STAR WARS day 2014

On time this year. Here's one of the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith. Hope you like it.

Previous drawings from 2012 and 2013.

Happy Star Wars Day!

bye

June The Ninth Be With You

I missed May the 4th this year so here's something to make up for it.

Plo Koon is a top Jedi.

I always thought that in the films he should have had a yellow lightsaber like he did originally in Jedi Power Battles and came close to giving him one in this but decided to go for the blue in the end.

Almost at 20,000 views so will do something cool when that happens (maybe a Congo War Child video update). 

Bye.

AudioVineyard

So unfortunately it's been a while since my last post as I haven't done much work on Congo War Child or anything else, but here's something new! I've done a few cartoon illustrations for my good friend Rory's new website AudioVineyard.net. It's a website selling royalty-free music and is amazing and definitely worth a look so go and look. Go on.

Anyway here's the images all put together:

And here's a screenshot of them working on the website:

Really happy to have my work on display in another place online and glad I could help Rory out.

More news soon hopefully, been really busy in work and out but really want to get the ball rolling with my creative work again, especially with CWC.

That's all for now.

BYE  

Alice

Just another Utopia drawing. Bye.

Where is Jessica Hyde?

Arby from Channel 4's amazing new series Utopia. Despite being horrifically violent he's probably the series' most likeable character. Couldn't get the mouth right here though I think.

Watch Utopia if you haven't already.

bye

Mid-Month Madness... Just an October update

 Just a quick mid-month update on non-Seeker stuff I've been doing.

First is a follow up to the business card I did for Lanny last month. He asked me to design a poster with pull tabs to promote his English tuition, so if you're German and can't read this get in touch with him.

 My Minecraft Lego videos have been having a steady flow of views which I'm incredibly pleased with as I was only expecting a couple of hundred views maximum. I'm encouraged to make more but I really can't find the time at the moment.

 I've also kindly been asked to design a tattoo for my girlfriend's brother incorporating various parts of his personality. It's not finished yet so will only post a sneak peek here but I think it's looking good so far:

 I think that's about everything now. I'm keeping updates about The Seeker in separate posts so that they're easier to promote. One should be appearing later on this evening. bye

Spillin the beans (Part 1)

 It's been a quite a while since my last post. I've got a job now and have been working on stuff in the rest of my free time so that's why! But here I am again with a big update specifically about my work on Project Steel, which has since become 'The Seeker'.

 We have an IndieDB page to keep you up to date and you can find that by clicking here.

So yeah this post is going to be a recap on where I was up to in the design process of the character Spillins last time and, from there, cover his progression into a 3D model in-engine. There will be some ground I've covered before but hopefully enough new stuff to be interesting. Aww here it goes...

Character Design

 With a pair of sketches of Spillins that Pete drew last year as a starting point I began work on the character design concept drawing. Using reference points such as famous historical explorers, american mountain men, and Yoda, the drawing took shape and finally ended up as the image you can see above.

 While designing Spillins I made a conscious effort to make him as recognisable from a distance as possible. As he is such a mysterious character and will occasionally appear at long distances unannounced it is important that his design catches the player's eye so that they don't miss him. The two main factors I took into account were his silhouette and his colour palette. 

Giving him a large rucksack, bulky figure, and bald head combined with a red coat with white fur (based on an image of the aforementioned mountain men I found) will hopefully mean he stands out against both the white mountains and the dark green forest settings of the game. 

Orthographic Drawing

 With the concept drawing complete the next step was to create an orthographic drawing of the character to aid the transition into a 3D model.

 I suffer from the problem of not being able to draw the same thing twice so, as you can imagine, I'm not a massive fan of this type of drawing. Luckily however I knew before I started that I would be modelling Spillins so I didn't have to go into a serious amount of detail as I could visualise the missing pieces in my head, having come up with the character's design myself. Had I had to pass the drawing on to someone else for modelling (or if this is the case in the future) I would have gone into a lot more detail to make sure they understood exactly how he is meant to look.

 Having said all that, the orthographics were fairly painless to draw and I had a good image in my head of how Spillins was going to look as a 3D model.

3D Modelling

 I was so glad to get into the task of modelling Spillins. As much as I'm satisfied by finishing a drawing, it doesn't come close to modelling, which I find constantly rewarding.

