I'm not an animator, and I don't know to what degree this will be visible from this angle, but my first thought was there isn't enough hip movement, vertically. And corresponding shoulder shift-counterbalance.
Also think she maybe needs more backward counterbalance and arm swinging if she's tilted that far forward and running with a heavy weight, but honestly, not sure how much that matters in this genre.
I did a bunch more changes based on some feedback from Martin ass-kicking Sen, but at this point I can't really spend much longer on it because I still have a lot to do, and the deadline's looming. I've updated the web build with what I've got so far (added background, some UI, improved run and idle animations). Main things that are missing are an attack animations, and the fx. I'll only be implementing her Bladesurge and an ulti. Her in-game ulti is pretty unexciting when it comes to fx, so I'll be doing a completely different one.
I've found that it runs fine in Opera, but in Chrome and Firefox I get blank screens. (Basically, none of my custom shaders -- which is everything -- want to show up.) But it's worked on all other machines that I've tested on except mine, so I'm hoping I'm just some anomaly... <_<
Thanks again for the feedback so far. Even if I can't address everything because of time constraints, it's really valuable for future work! :)
I've got a new link to a build with fx for her bladesurge. There's a 200ms charge up before it casts, which isn't the same as the game technically (it should be instant), but now anyone who plays knows what it's like to play from South Africa. http://www.techartjon.com/riotcomp
:P
Also, been painting some fanart for two of my friends who're getting married. They play(ed) a lot of WoW, as a troll and panda, so I'm making this for them. "Make love, not Warcraft!"
Also, I've been practising rendering reflective stuff.
Rendering some lineart by Artgerm, but he hasn't told me I can use it yet, so I'll upload that somewhere only when I know for sure... it looks so awesome though. XD
@Elyaradine the colours you used to do the dragon swarm in the 2nd set of pics are spot on. Even in the one with less details (where they are basically just smudges). The teal, mustard and pink colours really pop out from the green surroundings. To my un-artistic eye anyway.
Also, from a learning point of view - do you do the low detail one first, in order to see what colours will work where and then do the 2nd more detailed illustration or does the 2nd one get done over the first. Or, was the detailed one just an illustration that you found and then you made a low detail one just to see how they used the colours in their scene? Basically, how does one go about studying colour? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but again, I am not an artist and I am always in awe of your work.
@Elyaradine - I liked how the detail on the front arm and violin makes the arm in the background almost fade. It has a lot less detail than the rest of the picture, but you don't notice it because your eyes are drawn towards other focal points. Also, the shading for his beard is amazing!!!
@Elyaradine - I actually preferred last year's. Sorry. But she had a more "classic" Rogue look (like the animated series from the 90s), whereas this painting looks like the actress from Hunger Games (I forget her name now). Not that, that is a bad thing, nor that this painting isn't absolutely beautiful. It's just a personal observation/taste thing.
This Rogue feels more distinctive/real to me, particularly in the face (which feels more anime influenced in last year's one). She definitely has an Anglo-American face now, not too sure what Rogue's heritage is meant to be, nor whether it matters, but I like that she looks like a person with a heritage . The brush strokes feel more confident this year (with less fine lines added to improve forms).
I'm a sucker for flowing hair. I think your hair is a bit improved from last year, but the white hair feels oddly bulky, like it's been placed on top of her other hair. It might be that it blows out and so isn't conveying it's form as well as the rest of the hair. (I am being nitpicky of course, I assume the characterization and the face are what's important to you in this work)
The difference in detail between the hands bothers me a bit as well, particularly that the closer hand is less detailed (if I were to be absurdly critical).
Thanks guys. :) I didn't say it was a wip, but it is! :P Playing around with whether to add the jacket (I'm leaning toward yes), and still got to add some other features of her costume (like the hairband) and do a lot of cleanup, and a background. Also spent a lot of time adding legs and doing a full-body pose, but I think I may scrap that, as the full body then requires a more complex background, and I'm sure I'll quickly get bored then. Progress is already a slower than it would've been if I weren't watching Steven Universe...
