Woo! Adobe Certified!

As the title says. I am now an Adobe Certified Associate! Which basically means that I have the skills to plan, design and build manageable projects in Photoshop  This also gives me greater standing for when I get into the wide world of work. The exam describes parts of project management, photo manipulation which I didn't understand that well since I only do digital painting, but overall the exam is fairly easy, so anyone viewing this looking for a line of work in design I strongly recommend you take this to increase your chances of finding a job. It makes you feel good too, the people I've talked to after doing theirs felt the same way and wanted to do more. So what are you waiting for? Go! Take it! Take it now!


Also, project-wise, here is the finished painting of the main character, its taken a little longer than expected because of dissertation work.. But do let me know how it looks and what needs improving.

Check my team's blogs out too! You know you want to!
For Matt's click here
For Beth's click here

Is my photoshopping getting better? You tell me!

As I have said in some of my few posts, I am not very good at Photoshop  So I have been practising for a couple of weeks now and I just wanted to post up a few pictures to see how my progress is coming along. So leave any comments about how my progress is coming along, or anything about my work, it will be much appreciated. (there are possibly more e-cookies if you leave a comment. I can't get rid of these fast enough!)

BEFORE: 

AFTER: 

Also a big thanks to Beth for helping me! See her blog here

Winter is coming... and too much neck...

OK... playing Assassin's Creed 3 took longer than expected... a LOT longer.... plus my dissertation got in the way... but don't fret, I have been drawing in order to carry on with the project and to show you lucky few the things I'm doing.


OK so as the title says Winter Is Coming (anyone who gets the reference: applause and  an e-cookie for you). Now as a big guy, I never really feel the cold (due to my extra 'padding'), but the other day I did.. So I made a small drawing to express my feeling for the cold so here it is..

Anyway, back to the project, a LOT has been happening since I  last posted. Character revamps again and a couple more sketches and colour tests. Now with the recent character change, I decided to do a couple more polished images because I kept varying on what he looked like, so here they are:

So as you can see, the first one was good, until Matt pointed out the neck... it had way too much neck. So back to the drawing board (even though I don't have a drawing board..) I re drew the characters so the neck didn't make him look freaky. I also decided to do colour tests. some of the colours don't really go but hey, that's why they're called tests.


Some time later.....



So last Monday we had one of our formal/informal group presentations, that went really well and saw most of the other groups projects which were going well, we then sat down and decided that the character didn't look right again, so we sat down and suggested that we go back to my first initial sketches (seen on my previous posts) and go for a shorter, stubby character. We came up with a body type that the guys were happy with but I wasn't as I thought it looked more human  so I created 6 more body types around that shape and looking at my design mood board of short and round characters. See below:

This was my preferred choice because it was very stylised

This was the body type chosen










This was one of my first sketches with the new body type, I added a scarf/ pelt to restrict the model from doing too much neck animating when put into 3D. I tried to keep the old clothing but due to the wider figure, it just didn't seem to work.

Well that's what has been happening... sorry for the long post but I'm going to try and keep up with updating now. I might even post something later if you're lucky.

Aaand while you're here check out Matt and Beth's blog too, you won't be disappointed!
for Matt's click here
for Beth's click here

Aha! Revamps and Painting!

So quite a bit has happened over the past week, we had a discussion about the characters and we wanted them more stylised as i noticed they were edging towards a more human appearance, so I sat down for an hour or so drawing new styles and mostly chewing the end of a pencil in frustration since I had artist's block most of the week. But in the end, I managed to come up with a new main character that made the other team mates happy. Plus I liked it (I guess that helps), it felt like a character that I could draw again and again but I needed to redo some of the other characters first, so I did.

I then decided to finally create something on Photoshop  Now, I've never really been that good at painting whether it be traditional or digital. I always found myself sticking to pencil drawings but as I've developed within my game design course I've tried many different things one of them being Photoshop which I didn't touch until halfway through my first year. I think that I have improved over the past couple of years but as always, I'll leave you to be the judge. 

This is the new main character. he hasn't been painted yet, but he's near completion, he has the same sort of clothing on like the previous incarnations but the body now has longer arms and a bigger head, eyes and longer mouth. It is a lot easier to model in 3D as well.

This is a design for one of the characters the main character will meet along the way, you can see on the Photoshopped image i played around with chain mail. I cant tell if it was successful or not but at least I tried

Matt insisted that there needed to be a hippie wizard in the game somewhere so I drew one. I like this design mainly because of the floating orb he's sitting on. yesterday Matt said that the smoke from the pipe should feed an orb of smoke underneath him so I'm going to play around with that as well as finish the main character. I've got a lot of work to do today considering I'm going to be off the radar tomorrow playing one of the games I've been waiting for for ages so I'll post in a few more days.

Don't forget to comment on what you see! Help is appreciated on how I can improve on my work. 

As always find my team mates blogs here:
For Matt's click here
For Beth's click here

More drawings!

