[EDIT-- many of the links of the first page are gone but i've replaced most later on in the thread]

Howdy howdy everybody. Been meaning to put my stuff up to public scorn for a while here, and now I'm finally getting around to it. I'm all 2D, at least for now, and of that most of my stuff is divided between photoshop rendering exercises, figure studies, and robotzzz. I won't inundate you with my entire artistic output up to this point, just enough to make you sick and not want to come back Though I would totally post some 1st grade crayon drawings if I had copies.

crits always welcome.


a little love for Marvin, the paranoid android from Hitchhiker's Guide. Rest of the body isn't as clean as the head-- someday I'll fix that.


1 hour sketch of a faceted alien-ish helm. Pretty happy with this one considering the time involved.


it's Malevolo, the fortune-telling circus bot!




some figure work-- top half are all 5 minute volumetric studies, bottom is a 30 minute value study.


photoshop rendering studies. I'll tell you what materials I vainly tried to render if you ask nicely.






...and last but not least, some self portraits. Manage to look butt ugly and slightly cross-eyed in the second one, and the third one I'm still working on. And no that's not my real facial hair, but a man can dream, can't he?

dear god you look stunning in with those beautiful things on your face.

haha, it looks good, and you have a very solid body of stuff so far, I look forward to seeing how you progress.

I'm going to go ahead and assume the latest portrait is the most accurate in terms of likeness as well?

I'm also curious, if you don't mind sharing, how long you spent on each portrait on average?

Each one of those portraits is about 3 hours of work (which makes me cringe a bit), and yes the last portrait is both current and the most accurate in terms of likeness. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I'm going to try and really push myself on that last portrait, and give it at least a few more hours of work. Beyond that my DomWar entry sees the rest of my lovin.

quick update-- I've been working on the ol' face. I've cleaned it up but am by no means done, because now I look like a bronzed model/mannequin. Need to uglify m'self first.

aaaaaand a little more love tonight. Some general tweakery and then redid the entire ear. Because ears are hard.

Not quite ready for the uglification and freckles yet.

Oh, and no worries, the mustache is definitely coming back. As it's the icing on the cake, I need to make sure I hit everything else first.

Ok, finally ready to call it quits. I spent a rather grotesque amount of time on this one (over 10 hrs), but I'm fairly happy with it and I think it's a nice benchmark of my current skill set. Maybe now I'll finally get back to my poor, abandoned Dominance War entry...

Anyway, I'm interested to hear what anyone has to say about this if you're out there.

-wake

Posting a little more of the backlog while I'm working on other stuff.

These are some of the shots I did for a story about a person rediscovering their imagination. I had about 20 scenes thumbnailed out and went on to render some of them. The concept/story isn't anything to write home about and as a whole it's pretty disjointed, but I was happy with how trippy some of it turned out.

Cheers:

yo

i like the first version of ur selfp best, i dont think the more refined versions added anything new to it. my suggestion would be to be more thoughtful of your brush strokes initially, so u dont go back and refine them so much.


as for the story, one idea to present progression is a shift in color intensity/hue, contrast, dramatic composition/lighting etc. i think composition is the main thing u should pay attention to here, and in all the other work here. it should be the premier factor leading ur hand and my eyes through each piece...

I appreciate the crit and think you're right on both accounts. For the self-portrait, the push to the more refined piece was more a technical exercise to see how far I could go. Laying down a strong foundation is something I still struggle with, which is why my next one I'm doing in oil on panel, and from life instead of photo reference. That way I can't do any cheeky photoshop things and have to focus more brushwork etc.

Also, good point about the color shifting-- I had considered that in one of the pieces, though I should have taken the time to apply it more consistently throughout. I'll post that when I get home.

Always more room to improve

Finally getting some more stuff up-- not much, but I've been busy. Have the wonderful opportunity to sit down and chat with Ryan Meinerding tomorrow, possibly going over some of my work with him. For those of you not familiar with him, he's one of the rising stars of Hollywood concepting; he worked on Pathfinder, Ironman, and Gauntlet 7 Sorrows to name a few. It helps that he's a big gamer/comic book guy.

Anyway, here's that color shot I mentioned earlier Shotgun, as well as a quick concept that I did:





also, just finished this one before bed:

More goodies. Well, one to be exact. Been bogged down with other biznaz so I haven't been getting as much drawing done as I would like, but after listening to my roommate extol the beauty and virtues of Yvonne Strahovski for a while (hard not to agree with him there) I couldn't help but drop everything and try a portrait. So yeah, once I finished ogling and started drawing this took a little over an hour from start to finish, no tracing.

The 25 hour super self-portrait extravaganza and the sit-down that I had with Ryan are certainly paying off; my drawing time on portraits has dropped dramatically, even if the quality hasn't really changed. Color still owns my face tho, and probably will for many years to come, but I think I can deal with that...