...which was a pretty cool show, and led to this wip:
Calling this one done for now. Was originally planning to animate her, but there's just too much going on in my life right now. :P
And this one's background's a photobash that's still got a lot of heavy work that needs doing to mould it into what I have in mind. Putting it on hold though to do the rAge mascot thing, so I figured I'd just post it as is for now.
Been really busy in general, so I haven't done a lot of personal work. Made time to paint this for the girlfriend for her birthday. It's supposed to be the full set of Steven Universe gems, but I had to be realistic about time and have only done 1 and a half. I'll finish them up when I'm done with my current batch of contract work. :)
My favourites are the faces as well. Very unique style, with a hint of Disney princess in some of them. Love the Wipeout style stage as well. The Designers Republic is what made that game the icon it is today. Even now the art in the very first game still holds up.
Thanks! Most of the faces were straight up copies of Loish's art. She's a hugely popular artist who pretty much exclusively does that kind of stylised work. The remaining faces (probably the less good looking ones) and the painted one were my trying to draw my own faces trying to apply the rules I tried to figure out from her style. I'm pretty sure I didn't nail the ruleset, because when I tried again a few days later I was much less successful. :P
I lost my way a bit at the end of last year, with taking a contract that was too good to turn down even though I was really tired. Took a while to recover from that. :P
Free Lives has been really great though, giving some paid time for skills-building and R&D, and I think I'm slowly getting back into things.
do you do the low detail one first, in order to see what colours will work where and then do the 2nd more detailed illustration or does the 2nd one get done over the first. Or, was the detailed one just an illustration that you found and then you made a low detail one just to see how they used the colours in their scene? Basically, how does one go about studying colour?
Sorry I totally missed this post from last year -- I think you edited your post and I didn't see the edit. The smaller, more detailed images are from concept art from Dreamworks movies, whereas the messy ones are my attempts to capture the feel of the environment using colour and lighting, while not being precious about form. So that's kind of step one of studying colour I think, which is just learning to reproduce what you see for observation (but keeping the copies loose, quick, just learn the one thing you're aiming to take away, rather than making a perfect copy). Step two would be drawing a completely separate illustration, and trying to use the same lighting/colour palette that you learnt in the copy. There's a lot of breaking down you could do, like figuring out the colour of the light source, the colour of the ambient light/shadows, and making guesses as to the "real" (local) colour of objects before they were tinted by other lights.
Okay so you've given me quite a bit of useful crit so I thought I would throw some of my ideas your way.
You don't have to have dynamic poses for work to not look stoic. The issue you have may be that you're losing your dynamicness in rendering. What I mean by that is that you are scrutinizing over the lighting, line work and rendering being 100% accurate, where you could get away with something that is more interesting to look at.
Even your Rouge drawing suffers from looking like an action figure in space rather than a character.
Also, don't be scared to light women the same way you light men. There are far too many artists trying to make woman look beautiful by not lighting them properly because their bodies are somehow more important than the character they convey. (this may be me projecting because I see it a lot in art.)
The skull on the one lady with the pointy nose needs work. Skull variants can be interesting but they need to feel good in space.
Advice: 30 mintues is too long, get a character on a page, light it and move on.
There's a thing I made a little over a month ago (and why I didn't enter Comp G). It was an art test for a UK AAA game studio. I got some really great feedback from them, which was especially cool because most of the feedback was "try to do the awesome stuff in the concept you painted!" XD
I've always believed that what software you use doesn't really matter because the theory/principles/art are the same regardless, but it was great to be able to have to prove it by having to learn Unreal, and apply my knowledge of Unity shaders to get what I wanted. And, in return, I learnt a couple of cool tricks that I think Unreal does with its lit particles that I brought back into my Unity games (some of the tech was hacked into the shaders for the "Flight" jam game).
I haven't had a tablet for the past month or so because it's been in shipping. I guess I haven't said on the forums here (most people know anyway), I'm moving to the US next week to work at Epic Games as an FX Artist. (It was the above fire tornado that got them to contact me, actually!) I'll still be lurking/posting here though, so not much will change in terms of my being involved in stuff.
