Week 9: More Character Art

Last week I accomplished a lot on this guy. This week, I accomplished just as much, but it's not as apparent because this is the rendering phase. I want to make this illustration as polished as possible to demonstrate my rendering and finishing abilities to prospective employers. Here's the progress:

Getting warmer.

He's not quite done yet, but I'm still considering this a victory because I'm really coming to understand what goes into game art like this:

Copyright Riot Games

 In need of a break from the Flint King, I also started the design stages for another piece of character art. This guy is Ko. Ko is a samurai. Ko is a triceratops. Trisamutops?

Thumbnails for fun and profit.

Hopefully next week will see the completion of the Flint King and some significant progress on Ko.

Week 8: Enough cutesy stuff!

It's time to shift gears away from Seven Bear Itch in this blog. Back in my January 29 post, I made a commitment to improve and polish some work that I started in a previous class. Well, this week I did just that, and below are the "before and after."

Before.

After.

I'm happy with the progress that I've made on this piece. It's slow going because this is the furthest I've taken a full-color digital painting. I'm still defining my process. I'll be working on this more next week and hope to have it finished at the next blog post.

Some things I learned from my work this week:

• Some kind of background is important for both presentation and seeing color/value relationships. 
• I benefit from a "painterly" process. I can't treat concept art the same way as photo compositing.
• Custom brushes are amazing once you know the brush engine. I would rather use a custom brush made from a texture photo than said texture photo as a layer. With enough time, I'd rather build my own textures using brush strokes.

Cheers!

Week 7: What I learned at GDC

I spent this entire week working as a Conference Associate at GDC. It was a valuable experience, both as a networking opportunity and in terms of helping me pick a direction for my portfolio. Here are the core things that I learned:

• The Game Industry wants you to be specialized.
• I should have a separate resume for Artist positions and another for Game Design
• Even Game Desigers have specalizations. There are Combat Designers, Encounter Designers, and Systems Engineers. These are all subsets of Game Design. 
• A Systems Designer focuses on mechanics and manipulation of data for game balance and interesting user experience. This 
• There are no Game Designer/Artists outside of the Indy Game sector, and even within it, someone who is so generalized in their skillset is rare, and so their value is not implicitly understood.
• I need to choose a focus, and I'm a little further along on the Concept Art front.
• If I'm going to show Game Design work, something small and polished is way better than something grandiose and unfinished.
• The above probably goes for Concept Art as well.
• I need to learn Unity.
• I need to do more coding.
• There are more Artist positions available than Game Designer positions.

...So that's a lot of to-do list type stuff. The bottom line is that I should focus on concept art. I need to spend the rest of the semester producing 5 or 6 polished art pieces that show the best of what I can do. If I complete one every other week for the rest of the semester, I will achieve that goal. Here goes nothing!