Old school guardian

Ok guys, my new pc is ready and i've got almost everything i need to start drawing and painting again, the last few things are arriving between this week end so in the mean time i'll keep showing you what i was doing before. This is the final-ish design for a sacred tree guardian that i've made accidentally by sketching random stuff the day before this. It happened that i made a really hold school mask but it kinda worked so i've painted that a little and the next day i thought i could develop a character from it so here it is. Tomorrow i'l show you the colored mask ;)

Notebook sketch of the day!

All right i'm finally building my pc (actually i did it yesterday but i have a lots of things to install anyway) and of course for a couple of days i can't follow this stuff but i'll give you something, don't worry :)
Here's the only digital thing i've made with my notebook!

Good Designs (Character Edition)

Talking about Characters Design...


The Question: "I'm curious to know what you mean when you say they don't relate to anything. Are you referring to components within the design not relating to each other?"


My Answer: No, in general when i do a design, even if i have total freedom of choice, i try to use some real references of a culture or something like that. This is because when we see a human being of any shape we tend to relate to him, the more elements we recognize the more we relate, and the more we like it. I'll make you a very simple example on how it works, let's pretend that we have to do an hunter that needs to catch food for his family. It doesn't matter if it's sci-fi, fantasy, retro futuristic or cultural realistic background, the hunter must have a certain type of gear with him like a water can, some kind of silent weapon, some camouflage dress, some pockets. When we see those kind of stuff our brain automatically recognize and relate to. If we see a man with a sun protection tool (an hat) and some clothes or gear that protect the internal legs side we automatically think that he's going to ride something alive, probably out of a city. Those kind of stuff makes your designs believable and easily recognizable, a quick example that i can think out of the bat where the aliens from Stargate, those where extremely good designed and essentially they was a readaptation of Egyptian pyramid culture, of the same theme there where even some squads from Unreal Tournament.

It's not the easiest thing to explain but once you know about this you'll start to notice lots of references between all the stuff you like the most 

PC Specs for Digital Painting

Hello there, i'm officially waiting the package! I've made the order and i'm going to have a new pc in 2 weeks! I'm really happy with that so i've decided to talk a little about what kind of pc you need in order to do 2d digital art. First of all you're going to use A LOT OF RAM . The dimension required today for illustration, concept art and comics in general is in function of the medium your client is going to use. In general illustration and comics are for printing purpose and concept art is much more for indication to the production team. In most cases the dpi (dots per inch) are reduced to 1 (when there are no text fonts involved in a design program) and the canvas is calculated purely by height and width, 1 per pixel, cause the resolution must hold if you're watching the art on a small screen, on a big screen, on a giant print on the wall etc. This means that the files today are reaching an enormous dimension, on average 10000px, so those files today are holding a space of 6-10 gigs of ram if you're going to use lots of texture or layers in general. This is why you're going to need a lot of ram, in future probably the size of those files is going to grow up so if you're going to buy a pc today for digital painting you need at least 16 gigs of ram (this is why i took 32). Talking about the other pieces for your machine you need to be sure to have enough power to keep your system multitasking freely cause everyone of us is always switching between the drawing program and informations on the web, references and all that kind of stuff. The last thing to not forget about is a fast hard disk to load programs and files in the shortest times (so an SSD even small should be fine) and for the sake of yourself a BACKUP SYSTEM and a UPS! As a backup system i suggest a software solution, the hardware solutions (like a Nas or something) are not cheap and there's no need for that if you don't have to share something between your personal network. I prefer a software solution for myself, i've got a simple but efficient program that takes the files i told him and creates a backup where i want to so i just need to setup the program for the first time and make him do the backups in my 3 hard disks all by himself, so you don't need to worry about anything (the software i use is called Allway Sync i paid 20$ for this). For the ones of you that don't know what's an UPS in short is a battery that keeps your pc going for some minutes when there's a black out so you can save your work and shut down you machine in safety. That's pretty much what you need, as always if there's something else you want to know about the topic just leave a message, i will answer!


Oh i was forgetting, here's something to hold on the sketches!

Back to work!

