Earth Tone Color Variant.

 Testing out new approach using a palette based on the Werner's Nomeclature of Colors study.

These are earth tones compiled in the 1800's based on nature.

Comic style tests

Just messing around some more with comic art styling, having spent last night looking at old comic pages from the internet I've decided I need to work on faces more. Also clothing, also...well, everything. I'm just gonna spend the weekend doing quick studies based on photos and see how it goes.

Wolf Mother. Work in progress with Krita

I tried to get some art done over the weekend. I picked the Romulus and Remus theme for no particular reason apart from it popping into my head and any subject would do, besides, it's iconic.

So far I've dropped pencil sketches into Krita and moved things around to get a composition, and figured out my color palette (keeping it simple).

I'd like to formalize the negative space between the babies and the teats, as there is almost a pattern forming there.

Also, I was screwing around, playing with bezier selection masks and created this rough head, I almost dumped the file but decided to save it, and the next day opened it up, deciding to take it further I ended up with this image of a boy walking a dog (with the dog doing all the walking). It's one of those aimless illustrations that has no real reason to be, but I like the dog leash, being the last detail added.

The right caption in the thought balloon would help bring it together.

More animation with Krita.

This was based around a piece of art I had made in Krita a while back. I was looking through some of those works to finds themes or ideas that I might animate.

I will take the opportunity to again promote this incredible free software Krita, I had no idea it would be so intuitive for animation, I had previously made attempts to understand it but became confused about how applying frames worked.

However, when I wanted to sit down and really have a go, I quickly overcame that small issue and the way they have designed the animation work-space makes the laborious process of frame by frame as easy as it can be. You can just get to work and concentrate with the creative process without being caught up on technical UI issues or limitations.

You also have access to the tools and brushes you would normally use for making still images, and the layer system just adapts to any re-ordering or merging that happens as you work, any changes to the layer structure are run through the whole time lime and you don't even have to think about it.

I'm recommending this software to anyone who wants to start animating in a traditional manner without shelling out for paid apps such as Toon Boom or TVPaint.

I will design a bigger project to put it to the test, but it's hard to see why Krita would not be capable.

It's been a while...December Activity Dump.

I almost forgot I had a blog.

Let me update things. Firstly the Fat's Domino CD cover got finished, I did all the graphics (text) in Krita and here's how that turned out.

The thing that was nice was the ability to stroke my vector paths with the brush, so I could get the vari-line pen look on the "Fat's Domino" text.

More Muddling in Krita

I found that there was a filter plug-n for Krita, and then I found that it now comes as part of Krita and you simply have to activate it. So eager to give it a go I brought in an old (possibly my first in Krita) piece and applied some "G'MIC-QT" filters.

Here's the original.

And now with some filters applied.

Rock and Roll took over for a bit

I went through a month or so of listening to cheesy crunchy Glam Stomp rock pop and began compiling CD play lists, on the tenth CD I simply took all the best tracks from those to create the ultimate play-list. So now I needed a cover for the CD so I began working in Krita again.

At some point during this I stopped sketching on paper and importing the scans, and just sketching the ideas out directly in Krita, so that's a thing now (although I'll still use paper because it's portable).

Then I went to work on the whole cover concept and here is that.

Now during this period something quite wonderful happened, someone created Krita-artists.org, a proper forum dedicated to this wonderful open source paint program.
Obviously I signed up and began posting some things, and this piece actually got onto the top row. Which was odd actually because I don't get much feedback about my stuff on there.

Animation. The next step

I'll finalize this activity dump with my latest experiments in Krita, I've been delaying it, animation. Well over two days I got down to studying Krita's animation work-space. After a little effort I found it actually quite straight ahead, there wasn't much head scratching.

Here's my first two animations.




Krita is now the app I'll go to for frame by frame animation. It has everything for what I need.

Character poses cont...

I'll be putting up these images as I create them, I've been working on this pose over the whole week after work, making a number of big changes mainly on the second guy.

Easyref modeling result

Here is a render of the hot dog creature, I've yet to decide what to do with this, so it's just the model with no setting at the moment.

Bevel after Boolean, a character build.

I made this using the Bevel after Boolean addon written by Rodinkov llya.

