Three Years Gone By - Speed Painting

I got a notification saying it is three years ago today that I posted my speed painting exercise from class in which we had to paint grayscale mountains in 15 minutes. When looking at the images I painted I felt that I can definitely do better now, and was curious to test my improvements over the past three years. So I picked three (a bit more complicated and detailed I realised) images and set the timer at 15 minutes.

Old Pics:

I was right last time about time just flying by and still need to get better at using different brushes for speed painting. In my defense, speed painting is something that I hardly ever do. :P
Although they are far from masterpieces I still do think that there is a slight improvement (fortunately).

Practice

I looked through my old collection of pictures last week and was inspired by this half-finished painting and decided to complete it. It is a practice painting of a photo of Cara in Legend of the Seeker.

Finished

As mentioned in my last post I finished all the frames for the intro of "Terminal" Friday, and yesterday our Lead Programmer implemented them in our game. They slide in and out frame by frame, ending on a comic book page with them all gathered before perfectly timed with the music switch to the main menu, of wich he was very proud.

Here is how the finished page turned out.

As I have showed previously I first drew all frames in greyscale, apart from the "Fly City" one which was already finished. What I did next was applying colour layers in Photoshop on top of which I experimented with brushes and layers in colour dodge and linear dodge modes to get the vibrant glowing look I was going for. These were used for finishing touches, to draw the eye to the focal points.

I kept the colours rather flat and worked with very few colours, still inspired by Ms Marvel but now taking it in my own direction. I used the same purple for the background on all images, gradually increasing the amount of turquoise representing the night falling and her going further into the building where there is no sunlight. These are the two colours that make up the colour scheme of "Terminal" and I added some touches of an orange yellow, which complements them both nicely, and a redder version of the purple to get some variations to the colours.

I am thinking about wether it might be a good idea to add the logo to the page, but overall I think it turned out well. The ones I feel most happy with are the first one, of "Fly City", and the last one of the interrogation room from a security camera. I think I did really well on the lighting and colouring of the first one and I am really glad that I managed as well as I did on the last one as the prespective gave me quite a challenge, the light, colour and texture also give it a mysterious feeling that I was going for.

We have finished all graphics for "Terminal" now so it is just up to the coders to implement and polish the last few things that are left and we will be ready to show it on the final playtesting session on Friday, our game is very complete and I think we will do well.

Friday's Work

I finished colouring my last frames for the intro of "Terminal" today, since I had all values done and a colour scheme to follow it went rather quickly. I managed to finish the one I started yesterday and the last three ones, now all that is left is figuring out how it should be presented.

Intro

I have been very busy lately working on a comic book page styled intro for our game "Terminal" and I thought I should give you an update of what I have been doing.

As we had a storyboard assignment for the 2D course last week I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, since it was practically the same thing that I needed to do for this project. I reworked and added to a very basic storyboard that I doodled up very early in the project and when I was done with the 2D assignment I chose the most important frames to tell the story and arranged them like a comic book page.

This is the assignment I handed in, the Swedish text is a short description of the story being told, ...

and here is what I have done so far.

To keep it cohesive I have started with making all frames in grey scale, all the while focusing on work speed rather than detail, when I am finished I will start thinking about textures and colour. I will go more into detail of the how and why when I am done in one of my weekly blog posts and I will leave you with the one that is complete.

Friday Speed Paint

This is something I painted in about an hour and a half to practice rendering in grey scale and increasing my work speed, not getting caught up in details. I started with a rough sketch that I cleaned up into line art. I started rendering with a dark background, adding light where needed and blending it with the smudge tool. For the finishing touches I added some extra highlights and I thought about colouring it, but I like it better the way it is.

Ms X 2.0

This week I have completed my drawing of Ms X that I posted here a short while ago and I thought I would show you a little more about how I worked.

I had an idea of the pose I wanted, so the first thing I did was searching Google for references of women looking over their shoulder. I found one that had an angle I liked and to save me some time I moved her body and arms to get the pose I wanted. I then used that for reference of proportions and positions in a rough construction sketch and added her hips and legs. This first sketch went really fast to draw so that I could see if it would work before putting too much time into it.

When the first sketch was done I started cleaning it up, taking it to solid line art, first only her body and when I was happy with that I added the clothes and hair on top.

 

I used a small hard brush with shape dynamics and fast strokes to get as clean lines as possible – keeping one hand on the ctrl+z buttons. Again, I looked at Ms Marvel and decided to keep the line art thin, with the edges thicker. The lines in her hair were particularly tricky, as hair normally is, and I had to rework it several times, looking at my references, before I was happy. I also used several reference photos of silk blouses and pencil skirts to create the creases of her clothes and for the face I looked at our Concept Art.

 

To get cohesiveness with the background upon which she is to be placed and to get the values and slightly monochromatic colours of the Ms Marvel comic I rendered her first in grey scale, using the same brushes and techniques that I used for the background.

 

I started with colouring her grey and then add light and shadow and used the smudge tool to blend the colours before adding sharper details, especially in the clothes and hair – always using a hard brush. The hair was, again, a challenge as well as the face and I had to rework them several times.

To colour her I used a colour layer in Photoshop, the colours were inspired by our mood board for cohesiveness and I used only one colour for her blouse and hair, while her skirt was left very dark grey. I did not want her face to look flat though, so I added some pink, peach and reddish tones on her cheeks, chin, forehead and around her nose. 

 

When I finally added her to the background I also placed her underneath a gradient from the sun so that she would look affected by the sunset outside the window and an inner shadow which I changed to colour dodge in a light colour from the center of the sun to create a rim light. 

I am happy with what I have produced and I think I have made it look like the style I took inspiration from. If there was anything I would do differently it is probably the face; I think it could use some additional work to make it look more like the style I was going for although I think it works well the way it is now. If I was to redo it I would probably use sharper shadows and flatter areas of value, not blending the colours so much so that it would look more cartoony than realistic.

I has been really helpful working beside other people who can give instant feedback and notice things that are not apparent to me who was been staring at it for a while. When I was nearly done I showed it to one of our teacher's assistants to get some tips on how to best finish it and our Lead Designer, Oskar, has been a great source of feedback while working next to me.