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Tex Mech - Sheriff Junk

Here is an ilustration I created for Crimson Daggers Bloodsports 9 challange - "Tex Mechs". My idea was to build a steampunk-like robot from some rusty, metal junk pieces. I asked Bjorn Hurri for crit and he said, it's a bit hard to understand how those pieces on the arm and stomach work. I guess I made it a little bit too random. I'll think about functionality more next time.

Environment speedpainting

A piece I created today. Took me 40 minutes. I'm still a little confused by all these custom brushes in photoshop. Till recently I painted only in gimp using basic round  (mainly soft) brush like 95% of the time. I downloaded 30 day photoshop CS3 trial and some custom brushes of known artists. Now I test them and sweep out those I'm not comfortable with to keep it as basic as I can.

Some WIPs and a speedpainting

Here are some WIPs I plan to finish soon.

The first one is a concept created for Crimson Daggers Bloodsports challange. I didn't make it in time, but certainly learned a lot.

Some facial details (this piece will be crazy detailed) click to enlarge:

This one is a character design inspired by Mayan culture:

This one is an unfinished illustration of a "Scary Forrest" aimed at children. I will probably place some characters in it.

The last one is a 3 hours speedpainting I did for Royal Fellas challenge (portrait of one of 7 deadly sins - Greed):

More stuff soon (I have some more WIPs, but they are secret :)

Archdemon

I wanted to implement a powerful narration and interesting mood. I should probably refine it a bit more, but I need to move forward with other stuff. Hope you like it, though.

Forest man

A portrait of a man/creature made of plants. I could push it a little further but I felt like I have to stop already.

Some studies and speedstudies

Wanted to make them quite fast. Some are done within 30 minutes, for others it was around an hour. I'll probably post some more studies soon.

Musing elder

I experimented a bit in this one. I’m very satisfied with the result but I may return to this later and refine it a bit.

Trolling (unfinished and abandoned)

This is an example of lack of good planning. Even my rendering skills didn’t save this piece. It’s too busy, composition is not very good and I don’t want to finish it (at least for now).

And an environment concept I did alongside the troll piece.

Female face concept

My attempt on painting a female face. I used some reference but didn’t really stick to it much. The look of the face is not entirely what I wanted to achieve but I’m quite satisfied with the rendering of hair and lips (lips used to be a problem for me). Still a lot to improve. I need to study faces!

Lands: Night Plains, Forest, Mountain and Swamp

My attempt at creating some MTG lands. Night Plains is the first environmental illustration I’ve ever made digitally. I actually sketched it using acrylics on paper even before I got my tablet. My main goal was to create an interesting composition and I’m pretty satisfied with the result. It would be cool to make a full series of 5 MTG night-theme lands someday.

The forest one is a perfect example of my obsession for details. My mistake was not to plan appropriately and think about composition. But even a bigger mistake was to zoom in and render every pixel in the background. When I zoomed out, I realized that I’ll have to bring the rest to a similar level of detail, otherwise whole illustration will fall apart. Took me an insane amount of time to finish it.

Mountain is something between speedpainting and full illustration. I was trying to avoid getting into unnecessary detail (and not zoom in) and imply them using some custom brushes (brush settings in Gimp are probably the main disadvantage when compared to photoshop’s – I need photoshop!).

Swamp – with this one I wanted to do something that wasn’t done before (reffering to MTG swamps obviously). I achieved a nice mood quite early in the process, but again... lack of pre-render-phase planning made it way longer to render than expected and I’m not entirely satisfied with the composition (however I still like this piece).

Some speedies

Two pieces I made in between other stuff as a relaxing speedpaint stuff. Not sure how long it took to paint them though.

Abstract stuff

Some pieces I made using Fire Painter

How things started

My journey with painting started at the end of the last summer somewhere in the middle of August. I came across some Magic: The Gathering card alterations on some internet forum. I thought it might be fun to start doing such things as it might look nice in my decks. Before that I literally hadn’t touched a brush since the elementary school I had absolutely no experience in painting and wasn’t even interested in it. I had some drawing background, though, I used to draw stuff from time to time (mostly during boring lessons in school), but was never really good at it (I mean I was quite good but not pro level).

I bough 2 small brushes, my mom gave some other (she makes a living painting btw) and some really bad quality acrylics leftovers. One afternoon I sat down and started to alter a swamp not expecting my first alteration to be a successful one and... soon I discovered I have a huge talent for rendering. Despite having bad quality acrylics and knowing absolutely nothing about the color theory I was able to mix and match colors almost perfectly. Since that day I fell in love with painting and started to consider becoming an illustrator (firstly aiming at environmental ones for MTG).

During several days i did around 20 MTG card alterations (or so, some are actually not finished till today) but as soon as I discovered advantages of digital painting (and that John Avon uses photoshop) I decided to test it. I bought the cheapest tablet (Wacom Bamboo Pen – couldn’t afford anything better), and installed Gimp (I’m using both till now).

My first paintings were pretty bad. No, actually they were insanely bad. I got a little bit discouraged, but didn’t give up. I started to watch some tutorials on youtube, it gave me a lot of knowledge but unfortunately also a lot of confusion. First steps are always hard, no doubt. Fortunately form me, when I’m into something I learn the skill really fast, and by “really” I mean several times faster than average human being (no exaggeration). It’s not that I have a talent for doing something, it’s just that my mind has a very analytical approach to everything. I always try to understand how things work and once I get a grip of it, I know how to do it. It’s something like being Sylar (from “Heroes”) with a Sharingan (copying eye from Naruto manga series). Painting is all about understanding – understanding of form, light, shadow, value, color, perspective, texture and technique. Once You understand how they work and how to apply them, You know how to paint. Of course no one will ever fully understand them, humans are therefore not capable of mastering painting. There is hope though, we can get pretty close and this became my goal as of late – to get as close as my imperfect mind lets me. Pretty challenging, but it’s something worth to live and struggle for.

Here are some of my alters. I still need to finish few of them. Maybe I'll post some more soon.