Anyway, so no Wacom tablet, but I've been practising some painting with the Apple Pencil. I still miss Photoshop, but it's pretty cool.
Congrats on the new position at Epic Games! Sounds Exciting! I really love your art work and your comments and feedback on the MGSA Forums! Good luck and look forward to seeing more Awesome stuff! :D
There's an fx competition going on at the RTFX forums. I'm entering with a wisp. :) There's a lot to do still (and I think my concept's got a bunch of shapes that are clashing that I'm going to fix), but I love how cute this little guy is. XD
Comments
:D
Also think she maybe needs more backward counterbalance and arm swinging if she's tilted that far forward and running with a heavy weight, but honestly, not sure how much that matters in this genre.
http://techartjon.com/projects/riotcomp/__Build.html
I've found that it runs fine in Opera, but in Chrome and Firefox I get blank screens. (Basically, none of my custom shaders -- which is everything -- want to show up.) But it's worked on all other machines that I've tested on except mine, so I'm hoping I'm just some anomaly... <_<
Thanks again for the feedback so far. Even if I can't address everything because of time constraints, it's really valuable for future work! :)
:P
Also, been painting some fanart for two of my friends who're getting married. They play(ed) a lot of WoW, as a troll and panda, so I'm making this for them. "Make love, not Warcraft!"
Also, I've been practising rendering reflective stuff.
Rendering some lineart by Artgerm, but he hasn't told me I can use it yet, so I'll upload that somewhere only when I know for sure... it looks so awesome though. XD
(Open image in new tab. :) )
:3
Also, from a learning point of view - do you do the low detail one first, in order to see what colours will work where and then do the 2nd more detailed illustration or does the 2nd one get done over the first. Or, was the detailed one just an illustration that you found and then you made a low detail one just to see how they used the colours in their scene? Basically, how does one go about studying colour? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but again, I am not an artist and I am always in awe of your work.
I'm a sucker for flowing hair. I think your hair is a bit improved from last year, but the white hair feels oddly bulky, like it's been placed on top of her other hair. It might be that it blows out and so isn't conveying it's form as well as the rest of the hair. (I am being nitpicky of course, I assume the characterization and the face are what's important to you in this work)
The difference in detail between the hands bothers me a bit as well, particularly that the closer hand is less detailed (if I were to be absurdly critical).
...which was a pretty cool show, and led to this wip:
\o/
And this one's background's a photobash that's still got a lot of heavy work that needs doing to mould it into what I have in mind. Putting it on hold though to do the rAge mascot thing, so I figured I'd just post it as is for now.
Wow man! You have got serious talent .
Love the Wipeout style stage as well. The Designers Republic is what made that game the icon it is today. Even now the art in the very first game still holds up.
Free Lives has been really great though, giving some paid time for skills-building and R&D, and I think I'm slowly getting back into things.
A lot of your work is very stoic though, would love to see more of your dynamic action scenes (like the Rogue mansion image).
You don't have to have dynamic poses for work to not look stoic. The issue you have may be that you're losing your dynamicness in rendering. What I mean by that is that you are scrutinizing over the lighting, line work and rendering being 100% accurate, where you could get away with something that is more interesting to look at.
Even your Rouge drawing suffers from looking like an action figure in space rather than a character.
Also, don't be scared to light women the same way you light men. There are far too many artists trying to make woman look beautiful by not lighting them properly because their bodies are somehow more important than the character they convey. (this may be me projecting because I see it a lot in art.)
The skull on the one lady with the pointy nose needs work. Skull variants can be interesting but they need to feel good in space.
Advice: 30 mintues is too long, get a character on a page, light it and move on.
I hope this provides some insight :P
I've always believed that what software you use doesn't really matter because the theory/principles/art are the same regardless, but it was great to be able to have to prove it by having to learn Unreal, and apply my knowledge of Unity shaders to get what I wanted. And, in return, I learnt a couple of cool tricks that I think Unreal does with its lit particles that I brought back into my Unity games (some of the tech was hacked into the shaders for the "Flight" jam game).
Anyway, so no Wacom tablet, but I've been practising some painting with the Apple Pencil. I still miss Photoshop, but it's pretty cool.