We have been debating on the project mane and we came up with one two weeks ago. Project: Rocky road. I designed a logo last week to depict the name as well as our faces from left to right it's Beth, Matt and Me.

There have been quite a few changes to the game overall, head over to Matt's blog to see what's going on with the game internally and what it is about. I just focus on the game art :). 

So, here are some more drawings to keep your eyes satisfied. I will try to get more up on here but I will be focusing more on the writing side of the prject over the next couple of weeks. but ill try my best to keep updating when I can. Feel free to comment on them and I'll try to get back to you.

 For the main part of the game, we needed hero encounters so the next couple of sketches were of the potential heroes the character can interact with in the game. the first one is my favourite, mostly because of the handled weapon so on the A3 sheet I'm drawing on there are more designs of weapons he could use (I just don't have a big enough scanner to scan the whole page..) and the other one is a sort of elven character and possibly going towards a 'Legolas' angle since they are holding a bow and arrow, as like the other drawing, more designs for the bow are there too. 

 We had another discussion last week about the character himself, he should be a little older for the story we are trying to make for him. So I came up with this revamp of the character. he wears the same sort of clothing but just with a bit more bulk instead of a small childish body frame.

These also came up in a meeting last week. We wanted a sort of totem or rock for the player to save the game so I came up with these over the weekend. The first one reminds me of the golems in Dragon Age. I still don't know about the eyes.. I also flicked my pencil around on the arms to make it look like he has symbols on there. I like the second one because I thought of having an ornate wood carving as a totem. The face reminds me too much of the Pringles guy so I'm going to have to change that.. I also tried to do some celtic patterns on the wood since our university is based in Wales and the Celt pattern is everywhere

 
These are a few old concepts of the cart carrier. I gave up on designing it and focused more on the main characters but I will be returning to them when I start on the creature drawing for enemies and such.





















By the way, also look up Beth's work! She is very good with drawings and digital painting, right now shes working on the cart designs and the scenery colours, she will work on clothing for the characters as well since she likes character clothing so go visit HERE! 

Updating fail... apologies with art!

I said to myself when starting this blog that I'll update often to keep you few who read this and my thoughts happy.

 Well that obviously failed since its now 10 days since I last posted so I apologize to the few people looking at this... Anyway, I said I would put up some sketches when they were deemed 'internet-worthy'. here are some of the sketches i have done towards the project. I wouldn't call them 'internet-worthy' but ill let you be the judge....

 This was one the first concepts. 



















This was the next sketch.

















Final character concept, rough edit.


















Colour tests (very rough..)

 More character concepts

I also have a review of one of the games I'm looking forward to at the end of October so ill try to get that done soon and some of these sketches photoshopped once I've familiarised myself with it again after a 5 month period of not having photoshop. Send me some feed back on these pictures, its always appreciated to help me get better.

Final Year, Games and Writing...

This being my final year of uni, it is now time to get very serious with my work. Hence this blog to get my face out there but to also see if I can entertain the masses (or the very few) who visit my page. Now in the final year of my course we are tasked to write a dissertation and to also design and create a game. Anything from interactive storytelling, 2D/3D or another FPS that seems to be popping up nowadays. I have joined up with two course mates: Matt and Beth and we have been swimming around the idea pool for around two weeks and we finally came up with an idea based on popular opinion. Matt has posted the ideas building up to the final one, this is from his, so don't forget to see what he has to say on things (and keep a better track on the project than I will). click to visit his blog here.

The three of us now, Me, Beth and Alan have spent the last few days deciding on our idea, having spent the last two weeks discussing ideas and the whole summer thinking independently about the project ahead we had a lot to go over and sieving through the early ideas to find common ground is a large part of how we ended up with a group of three from an originally planned group of 6 or 7, we all just want something different at the end of the year, it's a commitment that most people rightly didn't take lightly.

And so on to the idea, what are we going for? Well we came up with a few fairly unique mechanics through our early meetings. Some like the "Imagination Field" idea were just a bit beyond our technical scope and we had trouble framing it in a story that we all liked. Others like the "Bird Idol" were far too much story and not enough play. One idea i had early on and then developed a little with everyone else was the idea of a fantasy RPG from the point of view of a travelling salesman, the idea coming from thinking about flipping conventions and looking at stories from other points of view. We also had a lot of ideas focusing around tower defense mechanics and with the final member of the larger planned group breaking off for for a solo run of the year we decided to just pitch all of our ideas to the class and see which one gathered the best reaction. We are now building on a twist on conventional tower defense games and the travelling salesman idea.

 So yeah, i'll be putting up some doodles soon. Once i've deemed them worthy of internet status.

Well, Well... Here we are!

It's taken me a long time but I finally made a blog to put my face out onto the internet. I will basically use this site to record my projects during the year and blog random stuff that takes my interest, whether it be funny pictures or world events. So lets get started. Welcome and Enjoy.