Hi guys and girls! I'm currently choosing some pieces for my new pc (was about time!) so i can come back to play with a personal technique that i've created in those days wich maybe i'll talk about the next time. Now back on topic i was drawing with paper and pencils in those days, that was very refreshing, i was able to get better in a very short amount of time. I suggest you do the same, if you haven't drawn on paper for a long time you may enjoy it quite a bit and you'll be able to see and correct things than with digital medium might be hard to spot.

Anyway here's how my new machine will look like when i'm done ordering the pieces:

The best way to learn to draw

The Question: [Short] What's the best way to learn to draw and then to paint with no experience? Is it ok to copy from photos?

My Answer: If you want to learn correctly you need to start to draw from the real things an you need some practice to draw objects in perspective on a 3d field starting from simple shapes like cubes, cones, cylinders, pyramids and spheres. There is a reason for that and is cause your eye can't perceive distance on a photo. Someone would say the opposite but it's not real, your brain can let you perceive distance by color brightness and perspective (this is what artists do) but it's not the same thing because of how eyes perceive distance (which is a little different). 


So the best way to learn to draw is to study perspective and how perspective is applied to our visual field and how to render simple shapes in a 3d space (with perspective) cause those shapes are used to create everything that can be drawn.


To learn colors the best thing to do is to learn value separation first when you are learning perspective ecc ecc and then study color theory and lighting.


Photos are a great medium to use to learn drawing and painting but only after you've learned the basics and you're 100% comfortable with advanced perspective and value separation.


I think i haven't forgot anything but if you have other doubts feel free to ask! 
(And obviously if you have a different opinion i'll be glad to hear it and talk about it cause this can be a very subjective topic for someone!)

Sup people? Sad news those days around, my pc is flat dead. Probably the mobo or the cpu are gone (maybe together) and i can't do anything about it. I'm drawing on paper in the mean time and it's kinda... weird. It's been years since my last paper drawing and i have to get used to it a little bit again. Until then i'll keep showing you some digital sketches (i can't use this machine to draw right now, i'll explain why the next time) but it won't be on daily basis, i'm sorry about that.

Anyway today sketch is something i was practicing before the pc issue, some sort of alien life form that is still fascinating for human eyes. I've figured out that most sci fi life form we see in movies or videogames are not meant to interfere with our vision or senses, with our likings. The idea came from a book that i was reading days ago that talks about our genetic preferences. I'll explain this better on the next post, the previous sketches too are done with the same topic in mind btw.

I'm still trying to fix my pc and i don't really have a clue on what's the problem, it's just... dead. I'm so sorry about leaving you without something so i'll let you see how i look like when i have to work with hardware...

Here's the final design sketch about this character

I have to catch up cause usually i do about 3 to 5 sketches per day and some illustration so well at least a sketch a day will come out so...

Sketches! Finally! I do a lot of this stuff and i never had a place to show them up so here we go. Nasty mantis cyborg, the follow up will be how i made the design in a day.

About Concept Art

The Question: Is concept art just an idea of something, or multiple ideas to choose? Or basically a sketch for a creation to show the idea of it. Cause i have seen concept arts in many form, multiple same sketch of different design, sketch of one thing that looks quite like an finished art, messy sketches of shapes and form of an entire movement or action. I am very confused. But my main interest is to create something for a game/movie > character, costume, weapons and props. Is concept art really the right path? I know that concept art is the very start of the process in a creation of a game/movie. Sorry for so many questions and long reply...


My Answer: The answer to all those question is only one though: Concept Art is a process, usually driven by an artistic media, used to concretize an idea in order to create a final product (potentially everything that can be made).

So potentially concept art can be made for a lot of reasons and with a lot of purposes but there are common ways to do it. I think the most common ways today are the silhouette and the happy accident sketching, together with gestural drawing and lasso. That's the reason why everytime we talk about concept design itself the techniques and the look of it could be vary but the meaning it's always to generate an idea or to fully render a design for a product.

I hope this will clarify most of your doubts, in your case when drawing an armor you must first think "what's this armor for? is this for a movie, a videogame or a comic ecc? what's the purpose of this armor? how this armor will work?" and all that kind of stuff.

Blog Start

Ok, i've finally found the time to follow this thing up (and i need a space for my sketches too) so you can see some cool stuff and i can start grouping together some nice info about concept art and design and painting in general. I hope you'll appreciate the efforts!