color monsters and a small tutorial

didn't expected to came out with an entire monster lineup today during the downtimes at work.

again, Nate Wragg's style simplicity and effectiveness keeps inspiring me lots.


i like the idea to reproduce the feeling of a real drawing in photoshop, so here it is my small guide to how i manage to do it!

here is the plain drawing. just a black rough sketch with a color above it.

selecting "drop shadow" from the fx panel...

... i add a small sharp shadow to make the blue spot look like a paper cut.

with FILTER>BRUSH STROKE>SPATTER i add some randomness to linework and edges. (you have to flatten the image to make this effect work properly)

with FILTER>ARTISTIC>ROUGH PASTELS i add some paper texture and pastel melting (again, the image need to be flatten to make it work as above)

finally i add one of my fav paper textures in normal mode around 20%. and here it is, done! =)

here and here a link to my texture paper. hope you enjoy and find useful this small tutorial!

CGMA Character Design Classes with Nate Wragg pt.2

again, working around silhouette clarity and shape language and playing with thin vs big / straight versus round.

 

i had chance to study and reproduce the styles of some great artists, in this case it's Ronald Searle and Jay Ward animation style.

Jay Ward animation style study

Ronald Searle's style study

CGMA Character Design Classes with Nate Wragg

here is my first 3 weeks of  assignments for the character design animation classes with Nate Wragg at CGMA. i'm having lots of fun, learning many of the basic principles behind the construction of a solid design.

as you might notice, the classes are mostly focusing on how to drive the characters appeal and attitude trough shape language starting from simple shape as triangles, circles or rectangles, making conscious and logical choices on how a certain character should look like given his personality.

that's it for now. hope you readers like my designs! =)

sam & max 25th anniversary

this one started from a very small doodle, while at work, right after i read about the 25th anniversary! i hope someone still remember the legendary lucasarts videogame (which me and Luca are trying to replay during our lunch break ) and maybe some of you lucky fellows have even read the original comics!

 and... it's just Sam, i know... but i can't help it, he's my favorite! =)

devoting my weekend to watching the entire first season of the Battlestar Galactica remake i came up with some sci-fi sketches.

this one is the sketch made with Alchemy

the spacecraft above is made with a procedure i learned from a workshop with Paul Christopher. He, as many other vehicle and prop artists uses Alchemy to bring new design ideas. in particular you can set the program in mirror mode, getting something close to Rorschach's spots.

i'm practicing with a method where you only paint space first. with a big flat brush or the free selection tool, which in my opinion is perfect for this task, i just paint the silhouettes of the subject i have in my mind. i keep each part of the character separated on different layers, that will ease the painting process.

the second step is about painting details inside these shapes. to do so, i use the clipping mask tool with flat or simple textured brushes. i think the whole thing would work even better if painted as realistic as possible.

that's it, nothing much more about it. the cool thing about this method is the resulting contrast between simple shapes and the fine details painted inside them. also it's something that allows you to get faster results since we're practically omitting the sketching process.

 

a good exercise to warm op or just keep your eye in shape and that i found immensely useful to study composition and color at the same time is to copy movie's screenshots.

i use to keep the original image in a separate monitor than the one with photoshop. that way it is a bit harder to guess the right color.

bright colors

the battlefield

here is something i did a few days ago trying to practice on environments. while i'm very happy of how the background came out, i'm not much satisfied of how the character blends to it...

also, playing lots of battlefield 3 lately! you can find me there as 'pentotark'.

went to La Specola last weekend where i met some cool friends* there. we ended up drawing insects all morning and thats undoubtedly a nice thing. =)

*nadia, andrea, ema, gio, lacame, marco

morning sketches

again, some practice with photoshop selection tool.

ahh good holydays! gotta keep up practicing some more...

finally some updates, working on more stuff!