A Rakes Progress - Costume Design

Nicola, Tom and Sarah.

The designs are based on the game design characters I designed, but with obvious changes to make the outfits look wearable.
Tom Rakewell wears a tacky but expensive green suit that makes you want to gauge your eyes out, Sarah Young wears an elegant blue dress that emits sophistication and Nicola Shadow wears a skintight latex dress that has the look of smokey liquid.

Experimentation - #1

In response to the group critique we had on Monday, I've tried a few other styles besides my own cartoon game style.
I've tried to do less cartoony drawings and explored costume design and other illustrations based on other styles I like. (Costume design to be posted soon.)
I did two illustrations in different art styles, and both of them were drawn straight from my mind. (Although in future I'm going to use reference imagery to help me draw a more accurate representation.)

A random character, sorta using my memory of the 'Borderlands' artstyle.
I'm quite proud of this too, even if it's not the most refined.

The Penguin from Batman, based on his more realistic designs in the Arkham games.

I'm going to continue exploring different ways of drawing my characters.
I'm not abandoning my cartoony art style, but I'm definitely giving it a break for now and may return to it later after experimenting more.

Reflective Practise - 26th November

- Course so Far -
The course has improved immensely over the past few weeks, mainly since we begun the pathway stage.
I'm allowed to go more towards my illustration/concept art route and use my own mediums like pencil and digital, which in turn has helped to improve my artwork. (I'm pretty stubborn when forced to use mediums I dislike.)
The projects have improved too, with the current 'A Rakes Progress' project being extremley fun and engaging, and the fact we're working on it in pretty much every session makes it more fun.



A life drawing of Jen I did on my laptop using my graphics tablet.

 

- A Rakes Progress - We're well into the Rakes Progress, and I've been bustling with ideas that I still need to jot down, but I've had no shortage of ideas, that's for sure.
I'm sticking with the video game world theme, with a few additional tweaks here and there.
I've explored a little more than I usually would by painting a picture of one of the main characters, Nicola Shadow, but instead of using the design I've done before, I did a more sinister, shady character that Tom Rakewell could see in his demented state.
I'm still sticking with the design I did before, but this version could be the one Tom sees in madness.

The more twisted and sinister Nicola Shadow that Tom sees in Madness.

Personal - T-Shirt Design

I've started designing T-Shirts for the website Redbubble, a site where you can upload your designs and people can buy them, with the artist getting most of the profit per shirt.
I've only just begun, but I have one design so far:

My first T-Shirt design, based on the Mass Effect games.

I'm thinking this could be good work experience and a way to earn some money from my design work.
If you want to see the shirt on the Redbubble site, the link is below:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/djallen/works/11152569-quarian-at-heart-paragon

Pathway Research: Artist: Charles Zembillas Revisited

I'm revisiting an artist who I posted about before, Charles Zembillas.
Before, I didn't touch on why his art impacts me and why I find his art to be good, so I'm gonna touch on that in this post and make my research a tad more interesting.


I discovered after posting the first time that Charles also worked on the Spyro the Dragon series, another game I played during my childhood and one that impacts my artwork and game design to this day.

Charles Zembillas was the head concept artist on the Crash Bandicoot series, creating the first every concept of Crash, dubbing him 'Willy the Wombat', and to this day, Charles continues to draw Crash as a staple of his work, despite him not working for Naughty Dog or the Crash series anymore.
He now owns an animation and character design university in California.


Charles development work on Dr. N.Tropy from Crash 3, you can see the design evolve into the final look.
N.Tropy is also a favorite character of mine, mainly because he's suave and British.

I really like the way Charles draws his characters, from the get-go his characters have personality and are chock full of imagination.

His trademark style seems to be large expressive eyes, exaggerated proportions and cartoon anatomy, something I can really relate to.
His art style reminds me of my own, probably because I grew up around his work, even if I didn't know it.

Development of the Coco Bandicoot character.
I really like her design from the get go.

Growing up playing Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and watching video game related show's he worked on as a character designer (Such as Sonic SatAM and The Super Mario bros show.) have really left a big impact, and I drop nods to Charles's character designs to this day in my own work.
I also want to start doing more rough designs like he does for my characters instead of going straight to the final design.

A page where Charles show's off every piece of concept art he did for Spyro the Dragon (50+ images) is here: http://www.theanimationacademy.com/spyromenu.htm

Personal - Character Design: Tora Ti-Gear

Coloured in and named the character I drew yesterday.
I named her Tora Ti-Gear, Tora being a Japanese name meaning 'Tiger' and Ti-Gear being a play on her Steampunk theme/attire.
She would be suited for a platformer/adventure game and would use her spanner to solve puzzles and unlock doors, along with using it to defeat enemies. etc
The character isn't for any project I'm currently working on, but was just an idea I had in my head that I need to get on 'paper'.

Tora Ti-Gear

I'm actually wanting to do a 3D model this character when I've finished College and mess about with it, maybe even make a demo game based around her. The original drawing was done in Colors! 3D for the Nintendo 3DS, additional line art (Mainly legs and tail) done in Photoshop, and the colouring and shading was done in Photoshop too.

Art Dump - Artwork from the past few Months

 




Different Skin concepts for Sketch in Super Sketch Quest.

Sketch Comparison




A redesign of the villain on my games project, Pore Krinde.




Pore Krinde WIP




Random character design




A page from our Exquisite Corpse Story




Random Crocodile Character Concept




Members of Omicron, a personal project I started.



"Big Bad Wolf"



A villain for Omicron, Putrefacient