The addon allows you to boolean geometry together and then run it to create clean beveled seams where the geometry meets.

I wouldn't normally model an organic character this way, it was a test see if I could use it for non mechanical subjects, you couldn't comfortably animate this creature because of the polygon flow, however for a still character sculpt of this type it's viable, and you could re-topologize to get better poly-flow. 

LightWave 2018: More render testing.

Just in the interest of keeping up to date I have included another test render I did with LW 2018. It's just an old scene updated with the new shaders and lighting. I've included the older version done with LW 2015 for comparison.

LW 2018

LW 2015

LightWave 2018 render tests. My Verdict.

I downloaded the trial version of Lightwave 2018 and spent about a week doing tests and renders. Here are some of them.

Yep, if you play around with the settings and materials you can get some decent renders out of it, but it's not as cool to work with as I'd hoped. Antialiasing isn't a strong point of this renderer, and noise is something that shows up a lot, requiring heavy sampling to clean up, indeed, there was noise that I couldn't get rid of at all.

I'm disappointed to say that my week working with LW 2018 was a week I could've been working with Blender, and having said that, I think that ends it for me and LightWave.

Blender sculpt exercise number 3

Primarily doing this guy for the muttonchops, at this stage a little too realistic, probably because of the photographic reference.

Painted. More realistic in proportions than I intended but I'll go with it for now, the body will be done as a separate piece.

Here's the final. Yes those eyes look flat, but maybe I like it like that.

I'm trying a free add-on called Light Studio, which is similar to HDR Light Studio, this allows me to light interactively in a rendered view so I can experiment and see results live. Below is a more somber take.

I put in some round eyes and rendered with a HDRI, no post production on this one.

Blender Sculpting exercise number 2

Another go at a sculpt, I drew a rough concept to give me direction.

Up-dated, initial texture paint.

And this might be the finished version for now.

Mr Fat

This is probably as far as I want to go with this.

I learned quite a bit doing this, the paint tools are just adequate, but I could've taken them into Photoshop and gone to town, probably the work process would be to use Blender's texture paint to lay down a base and then edit that image further in something else.

Sculpting and painting in Blender.

I'm going to explore Blender's sculpting tools for quick 3D illustration, so this is the first thing I ever did with that, a simple ball and not many brush strokes, it should've been a throw-away doodle, but I liked this fat faced man so I saved it and decided to try out the painting in Blender as well.

I own ZBrush, but I never use it and I know Blender's sculpting tool can't compare, but for the sort of cartoon stuff I have in mind I find Blender an easier study and fun to use. Obviously I'm still learning and haven't got a handle on it all yet, however it's very interesting learning this program with it's many dimensions to explore.

Rigged Vectors Test

As promised, here's a video showing the final rigged cat character for this shot. I also put in my first ever head turn, just in case I need it.

Using Illustrator for illustration

I've used Adobe Illustrator in the past for logo work, but never considered it for illustrations. That would seem odd to most digital artists, so to be fair I gave it a go over the last two days to see if I could work with it.  As a child I remember our family had a pet duchshund, so here's the quick sketch that started me off

After looking at some reference material I decided my initial sketch was pretty accurate so started the slow frustrating process of making it inside Illustrator.

I found things slower because (A) I'm learning and (B) using the path tools with bezier handles is more work than Anime Studio's simple path curves, however they are more precise perhaps. Textures were added later in Photoshop which is a bit of a cheat.

The following day I decided to do another one, based on the family cat. I know I want to do a more complex and larger piece, but now is not the time, for now I'm keeping it simple.

This time around I had a better idea of what I was doing, it was still not as fast for me as using Anime Studio but it wasn't painful. I'm definitely going to keep at it so that I can be equally comfortable using both software choices.

Ouroboros animated

Ouroboros thingy

I'm not sure what this character is or why this character is, but it may get used in the latest project.
I've been doodling random characters into my kiddie sketchpad and this is one now translated into an animated vector inside Anime Studio Pro.

Another Solid

Solids

I figured out (sort of) what the next project will be and have started translating some of the character designs into Anime Studio pro. Here is a test to see how this design sits on either a solid color or a white background (as both will be required). There will only be the one color plus black.