issues to sort out.



Damage state:

Update

I don't really have anything amazing to report, I just thought I should update. Both the van and the pony are getting there. For the van I've almost finished the diffuse, then it's normals and specular. Then I can start the damage state, but at this point I don't think I'll make it anything that affects the entire mesh.
Low poly pony is pretty much done, I just need to clean up my texture seams and fiddle around with my alpha channels. I've also done most of the high LOD body mesh, just hooves and facial features to tweak, then I get the fun of trying to make it fit my existing texture page. This screenshot doesn't show the alphas that go over the hooves.