I spent a moment by a creek in Yosemite lightly sketching the light illuminating the trees and winding along the surface of the water – you can see the whispers of my pencil marks in lighter areas. Then I sat cross-legged on the sandy shore with my travel watercolors on one knee and my sketchbook […]
Regardless of where you are in your career, your skill level, or experience, there is something for everyone to take from the Game Developer’s Conference. I met a range of people from game developers and artists, to CEOs of major companies who are interested in how the game industry will impact their businesses, to recruiters […]
Click to enlarge Earlier this week I posted this painting “Cursed by the Cthaeh”, a portrait of Kvothe Kingkiller from Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle. Today I want to show you how I made it. If you think this painting came easy, it didn’t. It’s been a long time coming, and here’s the full story. Step 1: […]
This week in Noah Bradley’s Art Camp we’re studying figures, gestures, and flesh tones, and one of the assignments is a long digitally painted color study of a full figure. I highly recommend this class to anyone who wants to level up their digital painting skills, especially for professional illustration or concept art. I chose […]
Happy New Year! Today I conducted my first annual review on 2013 and made plans for 2014, as suggested by blogger Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Noncomformity in his essay How to Conduct Your Own Annual Review. A personal Annual Review an alternative to New Year’s resolutions, and for good reason, only 8% of people keep their resolutions. […]
I’ve been developing the design of Kvothe, the main character in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle, for my thesis project dedicated to visually developing the story for game pre-production. Above are my color experiments for Kvothe as an adult. It’s helpful to make quick study of color combinations in the process of visual development before creating the […]
Gene Parola, the author of Lehua, Ka’ao a ka Wahine [Lehua, The story of a Woman]: A Hawaiian Noblewoman Comes of Age at a “Changing of the Gods.”, and Deborah Bond-Upson of Awesome Stories have commissioned me to paint Lehua. Above are my early thumbnails for the project. The final paintings will be included in a second print of […]
The overall shape, the silhouette, is the primary and most powerful way to identify an object, type of person, or creature. The ability to quickly pick out meaning from silhouettes, such as whether the thing we saw would help, nourish, or hurt us. Shapes are a kind of language that we learned first to identify, […]
I had fun with the lost and found lines in the glass and the subsurface scattering in this sketch.
Angelo Bronzino (1503-1572), who’s real name was Agnolo di Cosimo, was a Florentine Mannerist era painter. The painters of this era were known for breaking the established rules of Renaissance Europe painting and emphasizing artifice over nature. Stylistically, his work has an intellectual sophistication and seems to emphasize compositional tension and instability (such as the way […]
An animated .gif of the process. Notes: Armor was arguably most elegant in the late 15th century – it’s my favorite period for all things hammered into metal suits. Both Italian and German armor were popular (and used by both Spaniards and Britons). But German armor, like German clothing fashion at the time, was sleeker […]