So anyway, the beautiful Yvonne:



personally I think it's better in black and white, but then you miss her red lips and cheeks *sigh*

Soooooo it's been a while since I last posted. Almost exactly a one year anniversary, hahahah. Unfortunately my old image hosting was through my university, so that's why all of my old posts have lost their images. I'll try and replace the ones that I have and remember, but most will be casualties of war I guess.

Anyway, here's a few recent things I've done. Take a look.

about damn time. looks great! love the rendering on the lady there!

[edit] Oh snap, there's an image cap of 16... I'm going to have to split up this next post.

Time for a great big art dump.

Most of the time I'm super picky about what gets posted on polycount, so I need to just post the good, bad and the ugly here to help me keep everything in proper perspective. (I'm not going to post the REAL garbage of course, just the tolerably bad )

So yeah, this is all stuff from the last year, mostly personal work but also some stuff for small time games that I worked on that never went anywhere. It should be roughly chronological, the opening stuff dating from about this time last year and the newest stuff from the last month or so.





These next four are some concepts for those small games I mentioned earlier. And no, I had nothing to do with the name "Chromatactix" thankfully.









Also while I'm on the topic, here's a video of another game I worked on, though this time I was a lot more involved-- I designed the game, did the UI (yeah I know it's rough-- this game was only intended as a proof of concept so I didn't go very far on alot of the assets) and rendered most everything else besides a few of the ships, so even as just a proof of concept I'm pretty happy with it.

The first video is from very early on when we only had 1 ship type, the second is pretty close to where we stopped. Also, the ships move kinda wonky because when we capped this video all 4 players were early AIs instead of human players.

Video 1

Video 2

These next two I did for my ill-conceived blog which thankfully no one ever read. (nor ever will.. I'll get around to destroying all evidence of its existence once I finally get a real website up ) But yeah, I was writing about the Dr. Mercer character as well as how the Elizabeth character doesn't really work in Dead Space, so I did these as visual aids.






oh, and my header was far more fecal sounding than I meant it to be. Apologies

Back to more regular stuff. It wasn't until around this last October that some figurative stuff as well as painting techniques started to click for me. These next several are a mix of 1-2 hour studies and some that are more around 5-8 hours.















Here's the full progression for the next piece. All told it took me about 4 hours, working from reference. (Please ignore the cauliflower ear )

The rest of this is pretty much from the last 2 months. Later I'll get around to scanning and posting the anatomical studies in pencil I've also been doing recently. Oh, and the Famas WIP sadly was lost to time when my hard-drive went up in flames (note to self, don't name the C: drive 'Icarus'), though I'll get around to starting it up again soon. I need to get back into modeling before I forget everything I've started to learn.













These are from the 40k inspired portraits that I posted about in the P&P thread.. It's another project that needs more attention than its getting

Here's the Frazetta-ish mutant child of my imagination. I wanted to do this one sans reference, and the best part is how freaking awesome I thought it looked when I was working on it. Then I posted it, the wool was pulled from my eyes and I have yet to cease cringing









I owe Makkon for this one as I started it from one of his pieces in the concept thread





The anatomy was going nowhere on this one so i cut it in half, mirrored it and went for the freaky look. Turned out ok in the end.





So there you have it, my life from the last 12 months in paintings. I'm interested to hear from you guys.

Very nice! I saved your 4-hour lady progression images into my inspiration folder.

@Czar-- cool, glad I could help out. Just be careful on the ears unlike me

Anyway, here's a new one I just did for the concept thread:

oh, and these of course. I didn't sleep because of this piece, but I think it was well worth it. Also, to explain a bit-- I've found that I have some particular difficulty when working poses where the figure is clothed. I think I've just been working from nude models for so long that I'm just not used to it. So until I get up to snuff on the clothing end, I've just been starting pieces as if they were nude figures and then throwing the clothes on over everything else. It's time intensive, but has been working out alright for me so far.






Also, I just need to get to a new page on this thread so I don't have to wait 5 minutes for all the pictures to load every time...

another one. I was reading about The Fountain this afternoon, which may explain why this piece falls on the more psychedelic side..

Really amazing work wake. I love the "cauliflower ear" lady and the 40k inspired stuff.
Gives me a boost to keep going and improving my work.

Out of interest have you studied anywhere for anything games or art related? Or are you self taught?

Technically I studied Industrial Design at ND, but I spent an equal if not greater amount of time taking figure drawing and oil painting classes (I was very fortunate to have Maria Tomasula as an instructor). ID gave me a good foundation but ultimately wasn't what I wanted to do.

The game stuff is self-taught. I spent some time during undergrad playtesting, and I spent the year after I graduated on rendering and to put together a team of coders. The game clip was our first shot to see if we could do it, and we're now working on a new project, though the coders are building the engine so it'll take a while before I really get involved :/

So yeah, the short answer is a little bit of both

I see some big development In your paintings comparing the first ones to the latest ones. you use both color and value much more comfidently in the latest ones.

Keep working dude.

thanks GoodAsNew.

a quick one to get the juices flowing again.