Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Owl Princess

Another Art Challenge with friends. This time the topic was: The Owl. Mine is an Owl Princess as you can see.


close up:


I wanted to practice painting flowers. Which was stupid. I used lots of custom brushes for the foliage. I also used a ref for the owl and wings (random google image), as I never painted one. And a ref for flowers, of course (my own). Or actually a few. And I think I based initial tiara design on some photo, but I changed it so much, I'm not sure if it even resembles it. I still don't know what got into me that I decided to paint such complicated foliage.

I'm quite happy with her owl-face. And it was fun to do something more stylised and painterly this time :)

Monday, January 17, 2011

Demonic Circus


Another Art Challenge. This time I came up with the topic, got it from a game name generator and just loved it. I got kind of carried away with it. Had so much fun with the faces that when I finished them I needed to make all the rest more realistic than I intended to. Ah well. One day I'll learn ;)

The twins were inspired by the twins from The Shining, and I used some random still as a reference for their hands. Just the hands though. Clown's hands are referenced on my own. No faces were referenced which is perhaps why ringleader's smile is so weird. I learned painting teeth hurts. Other than that, just too much time in Photoshop and Painter. Here are some additional close ups.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Phantasmat

Phantasmat - a game I've been working on since a long time - is out! It's a casual horror adventure game with Hidden Object and Match-3 gameplay. Lot's of fun!

I'm responsible for all concept art, characters (including animations), puzzles, Match-3 graphics and touching up most of final locations (lights, details etc.). I even painted the bloody crow, all single frames of animation (swearing like hell during the process). So you gotta see it. You can download the demo and try it for yourself.

Official website: Phantasmat - including trailer, screenshots, wallpapers etc. The game is on BigFishGames as well (#2 one day after release!). Collector's Edition only at the moment, but Standard Edition (without extra content and gameplay, but cheaper) is coming soon :)

Some concept art:




Some in game locations with mostly my work:



More images on game's and my own websites. Hope you'll like it :)

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Day and Night

Another Art Challenge piece with friends. "Day and Night", we were supposed to depict day and night as a man and woman. At first I wanted to go with the Sandman look for the Night, making him a guy (I just recently re-read the series again, love it as always), but thought it'd be too cliche. Then it turned out everybody else made Night a woman, which - I guess - makes me even more cliche. Oh, well ;)


I wanted to make a proper tutorial out of this one, but no time for that, hence just few wip shots in a gif file (a bit big, so wait for it to load):


Photobucket


What you can see here is my usual workflow: first a rushed, dirty sketch. Some flat colours to get a general colour scheme. Then detailing the faces too much, which I always do, even though I know it would be better to work on everything at once. But somehow if I don't get the faces right at first, I quickly lose the interest with the rest. And after that, it's just lots of regular brushwork. One thing you can see here that works wonders in pictures is: adding shadows. Even if the picture has a diffused light and no big contrasts, just small hints of shadows (see last steps) really add to the depth of the whole thing.

Monday, January 03, 2011

Evening Cat

All the best in New Year everyone!

Those following me on DA probably already saw that I joined an Art Challenge with friends. Thought it'll be a good idea to force myself to be challenged with varied themes more often. First submission was this one:


The topic was: something small, cute, snow, first star. Photoshop and Painter. I just learned I hate drawing cats ;)