 There's little to say about modelling the main bulk of the character's body, arms, and legs as it was so trouble-free and quickly finished. The video below shows the body at an almost finished stage with a placeholder head:

 Once the main body was finished I moved on to Spillins' hands, which turned out to be the most frustrating but ultimately rewarding part of the model. Although the topology isn't great I'm incredibly happy with the shaping of the hand:

 Next was probably the most important part of the model, the head... The following image shows the head throughout the process growing from a random bunch of polygons into something more recognisable:

 And here's the head at this point on a partially accessorised body (rendered in Maya):

 After quite a few hours of developing and tweaking the head is complete. Following that more accessories are added and the model is complete and reading for engine testing:

 And again with the wireframe visible (don't forget to view the pictures in full size!):

 I'm pretty pleased with the model's poly count (weighing in at just under 4000 faces) but obviously still have much to learn when it comes to low-poly game modelling (and modelling in general of course). Since finishing the model I've found some great topology pictures of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood characters which have insanely low poly counts and which I will be using very closely as reference points for future character modelling. 

 To wrap up this part of the development of Spillins I give you him in-engine (UDK) with a rather jazzy sandstone texture (unfortunately not two-sided as his bag strap is invisible):

 I hope you agree that he's looking good and hope that this post offers a bit more insight than usual haha! Next time I will hopefully have the model textured and possibly rigged, but that's all for now.

BYE

June 2012 dump

 After the tidal wave of posts in May I've been relatively quiet this month. I have done some stuff though and here it is...

 I've started working on the orthographic drawings for the Project Steel characters and this is the first completed one, Spillins. Normally I'd tidy up the drawing with clean lines before signing them off but we've decided that I will be modelling him so there's no real need as I have a good enough picture of what he looks like:

 At the very end of last month I also released episode 2 of my lego-style minecraft instruction videos so here it is:

 Finally I have set up a DeviantArt page (http://enormousblogodile.deviantart.com/) to post and promote stuff. You can get to it via the other sites/contact list on the right of the blog.

bye

Project Steel Character Design

 Finally finished the character concept drawings I've been working on for the past few weeks. They are for Project Steel, a game I am working on with a few friends. So yeah, I'll let them do the talking:

Captain Hawk

Adam Adams (First Mate)

Gunner (waiting for a name)

Rascal (Quartermaster)

Twin Deckhands (waiting for names as well)

Spillins (Mystery Man!)

 Very pleased with how these have come out. The recent drawing practise has paid off I think.

Let me know what you think. BYE

Yogdrawing + Project Steel

 As some of you will know I am a massive fan of The Yogscast. I decided to do a drawing of their most popular minecraft series so here it is: 

 I'm very pleased with how it came out. It's a similar style to my Mario and Luigi pictures but slightly less creepy I think.

 Also here is a silhouette and scale image of all the character designs I have been doing over the past few weeks. They are for a game I am currently working on with Pete and Ollie called Project Steel, at the moment, and you can get more information on the current build etc by clicking on this exact text which will take you to Pete's blog.

 Full character design drawings coming soon!

bye.

Star Wars Day 2012 (Darth Maul)

 Just a quick drawing to warm up for the massive amount of drawing I have to do over the next week. As it's May the 4th I decided to do a Star Wars-themed picture so here's Darth Maul (probably the best thing about The Phantom Menace). Might do one every year!

 Also my amazing girlfriend bought me a Lego Boba Fett clock (click the Star Wars label at the bottom of this post to see my other Star Wars stuff including a sketch of Boba!): 

 More stuff coming soon byyyyyyyyeeeeeee and may the force be with you.

March 2012 Update (with added Star Wars)

 Hello.
It's been too long since I posted anything and I've lost the knack of starting a post with a load of bullshit so I'm just going to post pictures and tell you what they are etc... (Don't forget to right-click > new tab if you want to see the images in full resolution)

 I decided to add a lightsaber to my graduation photo and it received a massive amount of positive feedback on Facebook (I graduated last year with a 2:1 with hons in Computer Games Design):

 Then my friend Dan of Toxic Games (creators of Q.U.B.E) asked me to do one for him! I'm in the Q.U.B.E credits as a tester! My first credit in a game :) It's a great game and you should definitely check it out. You can find it on Steam and loads of other places.

 Similar stuff again here although a lot more recent. A friend asked me to Star Wars up some photos of his brother and nephew, both of whom love the films, so here they are. I'm very happy with how they turned out and they are probably some of my best photo manipulating in Photoshop so far:

Jack

and Jamie

  Next up is an image I have only finished tonight. It's a Photoshop painting of an angry parrot, created as a promotional image for my friend Steve aka Phrazer for his soon to be released track 'Angry Parrot'. Visit his Soundcloud and listen now!

 This last picture is a WIP of a creepy Mario drawing I am slowly doing. I made the mistake of posting it on Facebook as it is here and got some really positive feedback meaning that I decided it was good enough like this. I really want to finish it though:

 In other artwork related news I had my first potentially paid commission for a website header but it fell through and they used their own design. I was very happy with the work I did and it showed progression in my design skills but I won't be posting the work on here as it might act as promotion for their website and basically fuck that. I learnt quite a bit from the experience though which is great!  

