Artstream 20/08/2016: Minotaur

  Over August I felt I needed to do a little brushing-up on my painting skills. As painting is a skill one has to practice to maintain, not just to develop, I keep feeling like I'm not painting enough. This Minotaur was a half-finished development from a previous streaming session that I ended the stream on half-finished. So my decision was to go back and see if I could finish it, or at least improve it. The current result I'd rate as decent, I think I am getting a better handle on of light patterns, brushes and adding a creature into the background. I still have a ways to go but it's an improvement; with every picture it feels like I am getting a better grasp of digital painting.

New ArtStream Layout

  Lately I got thinking that when it comes to my streams I need to be a little smarter with screen real-estate. Learning the benefits of talking while working I realise that when the full video is played back, conversations can look out of context or answering comments can be potentially mixed with musings I make. I managed to get my webcam back so I can now record using its mic as well as my face (this might help with engagement and ad a bit of personality, it might help with presentation but we'll see.)

  The format had to also take into account that these videos are compiled into time-lapse videos several minutes long. So it had to be uncluttered. This reason is why the chatbox, webcam and referrals are separate from the screen itself, so that when the video is converted into a time-lapse I don't have to edit out a gap in the corner where my face would be.

References

Original "Please Stand By" image available form James Vaughn https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/4326395585 under a creative commons non-commercial share-alike attribution. I modified the image to replace the Sioux bust with a Colo Colo drawing.

The image will only be used for as a placeholder for setups such as these.

Sketchbook: Plotting a Course for Year Three

  With the hot late-July Summers hitting the country I had the chance to explore and head out into the sun. During a trip into London I got back into sketching, The drawings on the left-hand side of the above image were life-drawing attempts on a miniature of a fountain commissioned sometime in the 18th century. The drawings on the right of the top picture were partially inspired by the kind of outfits that became popular at that point in time, a time when English dress (termed Côte Anglaise) was very popular on the continent.

  Later on I thought about refreshing my character design skills, building an understanding of humanoid forms that are not strictly human-like in proportion. The structural sketches, done today, were based on how I felt after last Friday's art-stream session. I tried a hand at map-making, as over the past two years I have found I like an analytical approach to designing something be it a character or a world. And city maps can demonstrate a location's character (I had the good fortune to talk about this in detail on the stream), something I may try developing further in my third-year project.

  However as the half-finished nature of both suggests, I lost steam during the broadcast. Whether or not I will work on them again will be something to decide, but the lack of momentum I felt has made me inclined towards finishing the Minotaur painting half-made on the stream before this one.

(Yes, sketch 14 is an attempt at Totoro. I am quite fascinated with Studio Ghibli's works)

Artstream 15/07/2016: A Touch of Magic

  I feel I am getting a little faster at painting, that or the picture above is still relatively simple. Which took just under two hours. I felt this session was so brief I decided on a second picture, which admittedly isn't completed yet, but I feel the Minotaur I had in mind (below) is off to a good start despite only spending about 45 minutes on him. There's still a lot to do with him however.

  I considered making two separate videos, one for each picture, my current formula might be more suited to the time-lapses being compressions of my streaming nights.

Stream Saturday 02/07/2016: Horror Creature Design

  It's time I started considering what I'm going to do for my third year of university. With that in mind I decided to dive back a little into creature design. Originally I wanted this thing to have an angler-fish-like head, something reminiscent of Colo Colo. But as the stream progressed the monster became a little more bat-like in form.

  A secondary reason for this piece is to practice on some dynamic lighting as well as refresh my memory on bounced light. There are three point lights in this scene, each illuminating the creature from a different direction. Although on reflection maybe the light shining off the creature's rear-end is a little too spread out. Or it might not be, his hip looks quite close to the light.

As usual, I created an accompanying time-lapse of its construction. The thing I kept thinking while working was that the more I work on the layers, the better it will turn out.

Artstream 11/06/2016 - Battlefield One Art

  Watching the trailer for Battlefield One I was greatly inspired by the sight of a Bedouin warrior early in the trailer. What interested me most was the hint that Battlefield One might at least partially show the Arabian theatre of the first world war, a theatre that aside from tales like Lawrence of Arabia is relatively poorly-known to the general public compared to the fields of the Franco-Belgian border. I particularly enjoyed painting the horse, as I had spent a lot of time as of late looking at horses that got me particularly particularly inspired though I think there could be some improvements made to how it ended up.

Stream Saturday 07/04/2016

With the academic year mostly over, I have a little more time for streaming. With an internship at the studio Butch Auntie, activity is also going to drop considerably due to a policy of client confidentiality. This stream in particular was fun not because of the subject, but experimentation with perspective, and halfway though I asked the stream's chat channel for suggestions on the tail, with the decision to make it more of a constrictor's tail.

Art Stream: Cityscape Concept

  The product of a three-hour stream. If anything this was an attempt to get my mind back into actual digital painting since aside from the concept art for Legends of the New Year, I hadn't picked up a stylus for Photoshop for anything more than silhouettes.

I suppose the buildings at the bottom could have a lot more done to them. There are still a number of rough edges and I might need to look a little into building layouts next time in order to make something a little more organised.