Research L 14

I've decided to invest in environment design, I am forever in love with character design, the clothes, the little details such as small scars, motifs and visual values a person or creature can carry, but it's starting to feel like comfort zone, and as such I need to expand, to grow, I'm not sure how much of good quality these next environments may be, as Im still learning, but growth is something that happens to you, growth is not necessarily good and as long as we stick to good, we'll never have real growth.

The concept just really came to me, I chose an image that inspired me to do this concept but it was the concept I liked the least, or felt drawn to the least, I notice that the bar is often set too high when doing these, I go over ambitious to make something really really cool, and I get crippled by it's possible awesomeness when it's not working my way. I guess I'm afraid I can't pull off the ambitious or really good idea I have, so I went with a lesser one. I still get bothered when this happens, when I'm crippled by how cool a briefing is, but I guess it's just natural as Im not used to do environment designs, if it was a character or prop, I wouldn't have these worries.

I need to teach myself to find better reference, reference that works with me instead of agaisn't me too. I find that it does 80% of the job when I find the right element. Pinterest seems the best ally, as it suggests many other similar images based of one that I deem really good, into a narrower search.

/end ramble

More sketches

More sketches, refining the sketching process more, amazing that I thought I had my sketching skills honed enough, but you can always be more efficient at what you already know how to do!

Anyway, just experimenting, nothing crazy.

More sketches

Some more sketching done while I am on the vacation month. Trying to find a balance between refinement and looseness, to be presentable enough... as my sketches tend to be very dirty and quick, but not in a virtuous aesthetic.

Sketches!

Some sketching from this week. Greek architecture studies. Trying to get better and faster at sketching, finding a balance between fast and eye candy

blackmarket

Just throwing another test I'm experimenting with.
Not happy at all with the outcome, but it was a good test to map where I've failed with this process and also get where I failed before this attempt, using this same process.
I guess it's why I made it, to try to level up, and like it is in life, you're not gonna win every time.

I guess the core reason I failed is because I relied too much in a 3D blockout, like I've done before and failed because of it. Now I know, it'd be much better in efficiency and style if I had photobashed a background instead.

Another reason why this didn't work is because I'm constantly looking at old .PSD files and checking how I integrated images with keyshot compositions before, this is to save brain power, but every image is different and may require light and color tweaking reverent to their environments, I keep trying to bruteforce it to work, but hopefully this blog entry along with this sketch will be a reminder, to keep me from doing this same mistakes.

 I guess I should have researched of concept art'y ways to rig a face expression quickly, I was lazy, laziness doesn't get anyone anywhere. Posting bad art in my blog doesnt bother me, this is just a sketch blog with my dev notes. In this case, the benefit of having my art exposed greatly outweights any bad reputation.

Gypsy punk!

I haven't made new work relevant to subcultures in a while, I liked when I first started fiddling with that topic, it felt right, it felt fun.

Research steps on new character

Been a while, or maybe it hasn't, it feels like it has, because I haven't done a character like this in almost a year now. It's not because I didn't want to, it's just other stuff got in the way, client work, personal life... so much has changed lately. And I'm grateful for every change.
Anyway, I'm working on a series of still shots to showcase a new character for the my subculture themes.

Here's a fraction of the research, grabbed really quick out of my ref board software.

And the initial sketching, very crude, I know, but was just to guide myself, didn't have to show these to any client or anything, so kept them very crude, still felt good to show them.