Another Unplanned Tutorial.. this time not in quotes

This time, I think it's fair to say that I actually did create a tutorial. I created a series of images from start to finish, with the goal of showing another artist how to take a 2D map and, using a few tools in Photoshop, transforming it into a 3D map.

Here is the final product of my work:

I might come back and do a step-by-step tutorial on here, but for now, here is the link to the photo album I posted on my 365 Create Facebook page. This goes from start to finish, with images and explanations for each step in the process.

Cheers!

An Unplanned "Tutorial"

I hesitate to call this a tutorial, since it really just illustrates the process I used to achieve the end result. It also doesn't show the very start of my work, where I just drew in the basic shapes and colors.

Anyhow, I am a fan of the Website ConceptArt.org, and I've been interacting a lot more on their Facebook page recently. I saw a guy the other night ask a question, something along the lines of, "Can anyone give me tips on how to paint the types of LED helmets worn by Daft Punk?"

I started to try and figure out exactly what he meant... did he want to learn to draw LEDs etc? Or was he trying to just draw cool, scifi sort of helmets? Or both?

He posted a link to a picture of one of the Daft Punk guys, and so I decided to take an hour or so to paint up a quick "demo" to show him how I started with big blocks of color, and then kept working smaller with details until I finished.

Now, I could have definitely spent many more hours on this, obsessively tweaking the details and studying the reference, but for the sake of my sanity and the sake of this guy's question, I accomplished my goal.

A bit of a speedpainting gone awry

I say that this went awry because I first started it as a speedpainting... that is, with the full intention of just capturing the basic values, gestures, and composition of the reference material. However, I liked the dynamic poses of the fencers so much, and I liked the composition so much, that I kept tweaking and editing and adding detail. Therefore, since it took a decent chunk of time to get to this point, it wouldn't be accurate to call it a speedpainting anymore. I now plan to make this a "finished" work, taking more time to really touch it up.

Sketching Figures and Fashion

This was somewhat new for me... the first time I tried to do quick, full-color sketches of people and clothing. With the exception of the girl in the purple dress, I based pretty much all of the clothing directly off reference photos.

Overall, I wanted to capture the mood of each model, as well as the overall look of their outfit. I plan to do more of these... they take me about 10-20 minutes each, but I want to draw both males and females, as well as people of different ages, ethnicities, and body shapes.

Ah, yes... landscape thumbnails!

I felt the urge to do some quick landscape thumbnail sketches, inspired by some pictures of ice formations called "ice fumaroles". They're pretty cool... they form in arctic environments where volcanic heat melts ice and snow, and then it starts letting off steam into the air. However, because it's so cold, most of the steam freezes as it hits the outside air, and then over time, these big towers form, like huge snow and ice chimneys.

Some Random Cartoony Doodles

For this, I started off the day envisioning a young, lanky man with a baseball bat slung across his shoulder, showing a defiant smirk or something. I got home, doodled a bit, and found a pose and a visual style I liked, and painted it very simply. Then I wanted to give him a friend... and so the lady in red was born.

The next night, I started envisioning a cast of bizarre characters to fit the same style, and I just doodled up some more stuff, and started coloring in the robot guy.

It was a fun exercise in trying to utilize a non-realistic style. I plan to try more of this sort of thing in the future...

Boy, it sure is easy to forget to post here, huh? More new stuff

Well, as you can see, it's been a little while since I posted here... still going strong on Facebook, so I was surprised to check here and see that's it's been about 3 weeks since my last post :O

Anyhow, here are some things to get up to speed... first, I did a bit of doodling, trying to imagine a bizarre fictional creature. Sort of a plant/insect/fungus hybrid.

I first sketched out some rough concept sketches, and then painted some tiny thumbnail sketches. The color sketches on the left are the sort of "seed" or "spore" phase of this creature. It's released from it's "mother" and then gets carried by the wind, where it will fertilize others of its species, or land on the ground and burrow in, shown on the right.

I then took that tiny thumbnail, enlarged it, and started to add more detail to it... I eventually got distracted by wanting to draw and paint other things, but this is something that still interests me, and I plan to play with it some more.