 Finally my two housemates (Pete and Ollie) and I have been playing a lot of multiplayer Minecraft on the Exiled Gaming server and have made some really cool stuff. We have set up a Youtube channel for videos of our adventures on the servers as well as some up-and-coming building instruction videos by me.

 Here's our first video. I'm blocodile and I don't have a mic (subscribe, like, comment, share etc):

 Hope you like what I've had to show. Hopefully Blogodile droppings will become more frequent again soon. Please like, follow, comment and all that stuff if you feel like helping me out :) 

 Bye.

Car Wars

 Check this out if you like Star Wars/the environment/cool stuff/Greenpeace/clever branding and marketing.

Basically I barged into this without learning the facts but I don't care.

CLICK HERE TO SAVE THE WORLD VIA STAR WARS


Give it a go.


More drawing soon. I've been busy playing Deus Ex 3 and sorting out moving into a new house but I'm going to get on with it tonight.


BYE


P.s. Here's a picture of Darth Vader I did as one of the first things on my Wacom (Intuos3 A4) about 2 years ago:

Devlin

 Just did this quick drawing as a break from my MK picture. It looks a bit too much like Westwood in the thumbnail but I'm happy with it:

 Check out Devlin's album 'Bud, Sweat and Beers' it's pretty awesome, some really great tracks on it.
Bye.

Raiden Loses

 Last post I mentioned I was working on an original picture. It's taking quite a while but I hit a checkpoint today so I thought I'd post a snippet of what I've done. Here's two versions lit differently:

 It's Raiden from Mortal Kombat if you couldn't tell. More coming soon.
Feedback wanted as always.
Bye.

Jenson Button

 After today's return of F1 and Jenson Button's impressive race I thought it was time I actually did the picture I mentioned a few weeks ago. In the final Grand Prix before the mid-season break in Hungary, Jenson won the race. It was his 200th F1 race as well as being exactly 10 years since his first F1 win, at the same track, so it was the perfect opportunity to draw him. But I couldn't be bothered. 

 Today, in Belgium, Button rose from 13th place to 3rd and ended up on the podium so I had to draw him. Anyway here it is:  

 It's kind of a partner piece to the one I did of Lewis Hamilton a few weeks ago but I expect they look shit together. There's a few things wrong with it but it ended up pretty good, especially for the short time it took, so I'm happy.
 I've been working on another fairly big, original picture that will hopefully be finished and up sometime this week. I think it's looking pretty good so far.
 Comment and the usual. Thanks. Bye.

Batman Returns

 More Batman copying. This is Batman from the "The Batman" series. I don't really know much about the cartoon series' but this is my favourite design of the character in the cartoons. The character design is by Jeff Matsuda, the same guy who did the amazing Jackie Chan Adventures series which I used to love.

 Anyway here it is: 

Not 100% happy with it, here's the original:

Going to do a couple more of this character soon.
Also you can now Google +1 my blog posts now if you're that way inclined.
Bye.

nana nana nana nana na... BATMAN!

 More digital drawing practise. This time I decided to draw Batman. Again it's a copy of another picture. I think I'm gradually picking things up and learning from doing this so it's all good:

 Here's the original:

 Let me know what you think. More soon hopefully. Bye.

P.S.


"Del... Let's go!" hahaha

Bit of drawing practice

 I decided I really need to practise drawing again and was particularly inspired by Feng Zhu's incredible design videos.

 I thought I'd post what I've done so far over the past month or so, it's not much but there you go.

Here's one of Boba Fett in a simplified costume: 

 

  I was planning to draw Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button and after Lewis won the German grand prix I drew him. I couldn't be bothered to draw Button but, as he had a great win the week after, I might come back to it. I was going to do a more detailed drawing but thought this looked cool:

 

 Finally a quick drawing of Gaz from Modern Warfare, great character design and voice acting as ever. Unlike the other two this is a straight copy from an in-game screenshot. I'm still trying to get my photoshop brushes nailed and this was practise for that, among other things. 

 

 Thanks for looking. Let me know what you think. BYE

Day 12 (Most Recent Accomplishment)

WARNING: This one isn't very good as I was at my Dad's and I rushed it and I was working from a picture on my mobile because I forgot the cable that links my phone to the computer and I couldn't really be bothered and I was watching Casino Royale.

I like it though.

It's a wheelbarrow that I filled with apples for my Dad at the end of last month.

The apples on the ground have fallen since before you suggest I did a sloppy job.

Day 13 up later.

BYE